OTOPIA

In 1877, a curious grad student enters an equally curious utopian commune with the desire to complete her dissertation on its effects on women’s reproductive health, but instead is caught in a complex web of sex, marriage, and lust, unable to leave as a mysterious past begins to reveal itself.

  • Evan I Schwartz
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Television Script
  • Genres:
    Historical dramedy
  • Number of Pages:
    53
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Final Draft Big Break

    August 15, 2019
    Semi Finalist
  • Unique Voices prize
    Creative Screenwriting
    February 7, 2023
  • The Black List

    October 15, 2020
    Top Ranked Script
Writer Biography - Evan I Schwartz

Evan I. Schwartz tells stories about the human imagination across American history.

His book Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story (Houghton Mifflin, 2009) is a biographical narrative about the origins of a cultural icon.

He is also the author of The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television (HarperCollins, 2002), named by Amazon Books as one of “100 Biographies & Memoirs to Read in a Lifetime.”

Since 2020, Evan has served as storyteller and team member for Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now by John Doerr (Penguin/Portfolio, 2021). He produced and wrote the documentary Saved by the Sun which gauges the future of solar power and premiered on PBS/NOVA on Earth Day 2007.

His docs have also appeared on Netflix & Showtime. His screenplays won a Sloan/Tribeca Film Grant and the Hamptons Film Festival Fellowship. His limited series pilot OTOPIA has placed in Final Draft's Big Break and the 2023 Unique Voices competition.

Evan’s first novel, REVOLVER, is a late 1970s coming-of-age drama about two teens with a premonition that the life of their ultimate hero is in danger (Concord Free Press, 2021).

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Writer Statement

“The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.” - Pete Seeger

While all the stories I am telling are about the struggle between the dark and the light, I tend to favor the optimistic, the glimmer of hope.

Whether in my three published historical narrative books, in my documentary work, or in my original screenplays, I ride with the main characters seeking a way out of a dark time and into a new light previously unimagined.

This has me choosing stories about human imagination itself, whether it's Baum's creation of Oz, Farnsworth's first conception of television, or the imagination needed now, for the way to solve the climate crisis and what that will mean to us.

Even if the paradise never arrives, we can feel it coming. These are the stories I want to see on film and television.