Get on Set Script Selection Panel
The leaves are falling, the temperature is dropping, and here at Local Cinema Studios we’re curling up with a warm coffee and a batch of good scripts for the season. We have several to choose from with 50+ scripts submitted for the 2023 Get on Set production.
In our collaborative spirit, we’re teaming with award-winning filmmakers to help select the final script. This is a joy and a challenge given the number of people who brought their best work forward. As filmmakers ourselves, it is an honor to be trusted with these stories and we are grateful for each submission.
We are also appreciative of our panelists taking the time to review scripts, so with a drum roll please… here are the members of the 2023 Get on Set script selection panel:
McKenzie Chinn
McKenzie is a filmmaker, actor, and poet based in Chicago. She is a 2021 Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab Fellow with her next feature A Real One (writer/director), and was the inaugural recipient of the NBCUniversal See It Be It Filmmaker Grant through Geena Davis’s Bentonville Film Festival. Her first feature Olympia (writer, producer, actor) premiered at the 2018 LA Film Festival, and won the Narrative Feature Audience Award at the 2019 Bentonville Film Festival.
As an actor she has played recurring and guest star roles on Fox’s The Big Leap, Empire, and CBS’s The Red Line, and has appeared onstage with Goodman and Steppenwolf Theatres, A Red Orchid, The Second City, Woolly Mammoth, The Studio Theatre, and others.
Her poetry has been nominated for multiple awards including a Pushcart Prize. She is part of Growing Concerns Poetry Collective whose releases include two albums - BIG DARK BRIGHT FUTURES and WE HERE: Thank You For Noticing, and the poetry collection Five Fifths (Candor Arts). She directed the video for the group’s poem First You Need a Body, as well as the music video for Type Love by group member Mykele Deville.
She holds an MFA from The Theatre School at DePaul University. Mckenziechinn.com
Joshua Foster
Joshua Foster is a graduate of the prestigious NYU Tisch MFA graduate film program. Joshua produced or directed sixteen short films while at NYU Tisch. He has over twenty years of experience in the financial sector trading futures contracts, M&A and managing high net worth clients’ assets. Currently, he resides in New York City working as an executive for Cinetic Media in the film finance and production department. He most recently represented Cinetic Media on the Ethan Hawke directed film, Blaze, and he was the UPM for the feature, Lost Holiday.
Myles Isreal
Myles Isreal is a screenwriter and actor from Atlanta, GA. His most recent work includes writing the screenplay and acting in the film HERO, a feature length coming of age dramedy. Myles is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and creative currently working with the production company Iris Indie International. Most recently he was out west working on the Mario Van Peebles set for the film Outlaws.
The panel is reviewing the scripts individually and using a common rubric for each script. Afterwards, the team will come together to discuss the strengths of each script and make a decision together. The team with the selected script will be notified in February, so that we can begin pre-production work together.