Catalyst is proud to announce our 2022-23 Mentorship Pairs! Our mentorship program, through a partnership with the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, is a gateway for storytellers in the Catalyst Story Institute to further their careers. Each mentorship is carefully aligned by our Institute Directors and is uniquely structured based on the creator’s career path, skill set and goals. Some consist of a series of career coachings between mentor and mentee, while others may include a hands on experience or connection, such as an onsite visit to a working set or production office or a valuable industry introduction. These relationships have proven instrumental to many in terms of career momentum and ignition. We are proud to be curating this highly rewarding program that will continue to foster the career paths of the future’s brightest storytellers.
Our first pair is mentor Steve Basilone (Los Angeles) and mentee Tomás Fleck (Brazil)!
Tomás is a showrunner, screenwriter and comedy director based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This past fall when he became part of the Mentorship program, we connected him with Steve Basilone and the mentorship was officially created. Basilone has been writing for film and television since graduating from Emerson College. In 2007 he sold his first spec with Benderspink. In 2009, he wrote, produced and starred in a pilot for Fox Television Studios. Since then, Steve has written and produced more than 200 episodes of television, working for shows like Happy Endings, Community and The Goldbergs. In 2015, he wrote a feature for Focus Films, and in 2017 he wrote the sequel to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito classic, Twins. This past year, Basilone’s feature directorial debut, Long Weekend, opened nationwide through Sony Pictures. Currently he is working on getting his sophomore feature off the ground, while he develops television projects with Sony, Fox and MGM. Based on Steve’s experience in the industry and Tomás’ career goals, we knew this would be a great fit and could be valuable for Tomás in terms of next steps and career guidance. Basilone and Fleck met regularly last year to discuss Fleck’s goals and the future of his career.
Tomás has had a prolific career in film and television so far and through the support of Catalyst and in working with Steve, has created even greater career momentum. He has become the lead director and one of the screenwriters of the new comedy series All in the Family, about a conflicted family that needs therapy and in 2022, he worked as a writer/creator on two TV fiction series for Anonymous Content Brazil.
Before that, he was the scriptwriter for dr4g0n, a half-hour Globoplay Original comedy/drama series about the universe of professional video game players, under the supervision of International Emmy winner Jorge Furtado. His main work in TV is as director/creator/screenwriter of the morgue workplace comedy, Necropolis (Netflix Brazil), whose original music was nominated for the Jerry Goldsmith Awards in the Best Original Music (TV Series) category alongside series such as The Umbrella Academy, La Casa de Papel and The Boys. Additionally, he is writer/producer of the comedy/thriller Deer Alice (Netflix Brazil), writer of the drama/fantasy Werner and the Dead (Amazon Prime - Brazil), seasons 5 and 6 of the popular children's sitcom Game Crashers (Gloob and Globoplay) and creator/writer/director of Online Confessional, selected for the Catalyst Content Festival 2021. He also wrote, created and produced the drama/sci-fi/YA B Horizon (Amazon Prime Brazil), the crime/law/cop thriller The Complex (CineBrasilTv), also selected for Catalyst 2021, the comedy/sport Bocheiros (Prime Box Brazil), the comedy Family Hell (Theater series for Cacilda Becker's Theater in Sao Paulo) and he also wrote The Masked Singer Brazil, one of the most popular shows of 2021.
In cinema, he was the writer/producer of comedy/drama feature A Gritty Story (Brasilia Film Festival, 2019), the comedy shorts PIGEONS! (Anima Mundi, 2014), More Suicidal, Less Suicidal (Gramado Film Festival, 2015) and writer/diretor of the drama/thriller/fantasy Glass Wall (International Izmir Short Film Festival 2018).
Tomás graduated in Social Communication from PUC and did his final work in character development and narrative for the series Mad Men. He studied screenwriting with Willian Rabkin (Writing the Pilot), Pablo Stoll (Whisky). He was selected to study theater dramaturgy at the Dramaturgy Center of SESI in Sao Paulo with Silvia Gomez, where he wrote the play A Dog Tragedy, for Humans. He was selected for the literary writing laboratory, CLIPE, at Casa das Rosas, one of the largest literary museums in Latin America, with his first novel, Second Family. He also was a finalist in the pilot contest at FRAPA, the largest script festival in Latin America, with the sitcom The Hospital Heroe$. In 2019 and 2020, he studied improvisation at Comedy Space (Sao Paulo) to improve his writing, directing and creative dynamics for the writers’ room. His first feature film as director, My Shining Shadow, was one of 10 projects, among more than 600, for the SESC Argumenta lab in Rio de Janeiro; and his next play is based on the same story and will be released as a book through the Sao Paulo PROAC grant.
Catalyst is proud to have curated this connection between Tomás and Steve and wishes both of them much continued success in their careers!
To learn more about the Catalyst Mentorship Program, visit https://www.catalystories.org/mentorship