History
A quarter-century of teaching writers to finish
FAST Screenplay launched in 2009, but the teaching behind it began a decade earlier. Jeff Bollow started teaching screenwriting in 1999 — as an independent producer in Sydney who couldn't find a single viable screenplay to produce — and ran live workshops more than a hundred times across ten cities in six countries before turning the whole process into FAST. The program has operated continuously since 2009; after a complete rebuild it is now in private beta, with public beta opening soon.
A producer's problem, not a teacher's ambition
In the late 1990s, Jeff and a friend produced a low-budget independent feature in Sydney — a few hundred thousand dollars, shot evenings and weekends over two years. The plan was to take the finished film to the American Film Market with several quality screenplays in tow: here's what we did with nothing — which one would you like to make with a real budget? The blocker: he couldn't find viable material. Every writer he met had a great idea; almost none had a producible screenplay. So he started teaching writers how to write what a producer actually needs.
He kept a line from his acting training close — Sanford Meisner's "that which hinders your task is your task." Finding and developing screenwriters was hindering the task of making films, so it became the task.
Timeline
| 1986–1990s | Jeff's film career begins as a child actor in Los Angeles, followed by production work across nearly every department — including for Roger Corman's Concorde–New Horizons — before he moves to the Southern Hemisphere to start an independent film studio. |
|---|---|
| 1999 | Teaching begins. An eight-week "idea to first draft" workshop in Sydney reveals that writers lack even the fundamentals — so Jeff builds a Weekend Screenwriting Workshop covering the core principles, structure, formatting, and rewriting process in two days. |
| 2000–2003 | The Screenplay Development Centre launches. The weekend workshop runs more than a hundred times in ten cities across six countries — sometimes three per month. |
| 2004 | Writing FAST: How to Write Anything with Lightning Speed is published and the FAST system is designed. The book becomes an Amazon best-seller the following year. |
| 2005–2008 | Between teaching cycles: co-founding the Big Mountain Short Film Festival in New Zealand, directing films and plays, and producing the educational resource Making Fantastic Short Films — winner of the 2007 ATOM Award for Best Instructional/Training Resource. |
| 2009 | FAST Screenplay is built — a committed year of work turning a decade of live teaching into a guided online journey covering the entire creative process, so the teaching could reach writers without depending on Jeff being in the room. |
| 2009–2024 | The program runs continuously, guiding writers from first idea to finished screenplay. Growth comes through word of mouth and industry referral — FAST never ran public advertising. |
| 2024 | FAST closes to new members and begins a ground-up rebuild — from a course into a private creative environment. |
| 2025 | The rebuild expands significantly and a private beta opens, ongoing since, as the program becomes a whole new creative surface. |
| 2026 | Public beta opening soon. See Status for exactly what is live today. |
Why the workshops became software
The weekend workshop was popular; the eight-week follow-through was rare. Writers loved the idea of screenwriting more than they trusted the year of work it takes. Live teaching also consumed the teacher — and in 1999 the answer would have been a DVD home-study course too expensive to risk. By 2009 the internet had solved distribution, and FAST Screenplay became what the workshops could never be: the complete journey, available to any writer, anywhere, at their own pace.
What the rebuild changes
The original FAST Screenplay was a guided program you followed. The new FAST is a place you write: the same four-phase process, now surrounded by capture surfaces, a private encrypted Vault, and a Companion — so the method and the writing finally live in one room. The scope of the new platform is orders of magnitude larger than the original program, while the conviction underneath is unchanged: the writer's voice is the product.