William J. Stribling has seen “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert 22 times and counting. Perhaps less importantly, he works in Los Angeles as a director and screenwriter.

His latest film, en la sala, is an intimate live concert film with the Panamanian rock band Making Movies. It premiered on PBS in March 2024. His feature The Mirror Game had its world premiere at Cinequest in 2022 and is now streaming. His fourth feature, CHLOE! (working title), is slated for production in 2026.

He directed the award-winning films Bear with Us, Lies I Told My Little Sister, Down in Flames: The True Story of Tony “Volcano” Valenci, Beyond Belief and The Speed of Time, all of which had successful festival runs. Bear with Us, starring Cheyenne Jackson and Christy Carlson Romano, spent a year winning awards on the festival circuit before being distributed by Comedy Dynamics. Lies I Told My Little Sister, his first feature, was a Geena Davis Selection at the inaugural Bentonville Film Festival and was released by ARC Entertainment.

For Shipwrecked Comedy, he directed the Streamy-nominated series Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party and Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story, which won Best Production at Buffer Festival in Toronto before premiering on YouTube in August 2022. In 2026, he directed the sold-out world premiere of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party: The Musical at the Garry Marshall Theatre. For Adaptive Studios, he co-created and directed the comedy/sci-fi series Stellar People, starring Rory Albanese. The Speed of Time, starring John Hennigan and Sean Marquette, was released on DUST in 2020. He is also the primary music video director for Making Movies.

He wrote the video game Ledgerbound with his frequent collaborator Russ Nickel, lead writer of Helldivers 2. The game was released to critical and audience acclaim, and its voice cast includes Ben Starr and Matt Mercer.

He has taught screenwriting since 2019 at Chapman University’s Dodge College, ranked the #4 film school in the US by The Hollywood Reporter, and works with private screenwriting clients. He holds a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in Film & TV Production and Dramatic Literature, and a master’s in screenwriting from Chapman. He credits any success to the clown camp he attended as a kid.