Joe Scott has been a screenwriter for most of his life, with the goal of being a full-fledged filmmaker. During his years at the University of North Texas Film School, he wrote, directed, and produced many short films. But there was one goal that continued to elude him…
A feature film.

Several times he came very close to getting a feature made, even attracting well-known Hollywood talent with the quality of his screenplays, but each time the production became too big for a first-time filmmaker to pull off. He decided he needed to do something small. A "Clerks," even. Something set all in one location. He began thinking of the best location he had available to him. It didn't take long to make a decision. A family close to him owned a beach house in Galveston.

He set out to write a script around the location. Several ideas were played with, everything from a 'beach party' spoof to a drama (dying man goes to a beach house to spend his final days) to horror (they came to have fun, then one by one began to disappear…). But recent life experiences seemed to be guiding him in a different direction. He had just suffered through a painful breakup with a long-time girlfriend. One idea wouldn't die. What if a guy was stuck in a beach house with a girl who left him at the altar and the guy she left him for?

Ideas for scenes came flooding into his mind and he began writing, fueling each scene with raw emotion, with no real story in place. What kind of things would the guy have to say to her? How would she handle seeing the lover she jilted? What would the new husband be like and how would they get along? The idea congealed slowly, adding characters and subplots into the mix, and Ocean Front Property was born.

From that point on, the creation of Ocean Front Property became the story of persistence, determination, a lot of luck, and hard work from many people without whom the film would never have succeeded. Problems arose from the very beginning. During the writing of the screenplay, after Mr. Scott had written 50 pages of scenes, a hard drive failure in his computer caused him to lose all of his work. Several months later, with a new computer, he had to re-write the scenes, all 50 pages, from memory.

Says Scott, "It was a pain to have to do it, but in a lot of ways, I think having to re-write half the movie was one of the best things that could have happened to the screenplay. Before that happened, all I had was a loose collection of scenes without a story behind it, just a stream-of -consciousness expression of what I was feeling. Later, when re-writing it, that's when the story came together and all the scenes began to fit into a framework that made sense. If it wasn't for me having to start over from the beginning, I think the end product would have been very different."

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