FAST Screenplay

Founder

Jeff Bollow

Jeff Bollow is the founder of FAST Screenplay and the author of Writing FAST: How to Write Anything with Lightning Speed (2004). He has been teaching screenwriting since 1999 and has spent his career on the practical problem most screenwriting education never touches: how a writer actually gets from idea to finished, viable screenplay.

Four decades in film

Jeff's career began in front of the camera, as a child actor in Los Angeles in the 1980s — film, television, commercials, and theater. He moved behind it early, working nearly every job from pre-production through post for companies including Roger Corman's Concorde–New Horizons, on features, music videos, and award-winning short films of his own. In the mid-1990s he moved to the Southern Hemisphere with a plan: build an independent film studio producing multiple films a year.

The producer who couldn't find a script

Producing a self-funded independent feature in Sydney, Jeff hit the blocker that redirected his career: he couldn't find viable material to produce next. Everyone had a great idea; almost no one had a producible screenplay. So in 1999 he started teaching — not out of ambition to teach, but to create the writers a producer needs. His acting teacher's tradition supplied the logic, in Sanford Meisner's words: "that which hinders your task is your task."

The Weekend Screenwriting Workshop he built ran more than a hundred times in ten cities across six countries. The system distilled from those years became the book Writing FAST (2004), and in 2009, FAST Screenplay — the complete guided journey from first spark to finished screenplay, which has run continuously since. Along the way: the 2007 ATOM Award for Making Fantastic Short Films, co-founding New Zealand's Big Mountain Short Film Festival, and work with thousands of writers worldwide.

Beyond screenwriting

Jeff's 2015 TEDx talk, Expand Your Imagination Exponentially (TEDxDocklands, Melbourne), argues what FAST is built on: that imagination is trainable, and that screenwriting exercises it like almost nothing else — a form where every line must fire the imaginations of dozens of collaborators, survive real budget constraints, and say the most with the fewest words. What began as screenwriting education has become a broader study of how human beings create. The thinking is laid out on the Philosophy page.

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