The Change

Hi, my name is Elizabeth Sampson and I've written a short film about menopause called The Change that Scott Alan Smith and Teri Schiavi and I are going to shoot this June. I've worked on this script for over three years, having spent the entire pandemic taking every writing for TV class I could find. I've worked on this script with showrunners, TV directors, film directors, actors, and fellow playwrights. I feel it is ready to be filmed. I have taken this short film from the TV Pilot and series I wrote, called The Change, which I am aiming to eventually make. I will be submitting the short film to film festivals to hopefully start the conversations that will allow me to do that. I've been a spoken word artist and produced playwright for over 20 years. I like to write the plight and emotional landscapes of the middle-aged woman. When I myself hit menopause, I hadn't a clue what was happening to me. I lost my mother to breast cancer in 1991, so there was no one to ask. I went to Google and found that there are 34 symptoms of menopause ranging from "vaginal atrophy", to "loss of hair" to "loss of self". It is a profound time of change for women, and if you don't know what's happening to you, it can feel like you are losing your mind. The Change is a humorous and poignant look at this time in three friends' lives - my protagonist Beth, and her friends Mary-Alice, and Kimiko, are representing three typical phases in the relationship cycle -- a stagnant marriage, a recent divorcee, and a soon-to-be widow. The film is full of humor, despair, desire, bravery, and some profound changes for the women that I aspire to be both educational and identifiable to all of my middle-aged sisters out there. This $10k will allow us to rent the truck, the equipment, feed everyone, and pay the actors and crew an honorarium for the 5-day shoot we have scheduled for mid-June. I hope you will kick in and help us make this film - I can't wait for you all to see it.