I recently made the final five in the TV category of the Save the Cat! Screenplay Competition, so naturally I’m now considering where else to donate my submission fees.
Which screenplay competitions have provided credible feedback, useful contacts or genuine industry attention? And which produced nothing beyond a handsome downloadable laurel?
I’m working on a five-episode limited series that follows the same day from five different perspectives.
Same events. Different information. The audience knows the ending from the beginning.
The idea is that each episode changes what you thought you understood in the previous one. My concern is obvious, at what point does accumulation simply become repetition?
Would you replay major scenes when the new perspective changes their meaning or avoid repeating anything unless the audience learns something substantial?
Any examples that pulled this off particularly well besides Groundhog Day?
Jerusalem, 1946.
A warning entered the building as a telephone call. A clerk wrote it down. Her supervisor asked whether the caller had identified herself. She had not.
The message was marked UNCONFIRMED and passed upstairs.
Another official requested verification. A secretary made a duplicate. Someone telephoned another department and received no answer.
Meanwhile, lunch service continued.
A waiter aligned the silverware. A typist replaced her carbon paper. Guests crossed the lobby beneath slowly turning fans. Outside, a child counted coins for sweets.
Nobody believed there was no danger. They simply believed someone else had the authority to decide what should be done about it.
The warning moved from desk to desk, losing urgency with every handoff. It was recorded, translated, questioned and filed.
Then the clock reached 12:37.
Author’s note: This is historical fiction inspired by events surrounding the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. Characters and details have been fictionalized. It comes from my historical limited-series project, 12:37 – THE KING DAVID HOTEL, recently named one of five TV-pilot finalists in the 2026 Save the Cat! Screenplay Challenge.
12:37 - THE KING DAVID HOTEL | A LIMITED SERIES
https://www.twelvethirtyseven.com
LOGLINE: Three weeks after a British raid kills her sister, a young woman delivers milk to the King David Hotel. Seven of the churns hold explosive. Her fifteen-year-old sister makes the warning calls. The calls fail. At 12:37 the south wing comes down with everyone still inside.
PITCH: 12:37 is a five-episode limited series about the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. Ninety-one people died. The bomb was carried in milk churns. Three warnings were phoned in. The building was never evacuated. Each episode follows the same morning through different people. The cell. The hotel staff. The British administration. The city.
The timeline is real. The lives inside it are fictionalized.
The series does not ask who was right. It asks who paid.
SYNOPSIS: The King David is a hotel, a government office, and a military headquarters in one building. Kitchens below. The British Secretariat above. Between them, hundreds of people at work. The paperwork upstairs decides the lives downstairs.
On the morning of the attack, the building runs on schedule. Lunch is prepped. Reports circulate. A typist files the night's bomb threat with the others. Third one this week.
The warnings do not disappear. They get processed.
One is filed as a hoax.
One is put on hold.
One is answered by a clerk as fear and doubt spread.
The audience knows more. The margin narrows to the minute.
COMPS: Chernobyl. Munich. United 93. Zero Dark Thirty.
E1 - THE BLACK SABBATH: A British raid kills a sister and sends a grandfather to prison. Three weeks later, the survivors carry the bomb into the building that holds their files.
E2 - THE KING DAVID HOTEL: The staff's morning. A waiter, a housekeeper, a switchboard operator. The warnings reach them in pieces. No one has the authority to act.
E3 - THE BRITISH SECRETARIAT: The typist files every warning correctly: logged, stamped unverified, filed. The gates are locked to keep the trouble out. It’s already in the basement.
E4 - THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM: A bus driver. A mother and her daughter. A girl in her dead mother's dress. A messenger boy. The diversion bomb kills the one who tried to warn them all.
E5 - 12:37: The blast, once, from everyone at once. Then the night: floodlights, the dig, and three chalk boards in the forecourt. Every name the series has followed ends up on a list.
© 2026 Michael John Fedun & Nick Schönfeld. All Rights Reserved.