Project updates: my feature screenplay "Searching for Shadow" was the 2025 Winner of a Golden Pen Script Award and a 2025 Nominee for a New York Independent Cinema Award, and an Official Selection at the Festival of Cinema NYC in 2023. My pilot script, "The Proxy Mom," was a semi-finalist in the 2025 New York Script Awards.
By Marie Smalley
A good storyteller conveys the human condition in all its glorious messiness. Its heartbreak and absurdity, its Murphy's Law moments, from the rational to the unhinged. That's all in television series The Proxy Mom. But it’s the overarching themes that resonate with me: motherhood, loss and helping oneself by helping others - and because I saw this firsthand.
When my sister and I were children playing together, she had a seizure and died. I couldn't save her. I watched my mother struggle to stay sane and find joy in life again. All she wanted was her child back in her arms. So I made it happen - sort of - for my protagonist Cecile.
This film is extremely personal. When my cat Shadow went missing, something inside me ruptured, and I relived a childhood trauma. This event and most of the characters we meet during the search are real - the things they said, the places I searched, Shadow's cause celebre status within the area, and finally, the denouement. Like my protagonist, I quit my job and returned to my first loves, performing and writing.
I have always thought of my life as a series of stories from the time I was a child. It was how I made sense of everything. In writing about this life- changing event, I set out to do the same.
A woman's quest to find her missing cat becomes an obsession that throws her life off balance and awakens repressed memories, forcing her to reconcile her past and the present
A woman leads a double life as a proxy mother to young people in sticky situations in an attempt to heal after the sudden deaths of her husband and son, resorting to absurd and desparate measures to pull it off.
"An ensemble of intelligent characters that can appeal to wide audiences ... the leads are engaging ... a premise worthy of a series." Table Read My Screenplay
In addition to writing screenplays, my published works include “Comrades," in 2021, an essay for a NY Times subsidiary, and from my years in the NYC art world on the curatorial staff of The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and The Takashimaya Art Gallery, she authored exhibition catalogs "Elemental Images,” “Quiet Light,” “Volume and Void,” and a reference book, “Painting and Sculpture in The Museum of Modern Art.”