About Scene Lift
The collective love that goes into creating a good movie has the power to uplift us and also entertain. There’s nothing else quite like it. To further appreciate this form of art and entertainment I started Scene Lift.
Every weekend I publish an article about a movie and the scenes that make it whole, sharing clips from the actual movie and the screenplay it originated from.
The research for most articles I write is focused on drafts of the movie’s screenplay, product information from old press kits, and other items I acquire through Scene Lift Treasures, a tangential newsletter about movie memorabilia.
Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or full-time movie lover like me, my hope is that Scene Lift introduces you to movies you might have missed and lets you appreciate movies you already love in new, exciting ways.
Newsletter Note: To save your inbox, every article is not sent via email. At the end of each month I send out a wrap up of the movies and scenes covered in that month’s articles. Of course, you can go directly to Scene Lift any time before that if you’re itching for a movie recommendation or some nostalgia.
About Me
My name’s Rob and I’m a practicing screenwriter from Pittsburgh who works for HP as a content marketer.
Ten years before this I applied to jobs in Los Angeles just to get closer to where movies were made. I had no intention of creating them but wanted to be close to the spirit of them. With only two years of professional writing experience, landing a job on the other end of the country was a longshot but, after months of persistence, I was eventually hired by an awesome tech startup in “the valley.”
The office was in Studio City directly across from Universal Hollywood. I would wake up in a beautiful villa-style house in North Hollywood and ride my bike to work in the SoCal sun. During my ride, I passed the studios that funded the movies I love.
This love for movies can be traced back to seeing movies like Air Force One, The Negotiator, Can’t Hardly Wait, Gladiator, The Fellowship of the Ring, and other movies from the 1990s and early 2000s. I grew even more fond of them when my mom gifted my dad a 43-inch “big screen” on Christmas 2001.
These days, I’m back in Pittsburgh and still love being close to the spirit of movies. I stay connected by reading screenplays, writing spec scripts, covering scripts for local film festivals, and yes, watching movies. However, after a spiritual awakening in 2019 my taste in movies changed a bit. I had always loved movies with big hearts but they were the only movies I could watch after this experience. Less positive movies just didn’t make sense anymore.
Thankfully I’m more grounded now from the experience and can appreciate all types of movies, even scary and somewhat disgusting ones like Barbarian (2022), though even that movie is sweet in a way. So I suppose that preference for positivity is still alive and well.
Want to get in touch? Send me a note at rob@scenelift.com
