We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Laurie Clemens Maier a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Laurie Clemens, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
I feel all of the projects that I have worked on have meaning for me, whether it’s a script, a film, or a character, but one stands out right now, a feature length award winning script, The Dude Is Legit.
This script is based off of the true story of my older brother’s baseball career. His life-long goal of pitching in pro ball was cut short by an injury to his shoulder. He underwent surgery to fix it but he never got his velocity back. Ultimately, this led to Dan leaving baseball for about ten years. As we wrote, we included the Baseball Gods to create a funny and heartwarming story where the Baseball Gods must fix their decades-old mistake that ended a promising young pitcher’s career by intervening at key points in his life to ensure “everybody gets what’s coming to ‘em.”
Dan, approached me about three years ago to collaborate with him in writing the script. Dan has an extensive writing background and proved to be a very quick study of screenplay writing. At that point in time I had several other feature length scripts that had won awards in festivals and I felt confident we could write a script that would appeal to a wide audience with a great message.
It’s been a fantastic experience collaborating with my brother on this script. We’ve had many in depth discussions about characters and creating a parallel plot structure for the story. We were able to relive some of our shared high school and college stories as we created an outline. I was interesting and fun for me to hear his stories about getting back into the sport in an adult (old man) baseball league where he pitches regularly.
We were just in Asbury New Jersey where we won best feature screenplay at the Garden State Film Fest. They provided actors for a table read of a condensed version of the script. We were honored to have won and to have had that experience.
I’m blessed to have an excellent relationship with my brother and to be able to work together so well. It’s been amazing to share the festival ride with Dan! We are now working on finding funding to produce the film and find distribution.
Laurie Clemens, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
From a young age I enjoyed making up my own stories and was drawn to the stories on tv shows like Little House on the Prairie and movies, like the Outlaw Josie Wales and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. My family travelled around the US visiting historical sites like Gettysburg, Yorktown, and parts of the Oregon Trail. I fell in love with history and pursued a teaching career as a high school history teacher.
As my love of film and history grew I discovered that I wanted to act. I was blown away by emotional performances that hit me in the gut and I wanted to be able to convey what I felt to others. I began acting classes and worked on my craft. I attended the summer long session in New York City at the Neighborhood Playhouse and really fell in love with the Meisner technique.
Sadly, there weren’t a ton of acting roles for my age and type in Denver, so I attended an ongoing class called Write To Act. There I learned how to write monologues and scenes. I loved it. Hungry for more I found more classes, now online, on how to write feature scripts. I found my voice and learned technique and was on my way. This was the point where I could use my knowledge and love of history and my writing voice to create roles for myself.
I did an eight month stint in Los Angeles discovering parts of the city, learning about auditioning and coming to the conclusion that this wasn’t the way for me to break into the business. Since then I’ve written a lot of scripts, short and feature length. Two of my short scripts have been produced, On Top of Me, which I acted in, directed and produced, and 47, produced by and starring Laurel Harris. On Top of Me is currently in the festival circuit and is a multi-award winner now. Four of my features are now multi-award winners as well – I Met Her at Birkenau, A Lily So Fair (co-written with Dennis Crowder), Pink Boa, and The Dude Is Legit (co-written with Dan Clemens). I’m very excited that 47 will be hitting festival circuit soon.
I have multiple other projects in progress and am excited about pursuing directing. I love history. I love acting. I love writing. I love filmmaking. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to blend all of these together. My new production company, Stack and Piles Productions is in process and I have plans for another short film production soon and a feature film production in the not so distant future.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
I think most people enjoy watching movies. We have our favorite movies. We use catch phrases from them. We go out to dinner and ask “did you see such and such movie? It was so incredible!” We can connect with each other through this. Movies offer everyone something and for those of us that make the movies we need access to resources, the largest being financial. When we have someone financially support our film we’ve shared why this script with its themes and this topic is so important to us and what a unique opportunity it is to be a part of making this movie. Art is a reflection of society and film is crucial to our growth as humans and a society.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect for me is unleashing a story that must be told. To take a little kernel of a story and make it into something that people identify with and love is incredible.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.laurieclemensmaier.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurieclemensmaier/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurie.clemens.5
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurieclemensmaier/
- Twitter: @LaurieMaier