His name may not be as well known as Steven Spielberg, but David Greenberg, an award-winning filmmaker who has lived in Chestnut Hill for 35 years (and Mt. Airy and Germantown before that), is not exactly a film neophyte. Greenberg, who has taught screenwriting and film history at Moore College of Art & Design, at Drexel University for more than 20 years, and at the now-defunct University of the Arts for 18 years, has written many film scripts and helped produce numerous low-budget films over the last four decades.

Greenberg, a graduate of the film program at Temple University, has worked as a writer-for-hire, developing projects for the film division of a record label that were pitched to HBO, director Abel Ferrera, actor/director Forest Whitaker and others. His original screenplays have attracted attention throughout the industry, from Oscar-nominated producers to Sundance Award winners.

His 1995 short film, “The True Meaning of Cool,” won an award from the American Film Institute. His most recent film, “Seclusion,” available as of Oct. 28 on Apple TV+ and Amazon as well as some other streaming services, has won several awards including the 2023 award for Best Feature at the Chandler International Film Festival in Phoenix. The film had a red carpet premiere on Oct. 28 at the Oaks Center Cinema in Montgomery County.

“While I am usually a screenwriter, I was a co-producer on the film along with East Oak Lane native Andy Silverman, and our lead actress was 2014 Penn Charter graduate, Lyndsey Bentham,” Greenberg told the Local last week. “And the film has gotten a distribution deal through Indican Pictures, so we are very excited about that.”

The lead character of “Seclusion” is a woman named Mary, who is having a bad year. She has broken up with her partner and lost her job, so she decides to take what’s left of her life and flee. Hitting the road to find adventure, she comes across a secluded mansion, boarded up, that appears empty. Breaking in, Mary soon discovers the mansion hides a secret, and that it’s been boarded up for a sinister reason. Realizing she is not alone, Mary must figure out how to survive her seclusion.

“The director,” Greenberg explained, “my friend Lovinder Gill, who has directed several films, hosts a popular screenwriting podcast and wrote a great book on screenwriting, asked me to read a screenplay that he was thinking about directing. I loved it and told him that I would do anything I could to help him get it made. He said, ‘Okay, what do you want to do?’ He was directing it, the screenplay was written and those are the two things that I usually do, so I said, ‘I don’t know, produce?’

“He said, ‘Great, you’re the producer.’ Now, I had never really produced and had been actively avoiding it because I did not think I had the temperament or skill set required but, here I was, now the producer. My first job as producer was to bring on a better producer, my friend Andy Silverman, who grew up in East Oak Lane and, like me, found himself in the position of being a screenwriter who had to become a producer out of necessity...

“In terms of actual producing, I did a lot of the things you might expect, like putting together the crew. The cinematographer is a former Drexel student, Brian Troy, who lives in Mt. Airy. Producing involves a lot of ‘social economy’ like who you know, so the director was always joking that whenever we needed something, I usually said ‘I know a guy.’ Of course, there were plenty of other less glamorous duties like ironing costumes and cleaning toilets.”

Greenberg and his crew set out to make a pretty classic “Halloween haunted house” horror movie, but when they began shooting, the chemistry between Benthem and the leading man, Scottish actor Jamie Craib, was so strong that they began to emphasize the romantic elements of the story. So while the film does have a lot of horror elements, they have been calling it a “haunted romance.”

Greenberg is also producing a documentary, “I Am Hungry: The Many Faces of Food Insecurity in Philadelphia,” which should be finished sometime next year. He also has a book publishing deal, and his first draft was due towards the end of June. “I had been researching and doing interviews for a year, but now I had to hunker down and write the book in about six weeks,” he said. “It is called ‘Screenwriting For Micro-Budget Films.’”

One film by Greenberg, “Stomping Ground,” won raves at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival in 2014. It was distributed through Amazon for a few years and wound up getting picked up for distribution by a well-respected “boutique” distributor, Breaking Glass Pictures. “That association felt particularly nice because the president of Breaking Glass was one of the owners of TLA Video, where I worked for a long time in Chestnut Hill,” Greenberg said.

He also made a film called “Prison Trump: The Don of Cell Block B” that was released late last year and is currently streaming on Amazon, Apple TV+ and Roku.

“I cannot make a living making these films,” Greenberg admitted. “I facetiously call myself ‘the minimum-wage screenwriter,’ but it is pretty accurate. The hope is always that one of these films might do well, get some attention and lead to some better-paying opportunities, but it has been a long, long haul, and I am getting kind of old to still be waiting for my big break. That said, I don’t think I would love it any less if someone wanted to pay me a decent wage for doing what I do.”

For more information, visit davidjgreenberg.com. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.