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Rebecca Teller has makeup applied to her face by Robin Murrah during a workshop for volunteers in the upcoming Duke City Shootout. Crews in the shootout have seven days to produce short films. Some volunteers have used the event as a springboard to careers in the industry.

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It's a shotgun wedding between a screenwriter and his dream of watching a film version of his script on the big screen.

The Duke City Shootout, Albuquerque's annual summer film competition, gives seven teams of screenwriters and their film crews seven days to compete for something more valuable than fortune or fame.

It's an opportunity.

There are Duke City Shootout alumni who have gone on to start production companies, act in feature-length movies and work on the sets of major film projects. Whether they entered the festival as a screenwriter or a volunteer, the talented and ambitious have been able to use the Duke City Shootout as a platform to catapult their career.

"In 2003, I did a film for the festival and met Spike Lee's editor, Barry Alexander Brown," said Ryan Denmark.

Denmark had volunteered to be an editor the same year Brown had volunteered to mentor one of the film crews. They met on the set of "Blueberry Muffins," a 10-minute film about a girl who inherits a haunted house.

"During the post-production process, he would look at my cuts and give me suggestions," Denmark said. "We created a good rapport, which eventually turned into a friendship."

In 2003, Denmark was 27 and a full-time student at UNM pursuing his bachelor's degree in media arts.

"I was a few weeks into the fall semester when Barry called me out of the blue and said that he needed an assistant editor to do the film `She Hate Me' with Spike Lee," Denmark said.

For the struggling undergraduate, it was a golden opportunity.

Jim Graebner, co-founder of the Duke City Shootout, said timing is everything: "If you're at the right place at the right time, the god of fame and success may smile down on you. It has a lot to do with luck."

It also has a lot to do with Graebner's making sure that film crews competing in the Duke City Shootout have access to the best possible equipment and mentors.

"We've got oodles of mentors," Graebner said. "Most of the time, we want people being mentored by people who are adept in the field."

In Denmark's case, having Brown as a mentor was a key factor in the success of his film career.

Despite being nine credits short of his degree in media arts, Denmark never returned to UNM. Instead, he packed up his things and moved to New York City. He now lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, not far from Lee's studio, and has worked as an editor on feature films including "Penelope," "Factory Girl" and "Inside Man."

This year, the god of fame will be given twice the number of chances to smile down on the Duke City Shootout's fledgling filmmakers.

Graebner said he has increased the number of mentors for each film crew.

"We had to double our mentorship in pre-production and production, because we were burning our mentors up," Graebner said.

Graebner says he tries to pick industry professionals who are respected but don't garner so much attention that the crew is overshadowed by their presence.

But building relationships with mentors during the seven-day stint of rush-rush-no-sleep isn't the only way Shootout alumni have been able to move up to the big leagues.

Michael Flowers, screenwriter and director of the 10-minute film "Babof," parlayed the award-winning project into a successful film career by catching the attention of a Paramount Pictures representative.

The representative found Flowers' phone number and contacted him after watching the finished version "Babof" in 2003.

"They saw the footage, and they called me," Flowers said. "It just came out of the blue. It was so crazy."

Flowers had been on a dance floor that evening celebrating all the awards "Babof" won when he got the call.

He agreed to work for Paramount Pictures as a set dresser for "The Longest Yard" in 2004 and has since found work on almost every feature-length film to come through New Mexico, including "Bordertown," "The Flock," "The Astronaut Farmer" and "Transformers."

Graebner said the success stories of Denmark and Flowers are the reasons for which the Duke City Shootout competition was instituted.

"It's not like Sundance (Film Festival), where it's all about the stars, actors and distributors," Graebner said. "With our festival, we decided to reverse it and focus on the crew. We decided that we were going to try to attract stars that wanted to work with people who made a really good crew."

Back in 2000, when the Duke City Shootout began, Graebner said he had noticed how filmmakers were going to Canada because Canada had better film incentives.

"So we kind of declared war on Canada and said, 'No. Come to New Mexico,' " he said.

And thanks to the enticement of Gov. Bill Richardson's film incentive package, they came.

Script judges for the Duke City Shootout have received almost three times the amount of entries for the 2007 competition than the one in 2006, and its creators were asked to replicate the festival's success in Brazil, said Tony DellaFlora, one of the event's co-founders.

"If we pull this off in Brazil, this may create a template for us to do it in other countries," DellaFlora said.

Denmark and Flowers have volunteered to return to the Shootout this year.

Denmark said he plans to help edit "The Pitch."

Flowers said his decision to volunteer as a production designer for "Young Gun" was partly due to his appreciation for what the Duke City Shootout has done for him.

"This never would have happened for me if I hadn't have been given the chance that first time out," Flowers said. "I'd never written a screenplay before. I just typed it out and mailed it in.

"I was at the zoo at the monkey cage on Mother's Day when they called me and told me I'd won."