Local writer’s teleplay wins at comedy festival
It’s the “New Guy’s” first day on the job at the family-owned Smart Motors car dealership. Will he successfully fix, or steal it off the lot? Only the hours left until it’s time to clock out will tell.
The storyline has all the makings for a sitcom, exactly how Bay City writer Robin Weber intended it.
ANGST*, an acronym for “Another New Guy Starts Today,” won “Best Comedy Teleplay” at the Portland Comedy Film Festival back in December. The sitcom focuses on the new employees that are always coming and going from the car dealership. Every new “guy” has their own motives for accepting the job; some of them regret having done so, others cause chaos, either intentionally, or unintentionally. What they all have in common is each one is gone by the end of the episode making way for the next one.
“It’s that kind of angst that you feel when you’ve worked at a place for a really long time and there’s a new person starting that day,” Weber said.
A former bookstore owner, Weber, was looking for a different creative outlet and decided to try writing sitcoms.
“I’ve always been interest in writing, but find it very difficult to do,” he said. “But, I always liked to read short stories. It’s similar in a sitcom, in that 22 minutes it’s the epitome that every word has to count.”
The written sitcom placed first out of an estimated 500 entries at the Portland Comedy Film Festival. The festival was founded by author and retired filmmaker Mikel Fair and now has 20 categories for written and produced projects and nearly 100 active judges.
“It was a lot of fun meeting and watching people’s projects there,” Weber said of the festival. “I won for the half hour teleplay script pilot, but there was also a category for films that had been completed.”
To write the pilot, Weber read some books about screenwriting for TV, and then spent three months writing ANGST*. Some of the plotlines were inspired by Weber’s own time working at a car dealership.
“I always wondered why there’s never been a sitcom at an actual car dealership,” he said. “They’ve been in garages, gas stations, repair shops, or custom shops, but never actually at a dealership. There’s just so much going on in a dealership; it’s like a whole world unto itself of all the different departments. And believe me, they all have their own issues.”
The dream is to have the sitcom picked up by a television producer, so Weber has created the “Bible” (more details for the premise of the show) as well as the second episode in the series.
“I’m kind of refining it a bit because if I get somebody interested in the first one, their first question is going to be: ‘What else do you have?’”
Weber is happy to share the teleplay with whoever would like to read it in its entirety. To receive a copy, he can be reached at books@bookbroker.com.
