Tamar Halpern received her BA in Journalism and her MFA in Film from USC. While in graduate school, she won a first look screenwriting fellowship from Paramount Pictures and the Jack Oakie Comedy Screenwriting Award. She also wrote and produced the award winning USC short film Never Come Back, starring Lucy Liu.

Tamar has been a writer in residence at Hedgebrook and currently has a feature-length script in development called "Nellie Bly" (aka "Blackwell") with Sobini Films.

She directed the documentary short, "Llyn Foulkes' The Lost Frontier", which screened at Kent Gallery in New York City and Patricia Fauer Gallery at Bergamot Station in Los Angeles. It has been incorporated in the teaching curriculum at the Art Institute Chicago and UC Irvine art department. She is currently working on a feature length version with Christopher Quilty, with plans to screen at the Armand Hammer Museum during the March 2009 Llyn Foulkes' retrospective.

Her script Ezzy Fish was a semifinalist for the 2005 Nicholl's Fellowship, the 2005 Big Bear International Screenplay Award and the 2005 Cynosure Screenwriting Competition. Ezzy Fish was nominated as a finalist at the 2005 IFP Film Market and was included in the 2005 Blacklist of the Best Unproduced Scripts of the Year. In 2006, she was accepted into the FIND (formerly IFP LA) Directors Lab with Ezzy Fish. In 2007, Ezzy Fish placed second in the Slamdance Screenplay Competition. In 2008, Ezzy Fish won the writers Network/Fade In screenwriting competition.

Tamar is one of the original founders of the internet company CitySearch and now works as a writer and director at the start-up advertising agency Spotrunner.

My influences for Ezzy Fish link back to my childhood, an unorthodox upbringing by a visual artist mother and a theoretical physicist father. While my father would try to explain entropy in terms I could understand, I would wander through my mother's art studio collecting oil crayons stubs. Cowboys and country musicians wove their way through our lives, infusing the house with strains of fiddle music and late night poker games. A few times a year, I would road trip with my grandparents through the Southwest and Mexico, staying in low-budget motels and making friends on the rare occasion when my path crossed with a traveler my age.

In terms of visual design, I see Ezzy Fish being drained of color during scenes when Ezzy is steeped in the real world and then bursting with color during her more magical visions. Because the green and blue color palette is originally linked to the plot and the main character, I see the play between saturated colors and stark tones as a natural extension of many story motels that still exist in their original form, having been spared renovation or demolition.

I envision this story as a tone poem in the style of Badlands or Days of Heaven, filled with raw, minimalist performances with natural lighting whenever possible. Ezzy Fish explores the potent effects of poverty and imagination on a child. It also illustrates the freedom of childhood and the fears and vagaries of adulthood. We are invited to share Ezzy's vision of a universe which functions only in ways a child's imagination can conjure, as if we as children were responsible for the creation of the world.

-Tamar Halpern