This week, justArts spoke with Miriam Esther Goldman '14 who co-wrote a screenplay that has been chosen as a nominee for the Madrid International Film Festival 2014.

JustArts: Congratulations are in order for your screenplay being selected as a nominee for the 2014 Madrid International Film Festival! Would you tell us about the screenplay-what is it called?

Miriam Esther Goldman: It's called The Ruins of Oz. In the books following The Wizard of Oz, which is the start of a series of 14 books by the original author and 40 books overall, it's made clear that people can't die in Oz. It's part of the magic. So what became of the Wicked Witch of the West?

So my script begins with this mild-mannered archaeology professor who's longing for a bigger, more important job than the one he has at a small Kansas college. He is called on when these strange ruins appear in the middle of a Kansas corn field. As it turns out, the Wicked Witch of the West has returned, and is a threat not only to Oz, but to the Earth as well. Eliot, our hero, teams up with Glinda the Good [Witch] and the Scarecrow and a couple other Oz-zy characters to confront the Witch of the West and restore order. But when romance develops between Eliot and Glinda the Good, complications arise as it turns out that once Oz and the earth are separate, they really will be separate again.

JA: Was this a writing endeavor that you went about by yourself?

MEG: No, I collaborate on all my scripts with my dad. Actually, the [Film Festival's] website only lists him [as playwright]. They always do that. I'm going to be generous and assume that he actually emails them and submits the applications most of the time, and not that it's some sort of sexism. That happens a lot. It's frustrating.

JA: So how many festivals or submissions would you say you guys have done together?

MEG: I lost track a while ago. I'd say it's somewhere between 60 and a hundred. We've only written four full-length scripts. We've been writing together since I was in seventh grade, and we won our first award when I was in eighth grade. ... We've never had anything produced, but we're trying to step it up and interest agents and managers and branch out into the international film festival circuit.

JA: How long has The Ruins of Oz specifically been in the works?

MEG: That was the first one we wrote together, so I thought of the idea I think when I was in sixth or seventh grade. The original basis of it was the idea of Oz appearing as an archaeological ruin. Oz books-not necessarily L. Frank Baum's Oz books, but the books that people have written since the books became public domain-often start with some crazy, wacky way of finding Oz because Glinda made Oz invisible after the sixth book.

JA: What was the most difficult part of the process for you?

MEG: This particular one we did a little bit differently than most of them in that, since it was the first [we wrote together], my dad did a lot of the groundwork. We plotted it together and he wrote a bare-bones first draft, and I've rewritten it about seven or eight times. I think the most difficult part of the writing process for this one is breaking out from scenes that don't add a lot or aren't interesting, but further the plot. And not being too self-indulgent in the Oz mythos, and trying to relate it to the Oz that people are familiar with from the MGM movie without actually running afoul the copyright holders of the MGM movie. It's complicated because I have a real love-hate relationship with the MGM movie. I didn't see it until I had read I think 10 of the 14 Oz books, because I saw it when I was seven.

JA: What was the entry and selection process like for the festival?

MEG: Unfortunately, not very dramatic. I think this one was on withoutabox.com, which is what you use to submit to film festivals. It was either that or we emailed in a PDF copy. You used to have to send in physical scripts, but that's changed in the last five or 10 years. ... then we waited. It's usually like three or four months, depending on the contest. That's why we submit to a lot of festivals. This is only the second-most recent festival win, because one of our other scripts actually won outright the Richman Film Festival last week.

JA: Is screenwriting something that you'd like to do after graduation?

MEG: If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said "definitely"-I love writing screenplays. I love the whole process. But I'm also really invested in theater. I think it all boils down to whether I am willing, able and have the funds to move to California, because I'm based in Texas. There's a great film scene in Austin, but, as this clearly exemplifies, I tend to write things that are a little more expensive. ... I'm also very interested in acting as a career, and classical singing and poetry-although, money.

JA: You were saying earlier that, in submitting screenplays to festivals, they would often take your dad's name and not your name. What have you learned about what it means to be a woman trying to come up in the film industry?

MEG: Well, I do consider myself a feminist, and two of my four scripts have female protagonists. Three of the four have what I'd consider strong female characters. The last one is a Western that we wrote as an homage to the typical Western adventure of the '40s-'50s-'60s, so the female character is typified by... [being] kind of a background character. ... Sometimes, I feel like that's hurt me, in terms of talking to producers, talking to managers, talking to agents. Because sometimes female characters, especially female characters who break a mold, aren't really saleable. And that frustrates me. And I'm not willing to back down on that. Because I've personally-always, since I was a little kid-found myself to be more invested in strong female characters than [in] even the most compelling male characters. One of the key points that screenwriters and teachers of screenwriters always hit on is "write the movie that you want to see"-and the movie that I want to see, more often than not, at least has a very strong female supporting character, if not a female protagonist who's free of all or most of the stereotypes that plague Hollywood women.