Scheduling Chair
Brian Lee Weakland is a native of Altoona, Pennsylvania, and an honors graduate of Penn State’s School of Journalism. He won the Associated Press Community News Reporter Award and Keystone Press Award for investigative reporting as a staff writer and news editor for The Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania. He has taught writing courses at Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh. Brian’s work has been published in Pittsburgh Magazine as well as numerous national journals.
Brian received a National Book Award nomination and the Award of Merit from the Kinzua Foundation for his debut novel, Tonight in the Rivers of Pittsburgh, first book of his Rivers of Pittsburgh Mystery Trilogy. The fast-moving murder mystery series begins when Pennsylvania’s popular governor is missing after his limousine falls into Pittsburgh’s Monongahela River.
The second book of the trilogy, Woods on Fire, is based upon Allegheny River legends. Woods on Fire recalls local stories of buried Spanish silver and the forced ouster of the last Indians of Pennsylvania.
In Zelienople Road, Brian continues his fascinating mix of eccentric characters and life-and-death situations, while he skewers lawyers, judges and the criminal justice system. The Rivers of Pittsburgh Mystery Trilogy has gained such a loyal reader base in western Pennsylvania that Zelienople Road’s initial press run was sold out less than three weeks after its release.
Brian won the Writer’s Guild of America drama award at the 2013 Austin Film Festival, grand prize awards in both the New York Screenplay Contest and the Hollywood Screenplay Competition, and scored at Top 50 placement in the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship with “Last Waltz of Vienna,” an action drama based on the true story of Sigmund Freud’s daring escape from Nazi Austria in 1938. Brian also won the top screenwriting award in 2012 and 2013 with the Virginia Film Office. He obtained representation by Madhouse Entertainment, Hollywood, CA, in November 2013.
Brian resides in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and two daughters. He also is a proud member of the James River Writers, one of the nation’s leading literary organizations.
He currently is working on a non-fiction crime novel set in Pennsylvania.
These loglines are the individual property of our member and are from registered or copyrighted scripts. If you are interested, please contact the writer for more detailed information.
Last Waltz of Vienna
Historical Drama
A young chemist is drafted by Nazis to control the assets of Sigmund Freud after Hitler’s army overruns Austria in 1938. But after becoming the unwitting subject of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the chemist disobeys orders, hides assets and pulls off Freud’s daring escape on the Orient Express.
The Kingmaker
Historical Comedy
Based on a true story, the “Father of Public Relations” recalls, in exaggerated glory, the day he saved the Republic at a White House breakfast.
Crazy Woman
Psychological Thriller
A Georgia public defender, battling voices and visions in her head, succumbs to a mystical woman who promises to reconnect the young lawyer with her dying son.
Trackback
Sci-Fi
Travelers from 2044, imprisoned in a NATO facility in Europe, vanish one by one. Suspecting murder by the commanding officer, an American doctor rescues their mysterious leader and risks her life to save them by traveling to a dark moment in time.
Klaus The Great
Family Drama
A profoundly old philosopher, struggling to survive a book-selling war with a brash Ivy League professor, follows the advice of his savvy 17-year-old adopted grandson and, in the process, finally discovers the meaning of his life.
Strong Enough
Action
Pound for pound, Sergei Karpov is the strongest man in the world. But when the Bulgarian athlete learns of his parents’ deaths and the destruction of his home by a ruthless uranium mine operator, he gains strength from Anne Donovan, a State Department agent, and together they hunt down the killer before nuclear fuel hits the underworld market.
Words of War
Historical Thriller
An Irish writer, drafted into the military in the last days of World War II, loses contact with his unit and faces a harsh test of his humanity: whether to accept death or kill a 14-year-old German sniper.
Franz Kafka: Golf Pro
Dark Farce Mash-up
One putt away from capturing the Prague Open championship, a brooding young golfer suffers a mysterious disqualification. His efforts to rectify this indignity cause his downward spiral from social outcast, to prison, to the gallows. Part anger, part angst, 100 percent Kafkaesque.