A Brisbane man who has yet to experience his first Parkes Elvis Festival has won first prize in an international screenwriting competition with his screenplay “Elvis Town”.
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Paul Mahoney is a self-taught writer whose life-long ambition is to write for the cinema. “Elvis Town” is one of a number of screenplays he has written.
Paul said he will spend the next year working with Euroscript on another three drafts to improve the standard of the script.
A visit to next year’s Festival will help Paul hone the finer details of the script.
“Once it is ready, we will be able to show it to producers and production companies in the hope someone wants to make it into a film,” he said.
“Ideally an Australian film company will pick it up and cast Australian actors.
“I am looking forward to my first Elvis Festival in January, I have bought an Elvis suit, I have my accommodation booked and I can’t wait to experience all the Festival has to offer.”
“Elvis Town” is a romantic comedy about a Network news journalist and his TV crew who are sent to Parkes to cover the events and personalities of the festival.
As an ambitious network news reporter, Ted dreams of better, more important mainstream reporting, but romantic and hilarious events change his life forever.
Paul said he was walking his dog trying to think of a murder mystery when he came up with the idea.
“A lot of my friends have been to the Parkes Elvis Festival,” he said.
“I’ve heard many great stories about it, but for one reason or another I’ve never managed to get to there.
“It’s quite a unique event and very well known all over Australia.”
Since being launced in 1994 thousands of screenplays have been submitted in The Euroscript Screenwriting Competition.
The competition is not exclusively European and is open to writers globally, the requirement being that they be feature length screenplays intended for Cinema.