Storybeat With Steve Cuden

Hal Ackerman is making his second appearance on StoryBeat. Hal spent thirty years teaching screenwriting in UCLA’s legendary screenwriting program. Along with Richard Walter and Lew Hunter, Hal helped launch the careers of many dozens of writers whose work you’ve seen on screens large and small. Hal has sold film and television material to all the outlets. His screenplay Holmeyer’s Bridge, holds the unofficial Guinness record for having been continuously optioned for twenty consecutive years, owned during that stretch by two Academy Award winning producers, two Tony Award winning producers and others.His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. “Sweet Day” was recorded by the late Robert Forster. Concrete Charley and The Golden Boy won the 2020 Sports Literate Sport Short contest.Hal’s written three “Soft boiled” murder mystery novels about an aging counter-culture P.I. named Harry Stein. The first of those, Stein Stung, won a Lovey award for best first novel. Subsequently, he published Stein