Laura Kroeger became the Grand Prize Winner of Final Draft’s Big Break 2024 features competition with her very first screenplay, Bigger in Texas. But she brought very helpful life experience to the script.
Kroeger spent years as an aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which gave her a wealth of real-world knowledge about lawmaking. Bigger in Texas is based on a real Texas law banning anyone from having more than six sex toys. The law, written in 1973, has been enforced as recently as 2007.
“I say that the script is based on real crimes, not real people,” explains Kroeger.
The script, pitched as Hustlers meets Erin Brockovich, follows Nora, “a 40-something ex-pageant queen who finds the perfect vigilante solution to her mid-life crisis: exploit Texas’s sex toy ban to blackmail powerful men,” according to the logline. It’s a twisty, suspenseful, subversive story that came to Kroeger through her Washington career.
“My first career was in politics. Writing is a totally second career, but my first career definitely informed my second,” she explains.
The California native started researching the Texas law in “one of those Wikipedia rabbit-hole type of situations,” she says.
“I heard about it from somebody I knew who was doing research in that area, and it didn’t leave my brain,” Kroeger says. “And then digging more into the ways that the law has been prosecuted over the years, it started to get more and more absurd in my mind, and so I started crafting a story together that incorporated a lot of those crimes, or elements of those crimes, to kind of paint a picture of how ridiculous and also harmful obscenity statutes can be.”
She started writing Bigger in Texas in 2021, teaching herself about screenwriting in the process. She eventually landed on a draft that got her into the Women in Film and Video Narrative Script Development Program.
“It kind of helped me take it from something very rough over the course of nine months to something more polished and ready for the industry,” she says.
Since Bigger in Texas, she’s written another feature and two pilots. But Bigger in Texas was very much in the zeitgeist when she entered it in Big Break. Her story about sex toys also serves as a metaphor for a slew of laws and policies that crack down on people who aren’t harming anyone else.
“The underpinnings of the law are some much larger court cases, like Lawrence v Texas, which decriminalized homosexuality. And these are also court cases that the Supreme Court has targeted to overturn, and that lawmakers have said that they want to overturn,” she explains.
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But in recent months, some conservative politicians have been saying they want to bring back laws governing personal behavior — “not just in Texas, but nationally,” she says.
Laura Kroeger on Winning the 2024 Final Draft Big Break Contest
Final Draft’s Big Break competition is one of the most prestigious of all screenwriting competitions, with a reputation for opening doors. Kroeger confirms that it has, as the name promises, been a big break.
“Everything since I won the contest has changed for me,” she says. “Even before I won the contest, Big Break was super helpful… They kind of let you know, as you go up from quarter finalist to semifinalist. I won the drama category, and then I started putting feelers out there for what managers might be reading at the moment, looking for more clients, and I signed with my manager just a few days before I won the Grand Prize.”
Winning the Grand Prize includes $10,000, an Apple iPad, a Dell XPS laptop, roundtrip airfare and three nights at a hotel in Los Angeles, meetings with managers, producers and executives, and participation the New York Film Academy‘s online Fellowship program. (You can read about the 2024 TV Grand Prize winner, Maia Mulcahy, here.)
“Everything has sort of happened all at once: my manager, meetings from Big Break, the very generous prize package — it’s a whole new world,” says Kroeger.
Final Draft’s 2025 Big Break Screenwriting Contest is now open.
Main image: Bigger in Texas screenwriter Laura Kroeger, courtesy of Final Draft.