A misconception in modern screenwriting is that setting is merely backdrop.
It isn’t.
Audiences know when a writer understands the roads, the weather, the trees in the right season and, perhaps, the way a conversation can happen at the famous Roscoe Diner at six in the morning. Authentic places carry memory, conflict, pride, and loss – long before a character ever enters the scene on the page.
Living and working in the Catskills, I’ve watched a region constantly reinvent itself. The fading echoes of the Borscht Belt, aging bungalow colonies, abandoned farmhouses, and ten-foot satellite dishes. For years, many of these communities struggled under the weight of economic decline and the slow disappearance of industries and traditions that once defined them.
And yet something interesting happened. Post-COVID, the Catskills began changing again.
New permanent residents arrived from the city looking for space, quiet, rivers, and community. Fly fishing experienced a resurgence. Small craft farms and local food movements reappeared. Environmental stewardship became less of a slogan and more of a shared responsibility tied directly to tourism, conservation, and quality of life. Old buildings found second lives. So did some people.
The tension between decline and renewal is a reservoir full of material.
In my scripts, tension may appear through a struggling farmer uncovering buried mob secrets in the shadow of forgotten Catskills history. In another, tension emerges through ordinary hunting buddies pulled into geopolitical chaos far from home but carrying rural values with them into an impossible situation. In still another, the landscape itself becomes almost mystical — a place where history, ambition, and myth quietly intersect beneath the surface of a central New York landscape.
Different stories. Same underlying truth – place shapes the character of a script.
Authentic settings matter because they remind audiences that the world on the pages of a script existed before the story began — and will continue after it ends.
Keep writing!
