If you've been to the movies recently, you may have seen a two-minute film featuring a hissing cockroach and a mortally frightened family before the feature. Sound funny? It is.
Suburban Bravery is the brainchild of Philadelphia-based comedy and copy writer Rob Bloom. The film was produced as the prize in a nationwide contest sponsored by Screenvision, a cinema advertising company.
Bloom entered the contest after seeing an ad in Creativity Magazine. He thought it was a cool idea but procrastinated on entering until the last day. "I didn't have anything but really wanted to submit something. There are so many writers trying to break into film and television. To have your film produced and shown is a phenomenal opportunity. Literally at the last hour, I thought of my old humor column about me and my wife - who should kill the bugs in the house. I typed a script and submitted it. A month and a half later, I was in the airport in Jacksonville between flights, and I got a phone call saying that I'd won."
Bloom is definitely funny. He has written comedy since he picked up a pen at age 8 and started a monthly comedy magazine. Called Rob's Magazine, it was 20 pages of satire, television show parodies, jokes and cartoons, handwritten and drawn by Rob, photocopied at his father's office, and sent to about a dozen subscribers.
"I was a huge fan of Mad magazine," Bloom said. "I did it every month for a year. But that wasn't my first writing experience. When I was 5, I wrote and illustrated a book, Jack and Zach."
Born in Atlanta, Bloom spent part of his childhood in Orlando, Fla., and graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in advertising. A job offer brought him back to Atlanta, and eventually his sister and parents joined him here.
Seven years later, in the face of downsizing and a changing job market, Bloom decided it was time to re-evaluate his career path.
As a lifelong stutterer, he headed for the University of Georgia to pursue a graduate degree in speech pathology, planning to help others who stutter.
One day he turned in a paper. Returning it, the teacher told him he couldn't do the kind of writing required in the speech pathology program.
She told him he was wasting his time.
"My first reaction was anger - I'll show her," Bloom said. "Then I started thinking. I was missing writing, being creative. I wasn't great at academic writing, but I was creative and had always loved writing. A few days later, I sat down at the computer and wrote an 800-word humor column. I sent it out to friends and family. They asked for more, and I found out they were forwarding them to other people as well."
Bloom started a regular humor column, eventually setting up a Web site and a mailing list. Three and a half years later, several people regularly check out robbloom.com. There you can find an archive of Bloom's columns and the things he wrote for Cartoon Network and other places. A link to the winning film is there too.
Bloom and his wife, Juliana, now live in Philadelphia, where she's doing a residency in the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and he's working as a freelance ad copywriter to make a living while he continues to write humor, which "I was doing for enjoyment," Bloom said. "I hadn't realized how much I missed doing it. It just started flowing. I viewed it as an investment in some ways. Now it seems that that investment is paying off in terms of the contest, the recognition I'm getting from that. I've developed a lot of good contacts. I'm working on a feature-length romantic comedy."
