Interview:

In addition to screenplays, I write short stories, essays, and humor pieces. I'm also a songwriter (words and music) with a number of songs under contract to publishers. I've won six first-place awards for songwriting. My prose has appeared in Playboy, Writer's Digest, Rosebud, Gallery, William and Mary Review, The New Renaissance, Audio-Visual Communications, Rangefinder, and other publications. I have also written and produced numerous educational, medical, and corporate films and videos for domestic and overseas markets, a number of them award-winners. I have a B. A. and M. A. from Wesleyan University.

I live in Santa Maria, California. My full name is Anthony Allan Amenta, but I usually write under the name, Allan Amenta

Is "Charlie Malloy's Golden Key" your first script? If not, what else have you completed?

I've completed nine screenplays, four features (two comedies, a Western, and one for animation), and five short scripts, (three comedies and two dramas with a Twilight Zone flavor).

Why did you write "Charlie Malloy's Golden Key"? And how long did it take you to write it?

It occurred to me that something dramatic could be made out of a gathering of classmates at a high school reunion confronting the prophecies they had made 30 years before in their graduation yearbooks. I had the idea for quite a while, and it was begging to be born. From rough to final draft took about a week.

Describe your process; do you have a set routine, method for writing?

In both my screenwriting and prose work I often write sequences that I know will end up in the work even before writing the opening, lead or intro. And often before doing this, I jot down words, phrases, dialogue, and quotations. This was a routine I also used when I wrote and produced educational, corporate, and medical films and videos for clients. I don't relish getting bogged down on openings, intros, and leads just because they come first in a screenplay, short story, or essay.

Frequently, I have discovered the opening in some dialogue or description I had written, and even the final title of a work. During my newspaper-reporting days and in my work as an editor for a publishing house, it was not unusual to find the opening buried somewhere in the text of a writer's work. I am a ruthless editor of my own work.

What inspires you to write?

Everything -- a glimpse of something, an anecdote, a passing remark, the look on someone's face. Everything is grist to the writer's mill as W. Somerset Maugham wrote in The Summing Up, "Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song, or a story, and having done this be rid of it." An uncle told me that my cornet-playing grandfather once entered the house across the street to give a few pointers to a boy struggling with his trumpet lesson. A random act of human kindness, yes, but no drama, no story, hardly anything to write home about. Yet the remark sloshed around in my mind for years until it led to my first feature
screenplay, A TRUMPET FOR TONY, about the vendetta betweeen a kindly musician and a tyrannical neighbor using his son's abominable trumpet-playing as a weapon to torment the musician into selling off his property.

Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?

Music, classical, opera, and jazz. I grew up surrounded by all kinds of musical talent, a father who was a jazz guitarist, a grandfather who was a classical cornetist, a cousin who was an opera singer, another a jazz singer, and still another who became Tony Bennett's bass player for many years. The neighborhood I grew up in was alive with the sound of live music. Three major composers were born in my small town, Henry Clay Work, who composed "Grandfather's Clock" and "Marching Through Georgia," Reginald DeKoven, composer of the wedding song, "O, Promise Me," and Allie Wrubel, composer of the academy-award- winning Zip-A-Dee-Do-Da." I once published an article about their lives and songs called "The Town With The Built-in Hit Parade," and later wrote and produced an audio-visual show with the same title.

What influenced you to enter the Movie Script Contest?

I liked the short script category.

Do you feel that screenwriting contests are worthwhile for writers and why?

Those that offer feedback are certainly worthwhile, even if you don't always agree with the analyses. Recently some producers and agents have been requesting scripts only from writers who have won awards. If you have won awards, this has to be a plus.

Who is your favorite screenwriter or writer and why?

Billy Wilder, because he had an unerring eye for discerning the mores and foibles of modern society and because he could comment on them with both dark humor and compassion. In Sunset Boulevard you may laugh at Norma Desmond's monkey burial and her dreadful attempts at screenwriting, but who could every laugh at the compassionate New Year's Eve sequence revealing her fears and vulnerability. I also like Ernest Lehman. Like Wilder, he had written for publication before becoming a screenwriter. I believe this kind of apprenticeship and discipline gives a writer an added dimension, as well as the reading of books that have nothing to do with screenwriting.

Any advice or tips you'd like to pass on to other writers?

First, confidence, confidence, confidence. I mean the genuine article, not some counterfeit like bravado or the emotional high you may get at some motivational meeting that dissipates by the next day and leaves you with a mental hangover. Confidence that remains unshakeable before the loftiest of agents or producers. True confidence protects you against the gossip, humbug, rumors, and bad advice that float around in search of someone to discourage. But don't regard confidence as a synonym for ego. Confidence and ego are miles apart. Ego can be shattered;
confidence is impregnable. Who needs enemies when you have your ego for a friend? So beware of ego. Next, don't mimic. Be original. You are a unique individual placed on earth for a purpose as someone with something special to say and something special to contribute. Finally, accept constructive criticism, but stick to your guns when you know deep inside that the criticism is more destructive than constructive. I don't regard writing or any other creative endeavor as a competitive sport. So create, don't compete. You will save a lot of energy.

What's next for you?

More scripts, more songs, more humor pieces. I have never run out of ideas, for which I am eternally grateful. But which project to begin working on? That's often a problem, but a felicitous one.