TEAM S&Co
QUITE SIMPLY, WE LOVE SCRIPTS!
THE SCRIPTWRITERS & CO TEAM (AKA TEAM S&CO!)
We're run by two scriptwriters - Zanna and Alex - who understand the business, as well as the struggles we all go through to make our mark. Our aim is to unite people studying or working in the performing arts, and offer opportunities to new and emerging scriptwriters as well as established playwrights and screenwriters.
We now have a team of around 25 readers, led by our judges: Zanna Cardash and Alex Hollister.
ZANNA CARDASH - ARTISTIC DIRECTOR/JUDGE/ACTOR
Armed with a helpful BA in Theology and Philosophy, Zanna initially embarked on a career as an actor. While filming four episodes of Doctor Who, she chatted with Bonny Langford and drove Sylvester McCoy home, so that’s something. She's also been a bluecoat and a belly dancer. Yes, really!
Years ago, she did a stint of playwriting workshops at the Tricycle Theatre, tutored by award-winning playwright Bonnie Greer; trained as a journalist at London's City Lit; and devised, wrote and performed in plays and musicals for a touring theatre company in Wales. She's been copywriting ads and feature-writing for mags for two decades, composes complex rhyming verse and has published a salacious novel about people she knows, under a pseudonym she can't divulge. Obviously. There's more at Zanna C.
A Scriptwriting Master’s equipped Zanna with a profound understanding of story, structure, character and the importance of collaborating, hence her starting Scriptwriters & Co. She's now a multi-award-winning writer. The first draft of her first full-length play, Caged Bird, bagged her an agent, Joan Lane. Her 2019 screenplay, Voyeuse, won Best Pilot Screenwriting at the Olympus Film Festival in LA in 2019, Best TV Series Pilot Screenplay at the New Renaissance Film Festival in 2020, and was Officially Selected for five other festivals, while Honeylove, written in 2020, was a semi-finalist in the prestigious Emerging Screenwriters contest. Her dystopian drama feature, Seahorse (see below), was a finalist in the ISA Fast Track Fellowship, a 2nd Rounder in the Austin Film Festival and placed in numerous smaller festivals. She's currently working with a musical director on the score for her second full-length play, Sprouts, about a teenage boy who grows veg on his head instead of hair. For more info on these scripts, see Zanna C.
Zanna doesn't just run, cast and host S&Co's Scratch Nights, Workshops and Writing Retreats and Zoom Table Reads, but has a reputation for delivering incisive, non-nonsense script notes to playwrights as well as screenwriters. She shoots from the hip but gets on with most people and, given half a chance, performs at our Scratch Nights (so you can increase your odds of winning a laurel by writing a meaty role for her... just saying). And somehow, via offering copious compliments, a vat of rum and tickets to see Liverpool play at Anfield, she conned screenwriter Alex Hollister into joining her at S&Co. Mind you, he's still waiting for those tickets.
ALEX HOLLISTER - LEAD SCRIPT CONSULTANT/JUDGE
Bristol-born screenwriter Alex was signed by Zero Gravity Management in LA, many years ago. That's what happens when you place silver at the Page International Screenwriting Awards. Since then, he's optioned and sold a number of screenplays, and worked with various Hollywood production companies on everything from adaptations of bestseller spy novels to high-budget comic book and Sci-Fi projects. This, he says, felt like some form of kismet, given his childhood love of crime novels, movies and comic books.
Inspired by 'Toy Story' in 1995, he bagged an BA (Hons) in Illustration and Animation in a time when you had to remortgage your house to buy a computer that would render the frames. However, the process of writing scripts for animations - unshackled by the limitations of technology, permitting wild imagination - truly hooked him. From that point, he claims, he became a screenwriter for life.
With a penchant for good stories, from crime to action adventure, Alex's work leans towards the mainstream; he twists genres and executes high-concept ideas. After ten years in the industry, pitching and creating outlines, treatments and lookbooks, he joined the Scriptwriters & Co team from the onset, initially as part of the judging panel tasked with reading and grading entries for our Scratch Nights. Now he co-hosts and provides invaluable feedback on screen (fact is, we can't stop him), as well as co-teaching S&CO'S legendary ''Scriptwriting Toolkit' course.
Alex also offers expert personal script coverage, and has garnered a reputation for highly critical, constructive and honest feedback that allows clients to polish their scripts with confidence. A self-proclaimed Simon Cowell figure (minus most of the sociopathic egomania, but with the same shock of dark hair and devious smile), he doesn't sugarcoat his notes. Neither does he concentrate on what clients want to hear, but on what they need to do to move their writing up a level, and carve out a living in this volatile, sometimes unforgiving industry. If you’re up for hearing the truth about your script, what have you got to lose?
From time to time we hunt for more S&CO Readers. If you'd like to volunteer, please email us with your CV.
The subheading speaks for itself - please check out their biogs and links! They're all for hire - please email if you're interested or want to audition.