Interview (Part 3): Karin delaPeña Collison

My interview with the 2021 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Karin delaPeña Collison wrote the original screenplay “Coming of Age” which won a 2021 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Karin about her creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to her.

Today in Part 3 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Karin shares how she learned she was a Nicholl winner.

Scott: Fascinating hearing that story. It’s like the antithesis of your typical screenwriter who goes to USC, gets an MFA, and boom.

[laughter]

Karin: Antithesis.

Scott: You’ve had this incredible life experience that reminds me of…I’m a big Joseph Campbell fan and him talking about how…

Karin: “Hero’s Journeys.” Yes. And there’s so much more to my adventures.

Scott: …you follow your bliss. The universe will create doors where there once were walls and all these opportunities. You had this phrase you used a couple times, “Complicity of circumstances.” I know that in my own life, too. You put yourself out there. You’re following the thing you’re passionate about, and somehow these opportunities arise.

Let me ask you about the screenwriting. You mentioned here, “Published fiction, nonfiction throughout my careers but only recently dived into screenwriting.” What took you there? Was it because you’d been working in TV and film and theater and you thought, “I could do this”?

Karin: No, nothing as arrogant as that. Just to be clear, I have had a couple of short stories — three, I think — published. But one I started running Speaking of stories I stopped fiction writing. And I wasn’t doing any writing at all when I was living in New York. But during my Speaking of Stories tenure, I was absorbing a tremendous amount of the highest quality literature. And in NYC, I did a lot of dramaturgy. Working a lot on other people’s writing. I enjoyed working in that way with theater and film scripts. And my husband is a playwright — he’s won the New Dramatists and been produced off-Broadway, at Louisville, at The Music Center. So I continued to be surrounded by writing and writers … and even married one.

Shortly after I moved back to LA, in 2018, I joined a rather wonderful actor collective called The Collaborative. You have to join as an actor and it’s a very hard auditioning process. You have to show your stripes, and prove that, A, you’re a decent human being. That’s very important. And B, that you’re a really strong actor. Once you’re in, though, you meet all these remarkable people — many of whom are multihyphenates.

So here I was surrounded by people who were writing and they filming stuff for themselves. As a middle-aged woman coming back into acting, it has not been easygoing. Even though I have good representation, it’s hard to even get into audition rooms. And the kinds of roles for which I’m suitable are very often offered out directly to actresses who never left the business and have a much higher profile than I have. That’s just the reality. I do book work sometimes. But not enough to feel well used.

I was inspired by these proactive actors in The Collaborative and I told myself, “Well, you know what, it’s time for me to write material for myself. I can write. So I’m sure I can learn how to write a script.” I remember I was in Australia visiting family. I went to Yelp. And typed in, “Best place to go in LA to learn how to write a screenplay.” I put in the zip code where I was living at the time.

This name came up with masses of stars, way ahead of anybody else. And her classes happened to be within a bike ride of where I was then living in Valley Village. Her intro classes seemed reasonably affordable, so I signed up. And then I totally fell in love with her.

I just thought she was fabulous. She knew exactly what she was talking about. Her creds were so impressive. DreamWorks hired her as their Senior Story Analyst, virtually straight out of college. Then she started her writing studio: onthepage.tv

It’s been wildly successful. In fact, one of her students a few years ago was also a winner at the Nicholl. Even this year, she had a student who was a finalist along with me. She really knows what she’s doing.

Anyway, I started working with her.

The first thing I wrote was a 30‑minute comedy, in which the lead is…Well, you would read it and just go, “OK. No-one else can play this. That is you.” That was the first thing I wrote — and writing it was what had spurred me to learn screenwriting in the first place. But I somehow sidestepped the process of trying to film it.

I entered some competitions with that material, though, and won a couple of placements.

I decided to enter competitions because I wanted an ice‑cold response writing. For nobody to have met me in person, so they wouldn’t invest the script with my personality. The writing would have to hold up on its own. I wasn’t entering competitions thinking, “Oh, I’m going to win this.” It was just, “I want to get the feedback.”

After I finished the pilot, I told Pilar that I was interested in exploring a couple of themes. I told her what they were and asked for her input.

She is so incisive. She managed to go into what I was waffling on about and find its core. She said, “OK. Look, this is very interesting to me. Backstage in an English touring company in 1965 would be an unexplored world to screenplays. Also, the sexual development of a young girl is always compelling.” So I signed up for coaching with her and started working on it.

Initially, I was thinking of this material as a series. And I still do. I now have a finished pilot with a Bible attached to it. But I took a circuitous route to get there.

I coached with Pilar on the first iteration. She said, “OK. Since you’re familiar with the 30-minute pilot format, let’s stick with that.”

After I wrote it, though, I began to think, “This needs to be an hourlong pilot. It’s serious enough material that I need to undo some of these tight threads and allow it to breathe a little.”

I did that, and then had a Zoom reading about 18 months ago now. Some seasoned industry came, and they all said, “We want to know more about these characters.”

So then this one‑hour pilot started to mushroom. Suddenly, I had a two‑hour pilot. You can’t have a two‑hour pilot. A pilot in this market has to be one‑hour. I was beside myself. I just wasn’t a seasoned enough screenwriter — let’s face it, I was a rank beginner. I thought , “What am I going to do? I love this material, but I don’t know how to sort this out?”

I reached out to Pilar again. I said, “I’m in the weeds. I’m desperate. What shall I do?” She said, “It’s simple. You’ve got two hours’ worth of material. Let’s make it into a feature.” I was so relieved, and promptly bought another coaching series with her. She helped me wrangle the material into a screenplay, explaining that as a screenplay it needed to have an ending … unlike a pilot, which has to end on a cliffhanger. I also needed to skinny it down, make it shorter than two hours.

Anyway, when I’d finished converting it into a screenplay, Pilar said, “You should submit this for the Nicholl.” All I knew about the Nicholl was that it very prestigious, but I didn’t really understand all the ramifications. And I was submitting to other competitions as well.

After I submitted to the Nicholl I didn’t think any more about it. And then, at the end of August, I got this email saying, “Congratulations, you’re a quarter finalist.” I went, “Oh wow — that’s kind of nice.” I wrote to Pilar. She said, “Oh, I love it when I’m right.”

Then a couple of weeks later, I heard that I was a semi‑finalist. Again, I thought, “Very cool. This is fun.” Told Pilar again.

The Nicholl got in touch with all the semi‑finalists, and said, “Please check your logline and check your contact information. Because quarter and semi‑finalists are frequently approached by industry.” I did. And when I went on their website I discovered that I had six Readers’ Analyses. All too often I’ve had the feeling that reader feedback from competitions is coming from inexperienced and overworked readers and I’ve given up paying for it.

So I’d forgotten I’d paid the necessary extra fee for feedback from The Nicholl readers, and when I read them I was delighted I had. The analyses were so thorough and well-written and useful.

Then I got another email from The Nicholl saying, “We have a couple of questions about your screenplay. Can you attend a Zoom meeting on such and such a day?” I said, “Of course.” I showed up at the Zoom meeting. There were about 13 people there. I thought, “Oh, they’re doing this in a group format?”

One by one, three of these people introduced themselves as staff members. I recognize their names. The third person was Joan. I was expecting the other people to start introducing themselves, but then Joan said, “We have a question for all of you. How does it feel to be a finalist?” There was a thundering silence at that point. I cried. I think other people cried, too. We were so taken aback. It was a fabulous way to tell us.

I loved the fact that they had plotted so that they could spring it on us. We weren’t allowed to announce it, though. We had to wait until they announced it on their website. We had to keep our lips buttoned for about a week. That was tough. But worth it.

After they publicly announced the finalists, they managed to surprise us again. This time, they did it by saying, “It’s mandatory that you show up for this Zoom session. But you have to be willing to sit in the waiting room between the hours of 11:00 and 1:30.”

That’s what I often have to do as an actress, though, if I have an audition or a callback. So I was accustomed to the waiting room set up. You can knock around your house, doing whatever it is that you’re doing, until you get the ding, ding, ding, which tells you that you’re coming out of the waiting room.

I’d had to answer some long‑form questions before this zoom session so I assumed that this meeting would be like defending a thesis. And I figured they wanted to make sure I didn’t have moss growing out of my ears. That I was a substantive, cogent person.

But no. When I got out of the waiting room, they took me by surprise and reduced me to tears yet again.

Only this time, it was the chairwoman, Jennifer, who greeted me. And then she announced that I was a Fellow and welcomed me to The Nicholl. It was such a delicious experience.

This time, we had to keep our lips buttoned for a month. We were told the good news on October the 9th. The public announcement wasn’t made until November the 8th.

I ended up enjoying that window of time, though, because it allowed me to absorb the reality of what had happened and to get my feet back on the ground. It was still wildly exciting to me, and I wanted to share it with my friends, though. And I managed to do that — by lying. I was suddenly really busy with industry enquiries, and interviews, and the filmed conversation with Our Lady J, and I told my friends about everything as it was happening. My lie was that The Nicholl was treating all ten Finalists in the same way so that they could stockpile the necessary information and have it ready for when they actually named the five Fellows.

I said, “It’s like when obit writers accrue information on somebody so that when that person dies, they’ve got a head start on their obituary.” This way I was able to relish and share the process as it was happening.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Karin talks about her own real-life story served as an inspiration for her Nicholl-winning screenplay “Coming of Age.”

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.