jacksonville blogs

"I was living in Key West, and there were a lot of writers there. When I decided maybe I wanted to become a writer, I didn't know anything about writing, so I asked my neighbor, Tom (Tennessee) Williams, for his advice . . . He said, well, 'Just write.'" So begins a fascinating hour with Sharon Y. Cobb, an accomplished screenwriter, former UNF professor, and generous mentor, whose career has taken her from Jacksonville to Key West, to Hollywood, and back to Jacksonville.  After "retiring" from the advertising business to become an artist in Key West at 31, she took old Tom's advice and reinvented herself as a successful screenwriter. She is a member of the prestigious Screen Writers Guild of America - West, and an active member of JAX Film Bar Mondays, a group of more than 1,200 local filmmakers who gather weekly at various watering holes to talk shop, and make movies, and has written innumerable short feature scripts for local productions. Cobb, whose accomplishments are too numerous to mention here, stopped by Scribbler's Corner at River of Grass to talk about Jacksonville's surprisingly prolific film scene, and swap stories about her writing life, and the movie biz.