long story very short:
i trained as an actor from high school (Nixa, MO) to college (SMSU) and in New York, where i lived and worked as an actor (also for a very very large publishing company who was very very good to me). i’ve always been a writer and have been writing short stories and scripts for a very long time.

the backstory:
shortly after september 11, my best friend james sheldon and i decided we were going to pursue our true aim in life: filmmaking. we were both actors and had been focusing mainly on stage, but we both really loved movies. so we both started pursuing roles in film and learning as much as we possibly could about filmmaking. i started converting a play that i had written into a screenplay, and from there started writing short films. they were fun to make, and all of my friends were either in film school, studying film acting, or working in the business so it wasn’t too hard to find advice and support.

around the summer of 2002, i started writing a screenplay with no title about a guy returning home to rural missouri. it was really because i was a little homesick, and because i’d been making short films about concepts#–not really about stories i really enjoyed. the resulting screenplay was about 100 pages in length and was called something dumb like "nate’s journey". i gave it james as more proof that i’d really been writing than as a serious venture in getting an opinion on the content. james loved it. we’d both followed the project greenlight series on HBO in 2001, and we were planning on watching it again when it came around in 2002/2003. but james convinced me to enter my script in the contest#–as a participant instead of an audience member.

after a lot of effort thinking of a title we liked, we finally settled on ozark mile (this was before moonlight mile or 8 mile came out. i entered the script in the contest at the beginning of august and started biting my nails. what if people hated it? the first round of the contest was excrutiating#–reviewing scripts and posting responses. the material i was reading ranged from very very good, to so poor i thought the entry must be some kind of sad joke. nevertheless, it made me very self-conscious that perhaps my script was just as terrible as those i was reading.

after several weeks of self-depricating nightmares, the results came in: out of the thousands of scripts submitted, ozark mile had been selected as a top 250 finalist. i was elated. the reviews i got from other contestants fueled my desire to really pursue filmmaking as a profession. i may not have been the best, but i was definitely competing. as the contest wore on, it fell victim to a lot of manipulation: and while my script did not advance into the finals, i was relieved. i knew it needed work, and it wasn’t ready for the kind of attention that contest generated.

after PGL, james and i started entertaining the notion of producing the film ourselves#–or finding a producer who would be interested in helping us make it. we started scouring our contacts, and fellow missourian-turned-filmmaker heather coker turned us on to the possibility of shooting it in branson, mo. after thinking it over, and meeting over christmas break in 2002, we decided to go for it. the first thing i did was read everything on producing i could find. heather and james started making phone calls to people in branson, people in LA, and everywhere inbetween. we had an offer from LA to fund and shoot the film in california, but we turned it down because we really wanted to shoot in missouri and get our hands as dirty as possible in learning the ropes of producing a film. we put together a small business plan and selected a legal team. in april of 2003, i quit my job at the publishing company, pulled up house in NY, and relocated to MO, flush on getting the film made. we had a lot of interest from people in the area, newspapers were calling, it was a real feeling of accomplishment and excitement. all we needed was our final paperwork from our legal team and we would be off and running.