TIM TURNER
 TIM TURNER
Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
Los Angeles, CA How did you discover The Palm Springs International Screenplay Awards and how did you decide to enter this contest among all the others? ISA Your script or media entry stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your project? My life. I started writing OUT LATE in the 1990s from the encouragement of James Sheldon. I am a gay man who was and is attracted to older men. I met my husband in 1990 when I was 29 and he was 59. We are still together 35 years later. (I am now 64 and he is 95). I produced Out Late as a play in West Hollywood in 2007. We received rave reviews and did an extended run. There is a lot of me and of my husband in the (now screenplay) but both roles are composites. I interviewed hundreds of men in age-gap relationships. There are still millions of men (and women) who were raised to grow up, get married and have children. Now they’re getting old and they are not in love with the person they were forced to marry. How long did it take you to write your script or produce your pitch deck/sizzle reel/trailer...and what was your development process? More than 30 years I’ve been re-writing this story. It started in the 1990s when I was a member -and later executive director -of The Playwrights Group. I workshopped it before I produced it as a play. I recently did a global table read and lots more re-writes with Noon Miracle and Jane Sibbett. I’ve come very close to getting it produced several other times. What is your ultimate ambition as a writer or filmmaker? I’ve written six plays, an original screenplay, a libretto, adapted two of my plays into screenplays and am now working on part two of a four-part series of historical fiction novels. I want to be recognized while I’m alive for my greatness and have all of plays produced, screenplays made into movies, my novels become best sellers and made into movies Which film directors or screenwriters inspire you? Why? Spielberg — specifically Schindler's List. Not the Spielberg of spectacle but the Spielberg who understood that the Holocaust had to be witnessed rather than dramatized, that restraint in the face of atrocity is the only honest artistic response. I’m doing the same thing with Soviet anti-Semitism. What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show? Again, Schindler’s List from the point of view of my novels. Closer to Out Late, I would say Brokeback Mountain (2005), written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx. Starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ranch hands who develop a profound and secret relationship over two decades in the American West. It won Ang Lee the Academy Award for Best Director. How do you approach competition entries, and what have you learned from participating in these contests? I get barraged by emails and I enter the ones that my work fits. I have lots of laurels I’ve posted on social media. It would sure be nice if even one translated into a production. What advice do you have for others hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as you have? Keep trying. Maybe someday the right producer or director will come along and make the play. You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. What else are you working on that the world needs to know about? I mentioned it above. The series is called What the World Owed Him. What the World Owed Him is a four-part historical saga following three generations of a Jewish Moldovan family from 1922 Soviet Moldova to modern Los Angeles, where music — accordion, piano, and perfect pitch — is the one thing no border, no pogrom, and no bureaucracy could ever take from them. Written in collaboration with the man whose family lived it, Moisey Gorbaty. Book One — The Reluctant Conductor 1922, Soviet Moldova. Elazar, a Jewish merchant, uses music to sustain his family, find love, and survive a world of bombs, bigotry, and hate. Book Two — The Prodigy's Bargain 1957–1989, Kishinev. Moisey Baranovsky graduates first in his class from the Moldovan Conservatory, is refusturner-gorbaty.com/ed the professorship he earned because he is Jewish, and spends thirty years lying, cheating, and playing accordion for a system that takes his music while rejecting his identity — until he decides to leave. Book Three — The Refugee's Serenade 1989. Stateless and suspended between the Soviet world that rejected him and the Western world that hasn't yet decided, Moisey spends three months in Vienna and nine in Rome — playing accordion in underground stations, earning coin by coin the money that will determine whether his family finds a shore to land on. Book Four — By Ear Alone Los Angeles. Moisey arrives with no money, no English, and a conservatory degree America will not recognize — and builds, one piano at a time, the American life that no institution ever intended to give him. I’m on schedule to publish The Prodigy’s Bargain on Feb. 28, 2027. Where can the world find you? (Website, IMDB, etc.) https://turner-gorbaty.com/ |
