WrittenBy F E B R UA RY | M A R C H 2 0 1 7 THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST © w w w . w r i t t e n b y . c o m AWARD NOMINEES & HONOREES Pamela Adlon Richard Curtis Alex Gibney Eric Heisserer Joshua & Michael Jacobs Theodore Melfi Trevor Noah Allison Schroeder Oliver Stone Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick Starry, Starry Night Barry Jenkins under a full Moonlight. LIONSGATE THANKS THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA AND CONGRATULATES DAMIEN CHAZELLE NOMINEE - ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY WrittenBy THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 VOL. 21 ISSUE 2 © COLUMNS 6 AWARDS SEASON BY LISA ROSEN How many writers does it take to … ? 12 TOOLS BY LOUISE FARR Pamela Adlon’s seen Better Things. 20 LOCATION, LOCATION BY PETER HANSON Keeping a timeline to Eric Heisserer and Arrival . DEPARTMENTS 2 FADE IN 4 LETTERS WEB EXTRA! A Purple Heart writer dies on the battlefield fighting for our country, then is blacklisted posthumously by vindictive politicans. The story of a real patriot whose name honors a Writers Guild Award. Only online at writtenby.com. Cover portrait: Tom Keller 2017Writers Guild Awards 24 BOY MEETS GIRL BY JACQUELINE PRIMO Father and son bond as first-time co-writers. 30 DANCING IN SERIOUS MOONLIGHT BY ERNEST HARDY Barry Jenkins makes a heartbreaker. 38 SPACE ODYSSEY BY LOUISE FARR Orbiting Hidden Figures with Allison Schroeder. 42 SPACE RACE BY PETER HANSON No more fear of heights for Theodore Melfi. 46 MAKING COMEDY GREAT AGAIN BY PAUL BROWNFIELD Trevor Noah exposes America’s first African President. 54 THE REAL SUPERHEROES HERE BY LISA ROSEN Learning to swim in Deadpool. 62 THE AWARDS SHOW Nominees & Honorees THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST FADE ININ FADE Written By © “I’d like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect. I think I’d rather win, for example, a Writers Guild Award more than almost anything on Earth. And the few nominations I’ve had with the Guild, and the few awards I’ve had from the Guild, represented to me a far more legitimate concrete achievement than anything.” —Rod Serling, his last interview, 1975 Then, as now, Rod Serling is a legend. Like an apparition, the handsome writer continues to narrate television reruns of his The Twilight Zone. He died, age 50, a few months after that interview, but the excerpt above remains a testament to the man’s professional identity. It’s the perfect statement to open a Written By celebrating the 2017 Writers Guild Awards nominees. Why is Serling’s statement still relevant some 42 years later? Nothing has changed. Writers seek the identical “source of respect.” Because you are The Source. Without you, nothing’s possible in the business. And writers remain the best judge of a colleague’s work. You know the tricks of the trade and aren’t fooled by smoke and mirrors. To be nominated remains a “legitimate concrete achievement,” as Serling put it. No public relations lobbying, no gift bags, no secret handshakes, no celebrity appearances, no escort services. Nothing succeeds except superlative writing. Only that earns a writer’s vote. Your vote. Turn to page 24. Meet Michael and Joshua Jacobs, nominated in the Children’s Script—Episodic and Specials category. You’re looking at two generations. One’s young, early 20s; the other’s approximately… well, you can find biographical details in Jacqueline Primo’s charming story. Suffice it to say, these two co-wrote an episode of Girl Meets World, which Michael created three years ago for Disney Channel. It’s Joshua’s first script; it’s his father’s… oh, so many scripts, too many to count. Did I forget to mention these co-writers also happen to be father and son? “I realized writing this together would be a wonderful experience for us,” Michael says, “and then the kid gets nominated for a Writers Guild Award. I never got nominated for any of that. I’ve been doing this for 30 years—nothing.” “The whole thing is surreal,” admits his son and co-writer. “I think the icing on the cake of everything is that the Writers Guild nominated Girl Meets World three seasons in a row,” Michael believes. “They nominated Matt [Nelson] for ‘Girl Meets 1961’. They nominated Mark Blutman for ‘Girl Meets I am Farkle’. And they nominated Josh and me for a kids’ show about the exploration of democracy versus communism, and about how friends protect friends. We lost the first year, we lost the second year, and…” This year? Joshua is already showing symptoms of Serling: “It’s an incredible honor and to be there with him is the real joy of it. Whether or not it’s a win or a loss, it’s a win.” Michael takes the cue from his son: “Being writers, I don’t think there’s a finer honor than having other writers say, This is good work.” – Richard Stayton, Editor in Chief 2 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 WGAW OFFICERS Howard A. Rodman President Vice President David A. Goodman Secretary-Treasurer Aaron Mendelsohn WGAW BOARD OF DIRECTORS Mara Brock Akil, Scott Alexander, Andrea Berloff, Marjorie David, Carleton Eastlake, Jonathan Fernandez, Katherine Fugate, Chip Johannessen, Michael Oates Palmer, Zak Penn, Luvh Rakhe, Billy Ray, Ari B. Rubin, Shawn Ryan, Meredith Stiehm, Patric M. Verrone EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR GENERAL COUNSEL David Young Tony Segall WGAW PHONE INFORMATION The Guild (All Departments) 323.951.4000 800.548.4532 FAX 323.782.4800 WEBSITE: WWW.WGA.ORG WGAW DEPARTMENTS 323.951.4000 Agency 323.782.4502 Awards & Elections Communications Contracts 323.782.4501 Creative Rights Credits Dues 323.782.4569 323.782.4574 323.782.4741 323.782.4528 323. 782.4531 Diversity 323. 782.4589 323. 951.4000 Executive Offices Finance 323. 782.4637 Foreign Levies Foundation 323. 782.4725 323.782.4692 Guild Screenings 323.782.4508 Human Resources Legal Services Library 323.782.4615 323.782.4521 323. 782.4544 Member Services Membership 323.782.4520 Operations Organizing 323. 782.4567 323.782.4532 323.782.4511 Politics & Public Policy Registration Residuals 323.782.4700 Signatories Theater 323.782.4698 323.782.4500 323.782.4514 323.782.4525 Web Site 323.782.4574 Written By 323.782.4510 WriteNow e-newsletter 323.782.4792 Pension & Health 818.846.1015 800.227.7863 WritersCare Info. 800.890-0288 Written By welcomes your comments. Send letters to: 7000 W. Third St., L.A., CA 90048 Or E-mail us at writtenby@wga.org HIDEEN FIGURES WrittenBy one of the best f 2016.” t Ross has erbly.” D E C E M B E R | JA N UA RY 2 0 1 7 THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST ized vision with heart.” com THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST LETTERS Written By © Write to Work Thanks for the Tools column, “Book to Film? No, Film to Book.” The joke used to be that every grocery clerk was writing a screenplay, but now that it’s so easy to self-publish, everyone who can spell their name is writing a book. While all novelists recognize that adapting their story to script form requires specific skills, it’s refreshing to read Joyce Gittlin and Janet B. Fattal’s admission that expanding a screenplay into a novel has its own challenges. The combination of structure and prose techniques has a learning curve that is rarely appreciated beyond the bestseller list. Thanks for revealing both the struggle and the triumph of this journey. Welcome to the ranks of Published and Produced! © w w w . w r i t t e n b y . c o m SIGHT SEEKERS Matt & Ross Duffer Joyce Gittlin Janet B. Fattal Paul Laverty Mike Mills PUBLICATION STAFF Editor in Chief Richard Stayton Creative Director Ron S. Tammariello Editorial Assistant Jacqueline Primo Copy Editor Harley Lond Richard Price Taylor Sheridan Night Vision Contributing Editors Sandra Berg, Paul Brownfield, Louise Farr, David Gritten, Joanne Lammers, Mark Lee, Susan Littwin, Lisa Rosen Steven Zaillian in the dark ARTWORK © 2016 BLEECKER STREET MEDIA LLC. © 2016 CAPTAIN FANTASTIC PRODUCTIONS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. WHEN PHYLLIS NAGY MET CAROL **WB PG001 COVER DEC_JAN (DARK COLOR).indd 3 PAGE 1 OF 1 November 16, 2016 2:03 PM PST CF_WrittenBy_12-19_2F 1/27/17 7:50 PM Leslie Lehr, Novel Consultant for Truby’s Writers Studio “Goldie Kane” was so excited when our new copy of Written By arrived. She purred, smiled, and immediately laid down and went to sleep. I tried to read the lovely letter to the editor that you put in the magazine—but Goldie went off to dreamland. The publicity hasn’t gone to her head, although William Morris, ICM, and CMA have called about representing her. I told them all that you and Written By handle her exclusively. Blackie Kane, her sister, is a bit more butch and prefers to sleep on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue but what are you going to do with daughters? Again many thanks for you kindnesses, Arnold Kane Editor’s Note: “Goldie Kane” is a 2-year-old “daughter cat.” Written By does not represent her. E-MAIL writtenbyw@wga.org ADVERTISING REPRESENTATION Kymber Allen, Advertising Sales 7000 W. Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048 E-MAIL kymberallen@wga.org TEL o: 323.285.0080 c: 310.467.0705 FAX 323.782.4802 E-mail letters to writtenby@wga.org. Letters related to Written By articles will be published, space permitting. Letters may be edited for clarity and length, and the editor will select representative content. Opinions expressed in letters to the editor are not necssarily those of the WGAW. BY FEBRUARY Peter Barsocchini, Steve Chivers, F.X. Feeney, Georgia Jeffries, Peter Lefcourt (chair), Glen Mazzara, Margaret Nagle, Margaret Oberman, Rosanne Welch WRITTEN BY (ISSN 1092-468X) is published bimonthly (January, February/March, April/May, Summer (June/July/ August), September/October, November/December) by the Writers Guild of America, West, 7000 W. Third St., Los Angeles, CA 90048-4329. Copyright ©2016 by the Writers Guild of America, West. Subscriptions: Annual nonmember subscriptions to WRITTEN BY: $50. Student rate: $30 with a copy of a valid student identification card. Single copies: $10 each. mailing offices. I appreciated Richard Stayton’s article on August Wilson. I have seen his plays on stage, including “Fences” with James Earl Jones and “The Piano Lesson,” and was always moved and uplifted with that genius’ way of humanizing the conflicting issues in our damaged society. When I went to see the movie Fences, I approached it with concern, understanding that film is a visual medium and August Wilson’s art is totally dependent on words and words and more brilliantly revealing words. I was surprised and delighted that Mr. Wilson’s words were not adapted out of existence. The Production—from the writing, acting, directing—did great service to one of America’s great writers, August Wilson. And like a few movies I see once a year, including The Godfather, Fences joins an illustrious group. Rick Edelstein WRITTEN TEL 323.782.4522; FAX 323.782.4802 Periodicals Postage Paid at Los Angeles, CA and at additional Words, Words, Words W G AW 7000 W. Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048 EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE Kat PHaN 4 • Editorial Offices | MARCH 2017 Postmaster: Send address changes to WRITTEN BY, the Writers Guild of America, West, 7000 W. Third St., Los Angeles, CA 90048-4329. Advertising Policy: Readers should not assume that any products or services advertised in WRITTEN BY are endorsed by the WGAW. Although the Editorial Advisory Board adheres to standard industry practice in requiring advertisers to be “truthful and forthright,” there is no extensive screening process by either WRITTEN BY or the WGAW. Editorial Policy: WRITTEN BY actively seeks material from Guild members and other writers. Submissions are subject to editing for length, style and content. Letters are subject to editing for length without correspondent approval. The content of letters is subject to review. Not all letters are published. Inquiries about column writing should be directed to WRITTENBY@WGA.ORG The WGAW neither implicitly nor explicitly endorses opinions or attitudes expressed in WRITTEN BY. AWARDS SEASON Written by Lisa Rosen Dispatches From the Nominees WRITERS HAVE A VERY SPECIAL PLACE IN AWARDS SEASON. W hen last we met, a few screenwriters had just entered the awards fray, recounting their startinggate adventures. Now, into the final month of their Odyssean journey, more contenders are reporting back with their highs and lows. But first, a few words from awardsseasoned pro Meg LeFauve, such as: “Have a great press agent who has worked for writers during awards season. It’s a special skill. They will know how to make people care that you are there.” After all, this isn’t only work for the movie, this is work for more work. Make the most of it, she advises. “Mostly, no press cares about the writer at the screening/event. Surprise. Go anyway! It’s fun! And the few reporters who do care will ask you great questions. Stay after each screening and talk to everyone who wants to meet you. They always have great energy, and it’s good karma to give back.” Eric Heisserer adapted a short story by Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” into the feature Arrival. “I have found people who have seen the film several times and [read] at least one draft of my script, and will ask me very specific questions about the structure or about 6 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | some subtextual concepts.” Heisserer had a guest approach him after a WGA screening and ask, “So did you talk to aliens for this?” She wasn’t kidding. “She gave me a business card so I could talk to a guru who’s had several close encounters with real-life aliens,” he recalls. “I realized that if I continued down that conversation, it would get creepier and creepier, so my lie to cut it off was, ‘Yes, I did have to consult with them, but I promised not to talk about it, so that’s all I can say.’ She nodded to me wisely, and said, ‘Oh, it’s those guys.’ I’m like, What? What are you talking about? According to her, there are three different races that have been in contact with humans.” At least they didn’t give notes. Yet. This may be Heisserer’s first tour, but he’s already squirreled away some sound tips. “I’ve stolen a piece of directing advice from writer Billy Ray: On very long junket days, especially when travel is required, and you’re doing a lot of walking around, bring an extra pair of socks and change into them after lunch; you’ll get a second wind.” NOT A MAGIC CARPET If any of that walking is on a red car- MARCH 2017 pet, “stop, take a breath, and take it in,” LeFauve says. “See it, feel it, be there. Because it’s awesome, but in the hurried rush you can miss it. Then step out and smile.” Robert Schenkkan, who wrote Hacksaw Ridge with Andrew Knight, and has previously been to the circus for 2002’s The Quiet American, has also been out this year for the HBO movie All the Way. Schenkkan enjoys the press interviews, “but the clusterfuck of a red carpet is always where the writer is reminded of his or her place in the food chain. You are absolutely the most important person in the universe, until anybody else steps on the red carpet— then you’re just chopped liver. You can see the heads snap and the cameras snap, and whoever you’re talking to, their eyes are immediately doing the Hollywood over-your-shoulder shuffle. This is something one is used to, but it’s a humbling experience, always.” LeFauve’s solution: “Go early. Press will actually care that you, a writer, are there. But once Brie Larson shows up, forget it.” For Heisserer, the camaraderie with other writers has been the best reward. “This is a big deal for some of us, es- STRANGER THINGS Screenplay by ERIC HEISSERER Based on the Story “Story of Your Life” Written by TED CHIANG pecially the feature writers who are all in our caves like hermits most of the time,” Heisserer says. “The greatest victory may not be if I take home a statue, but if I get to shake hands and have a coffee with Taylor Sheridan. I’m hoping it’ll happen; I am absolutely using Written By to flirt with another writer right now.” Both Sheridan and Heisserer are nominated for WGA Awards, but in separate categories—Sheridan for original screenplay (Hell or High Water) and Heisserer for adapted. Hopefully now they’ll have a meet-cute at the Guild ceremony. The chance to meet other writers has been Sully screenwriter Todd Komarnicki’s favorite aspect as well. He attended the Whistler Film Festival as one of Variety’s Ten Screenwriters to Watch, and met other writers there. “It’s such a lonely job,” he says. “I don’t talk to a lot of other screenwriters, so being up close with their process, loving their films, and watching how they tell stories, and how it moves them, and why they tell stories, that’s been a huge gift. We have new friendships blossoming left and right out of mutual respect and appreciation.” The whole experience has been made even sweeter because Komarnicki became a Writer to Watch after working full-time for 29 years. “I told the guy, I think they chose me just because I move so much more slowly now, I’m easier to watch. If you’re going to track an antelope, go for the slowest one.” At 51, he feels much more grounded than if he’d entered the heady awards fray as a younger man. “I’m able to appreciate it for just the sweetness of it, the wonder of it; so I feel very relaxed and giddy and am enjoying all these 8 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | Eric Heisserer had a guest approach him after a WGA screening of Arrival. “So did you talk to aliens for this?” she asked, seriously. Heisserer thought fast: “I realized that if I continued down that conversation, it would get creepier and creepier, so my lie to cut it off was, ‘Yes, I did have to consult with them, but I promised not to talk about it, so that’s all I can say.’” moments. When you’re three feet away from Tom Hanks grabbing Annette Bening as she walks by our table, and they whip into a big-band-era dance number that would have fit in La La Land, and you see Warren Beatty nearby watching and clapping appreciatively, well okay, now you’re among the legends.” Schenkkan experienced a surreal moment at the Venice Film Festival for the Hacksaw Ridge premiere. “It was the first time I’d seen the movie completely put together and scored,” he remembers. “That’s a tough crowd at the Lido; they don’t give it up easily.” He was standing in the back of the theater with director Mel Gibson and star Andrew Garfield. “At the end of the movie, the audience stood up, turned around so they could face us, and applauded for 10 minutes— or as I like to say, one minute for every year I spent on this project. That was certainly a highlight.” SHALLOW DIVE Thankfully, there are always other moments to bring one back to earth— like in the gifting salons, where there is a variety of vendors offering everything from fine jewelry to homemade brownies. “You have to make an appointment, and then you’re assigned a guide who walks you through this bizarre bazaar of products and services,” Schenkkan explains. “These things are really kind of entertaining in their own way. There’s a whole formality to it. But MARCH 2017 again, there’s the reminder of where you are in the food chain, particularly as a writer.” Schenkkan dredges up a painful memory. “Many years ago when I did this, there was a resort island package. I’m a scuba diver, so I’m always interested in that.” But sadly, the resort wasn’t interested in him, as he learned during his gifting appointment. “They have to artfully, discreetly explain that while they would love to gift you with this, actually they have to reserve it for somebody more important than you. It’s a little weird. It would be like sitting on Santa’s lap, and Santa saying, ‘Well, you have been a very good boy this year, but unfortunately the model of the Death Star is only reserved for our high-end kids.’” For those who make it to the second most important awards ceremony of the year—the Oscars™—LeFauve has plenty of recommendations, specifically for female nominees. “When buying a dress, think about [the wait time] sitting in a car. On the drive there, you will be stressed at every crease; after the ceremony, you will spill champagne on it and not care.” When considering buying a dress with a train, she adds that “people will step on it all night, and you might fall. Do it anyway. A dress with a train, when does that happen?” It’s humbling, exalting, and exhausting, this months-long celebration of your work that leaves you no time to work. “Don’t plan on doing any writing if you are in a full awards push,” LeFauve emphasizes. “Let it go, don’t feel guilty. This is your job right now. And it’s a rare, lovely time. Enjoy.” Focus Features salutes the Writers Guild of America and proudly congratulates Jeff Nichols on his Writers Guild Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay © 2016 BIG BEACH, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ARTWORK: © 2016 FOCUS FEATURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THANK YOU TO THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR WRITERS GUILD AWARDS NOMINEES DRAMA SERIES Written by Paul Dichter, Justin Doble, The Duffer Brothers, Karl Gajdusek, Jessica Mecklenburg, Jessie Nickson-Lopez, Alison Tatlock COMEDY SERIES Written by Emily Altman, Robert Carlock, Azie Mira Dungey, Tina Fey, Lauren Gurganous, Sam Means, Dylan Morgan, Marlena Rodriguez, Dan Rubin, Meredith Scardino, Josh Siegal, Allison Silverman, Leila Strachan FOR YOUR RECOGNITION. NEW SERIES Written by Paul Dichter, Justin Doble, The Duffer Brothers, Karl Gajdusek, Jessica Mecklenburg, Jessie Nickson-Lopez, Alison Tatlock ANIMATION “Fish Out of Water” - Written by Elijah Aron & Jordan Young “Stop the Presses” - Written by Joe Lawson EPISODIC COMEDY “Kimmy Finds Her Mom!” - Written by Tina Fey & Sam Means “Kimmy Goes on a Playdate!” - Written by Robert Carlock TOOLS Written by Louise Farr PAMELA ADLON SAYS LIFE IS WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU WHEN YOU’RE TOO BUSY TO MAKE ANY OTHER PLANS. LUCKY HER. you will tell.’” A week later, at the upcharming critics, as did Better Things, ost writers would have taken fronts, Landgraf announced he was which earned a 2017 WGA Award a nosedive after hearing John picking up Better Things. “My network New Series nomination for Adlon, Landgraf’s comments. Not C.K., Cindy Chupack, and Pamela Adlon. The FX presiGina Fattore. dent had been on the road testBack in 2013, C.K., Adlon, and Vernon Chatman How did the pilot, directed screening the Better Things pilot, by C.K., go from “harrowing” created by Adlon and Louis won the Guild’s Comedy Series award for to an audience-, critic-, and FXC.K. The half-hour comedy, pleaser? “Louis is an amazing about a single mother of three Louie. And when she and C.K. won again editor,” says Adlon, “and he redaughters, featured a character based on (and played by) Adlon cut the pilot after I had shot my in 2015, Adlon told the West Coast awards herself—a 50-ish actress living in season.” Los Angeles. This is how C.K. recut it: A Landgraf loved the script. But prolonged sequence in which audience: “We’re always, like, nobody’s at FX test screenings, audiences Max (Sam’s oldest daughter, declared the network’s first complayed by Mikey Madison) gonna like it. It’s too surreal.” screams at her mother did seem edy to star a woman “relentless” harrowing, so he wove in snipand “harrowing.” Adlon’s reaction? “I thought that pets from a lighter audition scene was pretty great.” Her inspiration for with Sam’s acting rivals (played by the pilot was All That Jazz and its DexeConstance Zimmer and Julie Bowen). C.K. also reintroduced an end segment drine-stoked, dying choreographer. “Joe with actress Sam losing an on-set atGideon, every day, he wakes up and he takes speed, and he puts in the eye tempt to “dial down a tiny bit” her oral drops, and he looks in the mirror, and sex scene. “Oh, you mean the funny he says, ‘Show time, folks!’” says Adlon, part?” her showrunner says. (Somewhose gravelly voice and strength of thing similar had happened to Adlon personality belie her five-foot stature. during her seven-season stint playing “A relentless, never-ending cycle. That’s smut-mouthed pubes-waxer Marcy what I wanted.” Runkle on Californication.) Adlon has three daughters herself, so her series takes on the hamster wheel IT HURTS TO LAUGH of soccer snacks, stray socks, and occaBack in 2013, C.K., Adlon, and Vernon Chatman won the Guild’s Comedy sional breakthrough triumphs of single Series award for Louie. And when she motherhood. It also tackles the disand C.K. won again in 2015, Adlon heartening grind of show business for really started to see this character, and told the West Coast awards audience: an actress over 40 in LA, a town where all these pieces, coming together,” says “We’re always, like, nobody’s gonna like Adlon judges a woman’s expiration age Adlon. “But then, when they were seeit. It’s too surreal.” to be 25. But Better Things is real. And funny Adlon will never forget the posting how the season was unfolding, they as it is, it’s not quite a comedy, either, pilot conversation with Landgraf. “He were saying maybe we could do someor even a dramedy. Maybe it’s a tragisaid to me, ‘This is essentially your thing that’s a little less intense.” dime. I want you to tell me where you Adlon and C.K. pulled it off. Their comedy, connecting through fearless see this show going, and what stories flawed heroine, Sam Fox, ended up writing and Adlon’s credibility as a per12 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 Paramount Pictures thanks the Writers Guild of America for recognizing the work of the late August Wilson. HIS WORDS LIVE DIRECTED BY DENZEL WASHINGTON WRITTEN BY AUGUST WILSON former. And she has wisely surrounded herself with exceptional young actors: in addition to Madison as 16-year-old daughter Max, there’s Hannah Alligood as Frankie, 12, and Olivia Edward as 6-year-old Duke. A surprise casting is puckish English actress Celia Imrie (Adlon’s own mother is British). Imrie portrays Sam’s semi-abused mom, Phyllis, with brittle comic force. “Anything I put into her mouth she just spins into gold,” Adlon says about Imrie, the Laurence Olivier Award-winner playing older than her years. “I’m like, how do I get a little old fluff lady to be my mom, and also a formidable scary presence? Celia’sJANET both.” And so Better Things adds up to a clever, moving, and amusing take on three generations of women who, despite all their quirks, feel more real than previous TV characters. Anyone in the audience who can’t identify with Sam’s endless juggling between career, damp towels, ungrateful kids, and an aging parent, will still recognize an exhausted homemaker crawling upstairs on all fours, too wiped out after getting everyone off to school to engage in planned sexting with her distant, probably married, lover. But life gets serious beneath the humor. “Hide things from me, please,” Sam begs Max in the pilot, only to have denial turn on her in the season’s final episode, when her oldest daughter forces her to confront the question of middle child Frankie’s gender. (An acting exercise could be based on the infinite inflections—ranging from disdainful, and disbelieving, to anguished—that Madison, as Max, can bestow on the word “mom.”) 14 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | With a nod to her father, Adlon always kept a journal and jotted down ideas that he called “brain bits.” Segall died more than 20 years ago, but Adlon still has a board he kept on his office wall with his ideas pinned to it. It wasn’t until 2006 that she landed a story credit on Lucky Louie, but it was on Louie that her serious collaboration with C.K. began. Adlon explains the turnaround: “Sam is this very savvy, cool mom who thinks she knows everything, and then her daughter’s looking at her like, You idiot. You don’t see what’s right in front of your face. That was very meaningful to Louis and me, and the fact that it was able to translate was just a huge victory.” feelings: “I’m actually fine that I’m in a constant state of agitation.” With a nod to her father, Adlon always kept a journal and jotted down ideas that he called “brain bits.” Segall died more than 20 years ago, but Adlon still has a board he kept on his office wall JOYCE ME, ME, ME Daughter of the late writer Don Segall (The Jeffersons, Who’s the Boss?, The Love Boat), Adlon bloomed early, appearing in Little Darlings and Grease 2 at 16, then playing the boyish Kelly Affinado in the girls’ school sitcom, The Facts of Life. For years, the quirky voices she created, often for little boys, gave Adlon a spectacular career in animation, and a 2002 Outstanding VoiceOver Performance Emmy for her work on King of the Hill. Cable viewers came to love her fearlessness playing C.K.’s blunt-spoken wife on Lucky Louie. And later yet, on the groundbreaking Louie, she was his neurotic, occasional girlfriend, Pamela. Perhaps the best ever scene of unrequited love, written and performed by Adlon and C.K., happened on the “Pamela, Part 3,” episode, in which Louie declares his MARCH 2017 with his ideas pinned to it. It wasn’t until 2006 that she landed a story credit on Lucky Louie, but it was on Louie that her serious collaboration with C.K. began. The pair’s creative chemistry is undeniable. “Louis and I have a kind of language that’s very different, and unique to us,” Adlon says. After snagging his FX production deal in December 2013, C.K. pitched an Adlon show to Landgraf. But Adlon, still playing Marcy on Californication, and writing, producing, and appearing on Louie, was cautious. “I was like, Oh, my God. I have three daughters that I’m raising on my own. When can I get to this? Then Louis was, like, ‘Okay, time’s tickin’. Let’s get going.’ ” She mulled over concepts, but couldn’t get excited. “Because it was about me,” she says. “It was difficult for FOCUS FEATURES SALUTES THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA AND PROUDLY CONGRATULATES TOM FORD ON HIS WRITERS GUILD AWARD NOMINATION FOR BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY © 2016 FADE TO BLACK PRODUCTIONS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ARTWORK: © 2016 FOCUS FEATURES LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. For more on this film, go to www.FocusFeaturesGuilds2016.com “Louis told me to just keep writing, and not think about story right now. Just keep going with situations, because it’s a very fractured existence when you’re a single mom. I always thought that if I had a tagline for my life, or my series, it would be ‘life is what happens to you when you’re too busy to make any other plans.’” me to find a voice for myself, because I’ve played so many different characters for so many years, including animation. It’s very easy to embody different things, and say, What is this squirrel? Or, What is this space enema? Then to be actually playing a version of myself was tricky.” Adlon tried to create a lead who was completely different from herself. But that didn’t work, either. “I realized, at the end of the day, the raw bones of my life was the story I wanted to tell. There came the time when I thought I needed to start writing and culling all the years of material that I inadvertently had [gathered].” With C.K. working in New York and Adlon in LA, they emailed ideas to each other with a skull-and-crossbones in the subject line, indicating “do not open” until they could read together on Skype or Facebook. Chupack and Fattore each wrote an episode, but there was no literal writers’ room. In the past, Adlon had given C.K. acting pointers. Now he advised her. “I would try to write to story, and then I would get caught up,” Adlon remembers. “Louis told me to just keep writing, and not think about story right now. Just keep going with situations, because it’s a very fractured existence when you’re a single mom. I always thought that if I had a tagline for my life, or my series, it would be ‘life is what happens to you when you’re too busy to make any other plans,’ you know. That’s just the way it is.” And so in Better Things, stories happen in bits and pieces: vignettes with no obvious storylines, punch lines, or transitions, but more free-form odes to a scatty kind of motherhood with themes that, instead of nudging the audience, 16 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | emerge through subtext. There might be an image of Sam hauling a cooler to soccer practice on a sweltering day, or thumping a heavy suitcase downstairs while a lazy teen ignores a request for help. “I love seeing things visually like that, and not being told when to react,” says Adlon. “Letting people settle into the story that’s unfolding.” Moments of Sam’s selfishness are left hanging: standing her mother up over a promised birthday trip; being too busy to acknowledge middle child Frankie’s pleas to not be ignored. Yet there are others of warmth and love: Sam and the younger girls giving up candy to stay home on Halloween and support a heartbroken Max. That “Scary Fun” episode was the hardest for Adlon to write. It put her not at odds with C.K., she says, but disagreeing with him when he found it scattered. He rewrote it, only to have her stick to her original, while still in love with his ending. “Not going trick-or-treating after all was a beautiful end sequence that Louis felt strongly about. He was writing out that last beat, and he was crying when he was writing it, and it turned out to be my favorite thing,” she says. SAFETY NET Showrunning, as well as writing and starring in Better Things, and directing two episodes, led to a “massive” Season One learning curve, Adlon admits. “What I figured out during this whole process is that people feel safe when somebody can make a decision and say, ‘It doesn’t have to be this complicated. It doesn’t have to be a committee of 50 people on an email chain.’” With authenticity crucial to Adlon, MARCH 2017 she brought art from her own home and items from her daughters’ rooms into the Altadena house where Better Things shoots. She chose her own kids’ clothing, too, for her TV daughters to wear. “I said to my costume supervisor, ‘I don’t want the girls to wear anything new. I want you to shop at only thrift stores, and vintage stores.’ And for me, I just bring in a lot of my own clothes.” In the pilot she even wore a bulky green cardigan that belonged to her father. “It’s fun that I was able to do that, because it’s my shit.” Being firm about incorporating fragments of her own life into that of her fictional family doesn’t mean Adlon is rigid. The opposite is true: her writing method includes staying fluid. “The way that I learned when Louis and I were collaborating for years, on Louie and before Louie, it’s like you can have a whole season of scripts locked and ready to go, and then you walk out on the street, and you take your daughter to soccer, and you realize, Oh my God, I have to tell the story of this thing that happened to me today.” Since she doesn’t want to give away anything too personal, Adlon won’t elaborate on what might have happened to shift her focus during the season. “You just throw out three scripts,” she explains, “because something new happened that’s way more inspiring to you than something you may have come up with and executed.” At times like that, Adlon thinks, writing can be awesome. “Sometimes it’s very awesome. And sometimes it’s the most painful thing in the world. I believe it’s like working out. If you’re exercising, and you’re in a regimen, and you do it consistently, you’re not going, ‘Come on. Get going!’ But if you let it go for a long period of time, it’s almost impossible to get started. It’s painful. It’s physically painful. And you’ve got to just sit there and work through the pain. My dad used to always say that if you write one sentence every day, at least a sentence, you’ve written something. But don’t let a day go by without writing.” WE’VE GOT FILM COVERED. Abbas Kiarostami Honored by Writers Guild of America West Tune in to @PBSSocal tonight at 7PM for an all new #ActorsOnActors episode starring @tomHanks, @violadavis, Matthew @McConaughey and more! 27K Likes 725 Comments 245K Views Read. Watch. Listen. Share. FOLLOW US / VARIETY LOCATION, LOCATION Written by Peter Hanson DEPARTURE HOW ERIC HEISSERER CHANGED COURSE TO ARRIVAL I n the cerebral sci-fi film Arrival, the US government recruits a linguist named Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, to translate messages from alien visitors. What ensues is not only a thriller but also a meditation on the profound question of whether we would live our lives the same way with the gift—or burden—of awareness about our future. Based on “Story of Your Life,” a short story by Ted Chiang, Arrival was adapted by Eric Heisserer, who notched his first credit with the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and has worked consistently in genre films ever since. Heisserer, who is also an executive producer on Arrival, discovered the source material a decade ago, and estimates that he wrote nearly 100 drafts. “If I went and found the actual number,” he says, “I’d have to have my therapist on speed-dial.” The story unfolds in parallel timelines, with the nature of the connection between the timelines kept secret until the ending. Moreover, two principal characters—the alien visitors—communicate via complex visual patterns, so most of the film depicts the heroine’s attempts to decipher code. Heisserer counts the moment when Louise first diagrams an alien sentence as his most significant narrative contribution. “The biggest craft challenge for me was integrating the time-fugue moments, the scenes between Louise and [her daughter] Hannah, with the present-day storyline,” Heisserer says. “Unlike the short story, which doesn’t need to be anchored in transitions, it was vital in the film for us to understand why and when these things were happening to Louise. That was where I did the biggest amount of heavy lifting, to make sure the moments felt justified and contextually right.” That Heisserer uses words like “logarithmic” to describe the progression of story events in Arrival reveals how deeply the scientific process informed his work. “I felt like the best way to respect the material was to apply some of those same principles to the writing,” he says. “When I got stuck and I needed inspiration, I wouldn’t go and watch Contact or Close Encounters; I would watch documentaries [about scientists]. The more I filled my head with the documentarian’s approach, the better the writing became. Having read and re-read Ted’s source material also helped. It allowed me to feel comfortable talking about things like Fermat’s principle of least time. The only danger was to prevent my script from feeling like a TED Talk manuscript.” Connecting with emotions was key. Reading Chiang’s story for the first time “uplifted me and broke my heart at the same time,” Heisserer says, “so I thought, ‘God, can I find a way to lift this feeling and transplant it into a film?’” Originally, Heisserer connected to the short story’s perspective on motherhood, but living with the material for so long has revealed other dimensions. “A new theme has seized me by the heart and the throat, which is how crucial it is we get better at communication,” he says. “We’re in an age where it’s the easiest [it’s ever been] to communicate with one another from across the world—and we are fucking terrible at it. We need to fix that.” FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 21 CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR NOMINEES AT THE 2017 WRITERS GUILD AWARDS DRAMA SERIES WRITTEN BY DAVID BENIOFF, BRYAN COGMAN, DAVE HILL, D.B. WEISS EPISODIC DRAMA “THE WINDS OF WINTER” WRITTEN FOR TELEVISION BY DAVID BENIOFF & D.B. WEISS DRAMA SERIES NEW SERIES WRITTEN BY ED BRUBAKER, BRIDGET CARPENTER, DAN DIETZ KARL GAJDUSEK, HALLEY GROSS, LISA JOY KATHERINE LINGENFELTER, DOMINIC MITCHELL JONATHAN NOLAN, ROBERTO PATINO DANIEL T. THOMSEN, CHARLES YU COMEDY SERIES WRITTEN BY MEGAN AMRAM, ALEC BERG, DONICK CARY ADAM COUNTEE, JONATHAN DOTAN, MIKE JUDGE CARRIE KEMPER, JOHN LEVENSTEIN, DAN LYONS CARSON MELL, DAN O’KEEFE, CLAY TARVER, RON WEINER COMEDY SERIES WRITTEN BY RACHEL AXLER, SEAN GRAY, ALEX GREGORY PETER HUYCK, ERIC KENWARD, BILLY KIMBALL, STEVE KOREN DAVID MANDEL, JIM MARGOLIS, LEW MORTON GEORGIA PRITCHETT, WILL SMITH, ALEXIS WILKINSON LONG FORM ADAPTED WRITTEN BY RICHARD PRICE, STEVEN ZAILLIAN BASED ON THE BBC SERIES CRIMINAL JUSTICE CREATED BY PETER MOFFAT LONG FORM ORIGINAL WRITTEN BY SUSANNAH GRANT COMEDY/VARIETY (INCLUDING TALK) — SERIES WRITERS: KEVIN AVERY, TIM CARVELL, JOSH GONDELMAN, DAN GUREWITCH, GEOFF HAGGERTY JEFF MAURER, JOHN OLIVER, SCOTT SHERMAN, WILL TRACY, JILL TWISS, JULI WEINER CHILDREN’S SCRIPT — EPISODIC AND SPECIALS “MUCKO POLO, GROUCH EXPLORER” WRITTEN BY BELINDA WARD CHILDREN’S SCRIPT — LONG FORM OR SPECIAL WRITTEN BY GERI COLE & KEN SCARBOROUGH OUR WARMEST CONGRATULATIONS TO SUSANNAH GRANT, RECIPIENT OF THE PAUL SELVIN AWARD FOR CONFIRMATION THANK YOU, WGA MEMBERS, FOR OUR 11 NOMINATIONS AND FOR YOUR RECOGNITION ®, SM & ©2017 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Sesame Street® and associated characters, trademarks and design elements are owned and licensed by Sesame Workshop. All Rights Reserved. WRITTEN BY JACQUELINE PRIMO PORTRAITS BY JILLY WENDELL boy meets girl MICHAEL AND JOSHUA JACOBS FIND COMMON GROUND IN THE WRITERS’ ROOM. M ichael Jacobs can still vividly recall the inciting incident: “It was a nightmare. We were at a vacation place for a weekend away, and he said to me, ‘I have an idea for a show…’” Indeed, every showrunner-father’s worst nightmare. Jacobs sought to snuff out his son’s fantasy: “I don’t want you to have an idea for a show,” he said to Joshua Jacobs, who was barely 20 at the time and attending college at Emory University in Atlanta. “I don’t want you to be a writer, I don’t want you to think about writing. This is not what I want you to be. Go be an accountant. Go be a rabbi.” (Ironically, Joshua is considering joining a seminary.) But since high school he had been tossing around the idea for this particular episode of Girl Meets World, the Disney series his father had created three years earlier. “And so as Josh is pitching me,” remembers Michael, he had to admit to his son: “You have a great story here, because the conflicts are all over the place. Not only social, but individual conflicts.” He should know: Michael Jacobs’ other creator credits include My Two Dads (with Danielle Alexandra), Charles in Charge (with Barbara Weisberg), Where I Live (with Ehrich Van Lowe), and Dinosaurs (with Bob Young). He recognized that the pitch was authentic, emerging from Joshua’s observations while attending high school in LA. The story was based on his time volunteering on the honor board, a panel of students, teachers, and staff judging “criminal cases” of kids who transgressed the school rules. Neither father nor son knew it at the time, but this was the birth of a Writers Guild of America Award-nominated script, “Girl Meets Commonism,” written by the pair. You read that right: in the episode—the third consecutive WGA Awards nomination for the Disney Channel children’s show—the word is not commu- nism. It’s “commonism.” But like every episode of the earlier Boy Meets World series, also created by Michael, the episode tackles more than many kids’ shows would dare, and packs more wisdom into each roughly 22-minute episode than should be possible. DAD MEETS SON … HALFWAY “Now when Josh pitched this story, it was upsetting on various levels,” says Michael. “One, it was a good story: he went right to conflict—he went to personal conflict, he went to group conflict, it was a story for an ensemble show. His every instinct was right. But it wasn’t a complete story.” Michael is talking to Written By during an interview at the Guild after the announcement of the episode’s WGA Awards nomination. Father and son, dressed alike in checkered shirts (although they promised me this wasn’t arranged), sat together and dished about Girl and Boy, bouncing stories off of one another and finishing each other’s thoughts—it was difficult for this interviewer to tell which man’s eyes sparkled with a greater amount of pride for the other. “Give him the story, let him write it,” Michael continues about his response to that vacation pitch, “and then let the staff go to work on it. Which is what we do anyway. Which, when I think about it, is communist immediately, I guess …” He pauses to study his son a moment. “And that’s what I elected to do, which is to say, you have half a story. But I like your half a story. It needs help. Let me think about it.” The episode’s first scene is straight from Joshua’s honor board high school experience. “It was a judicial system,” Joshua recalls. “What I didn’t like was, I didn’t want to be a judge of humanity. I didn’t like the idea because expulsion was always a possibility. If I feel like somebody’s mad at me, I can’t stop thinking FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 25 about it. I can’t go to sleep. So to be involved in somebody’s expulsion to me was just not a possibility. But I also wanted to be fair-minded, and I understand that schools have a code.” Two students were expelled during his time on the board, with Joshua the only member objecting to their expulsions. “Everybody else was pretty much in agreement. I kept raising my hand.” In an administrator voice: “Would you please sit down, Josh!” “But we’re a school, and a school should be responsible for the growth of its students and not giving up on them.” In an administrator’s voice: “But he killed three people!” Josh again: “I know, but listen!” Michael, laughing at the performance, is obviously proud. While the students facing the honor board typically committed some small infractions, no matter the misconduct, expulsion always felt too extreme to Joshua. This opened up the floor for a wider philosophical debate between himself and the dean of the school. “I was in a philosophy class that everybody took. And we were learning Utilitarianism. So at the same time [the honor board] was happening, I was learning about sacrificing the individual for the sake of the greater good. And I never really liked Utilitarianism, because I felt, where’s the value for the individual?” Soon, Joshua was confronting the person in charge of the honor board. “We had this philosophical disagreement, one-on-ones in his office. I would say, ‘How could we not give this person another chance?’ And he would say, ‘Listen, if you’re making me choose between the individual and the community, I pick community, community, community.’ Which is what 26 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 his job was. He’s overseeing. But for me I thought: What is our ‘community’ if we don’t care enough about the individual to help them do better?” SON MEETS WRITERS’ ROOM Gradually, Michael realized that “Josh’s pitches were so good and as scripts came in, you know, my staff looked at me and said, ‘Why are you denying us this help?’ And I said, ‘Disney’s not going to put any kid of mine on staff. It’s nepotism. It’s wrong. I’m not doing it.’” Joshua’s mom came to the rescue. “Finally, it was his mother [Patti] who commanded that I put him on staff,” Michael admits. “And I said, ‘I think this is not right.’ And she said, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen?’ I said, ‘The worst thing that can happen is that he thinks this is easy.’ And the thing Patti said that made the most sense to me was, ‘Lots of his friends are going to take a year, two years, travel, gap years. Why can’t you think of this as the most extraordinary gap year? Plus, you run around every day, grabbing FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 27 Showrunner Michael Jacobs’ wife Patti convinced him to put their inexperienced son Joshua on the Girl Meets World writing staff. “The thing Patti said that made the most sense to me was, ‘Lots of his friends are going to take a year, two years, travel, gap years. Why can’t you think of this as the most extraordinary gap year? Plus, you run around every day, grabbing your chest, saying you’re having a heart attack, you’re having a hemorrhage, you’re gonna die. Why not spend your last year with your son?’” your chest, saying you’re having a heart attack, you’re having a hemorrhage, you’re gonna die. Why not spend your last year with your son?’” Really? Or a joke? Michael answers, seriously: “‘Honor Board’ [retitled ‘Commonism’] got him on the staff.” The staff wouldn’t allow Michael to treat his son any differently than the other writers. They also assured Joshua he would get the full—and sometimes brutal—writers’ room experience. “That’s something I was really indebted to,” said Joshua, who would go on to write more episodes for the show. “From day one, Matt Nelson turned to me and said, We’re going to treat you as just another writer on this staff. He happens to be your father, but we’re not going to spare you from anything. Which I always appreciated because I always felt like I was one of the team.” Co-executive producer Frank Pace remembers that “Michael expected more from his son than he would expect from other writers. He expects a lot from other writers, don’t get 28 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 me wrong, but he put a lot of weight on what Josh said. “Michael takes enormous pride in the work Josh does,” Pace continued. “And I knew he felt an enormous sense of fulfillment for he and Josh to write the episode together, and for them together to get that recognition by the Writers Guild. Michael made it happen and Josh made it pay off for Michael. It was the best decision Michael could have made, to have Josh on our staff.” Joshua was among the younger staff writers on the show, compared to the original writers of Boy, who had aged along with the characters—and actors—into adulthood. Michael recalls the start of the show. “When they announced Girl Meets World, the first thing that happened was we found out on social media that the audience had really, really appreciated Boy Meets World. And Josh would say, You have a responsibility now. Don’t screw this up. You’ve got a tiny legacy.” After all, as a boy, Joshua absorbed his father’s Boy Meets World, learning about life while watching its stories. GIRL MEETS A CLOSE With this newly realized responsibility on their shoulders and an audience of young children and teenagers loyal to the Disney Channel, as well as the adults who had been loyal to Boy Meets World, Michael got tougher on the writers when it came to stories for scripts. “I think all of the Boy Meets World fans [watched the pilot of Girl Meets World], and they were expecting a continuation, but not quite up to the realization that we had these little girls [in Girl Meets World],” Michael continues. (The main characters on Girl are 12 years old at the beginning of season one.) “I think we got an audience of over 5 million for the pilot. And we hung around 2 million. But I think the [viewers] who left went, Hey, these are little girls. Also the venue that we were on, at Disney Channel, I think the mandate is for young shows … And so the directions to the writing staff and to Josh were always, Let’s come up with storylines that will intrigue two audiences. We had the great bimodal aspect of [Boy Meets World characters] Corey and Topanga being their parents, and then we started bringing in Boy Meets World regulars. We were able to hold the balance pretty well.” As for the WGA nomination for “Girl Meets Commonism,” Michael says Joshua insisted they write the episode together. “I realized writing this together would be a wonderful experience for us. And then the kid gets nominated for a Writers Guild Award. I never got nominated for any of that. I’ve been doing this for 30 years—nothing!” Michael says with a laugh, gesturing toward his son beside him. “It’s his first script,” Michael continues. “So this experience has been so incredibly wonderful and I think, If we go back to spirituality, I don’t believe in coincidence. I think it’s magnificent that he and I were able to do something and that his experience on the staff was, and continues to be, remarkable.” “It’s a dream come true in so many ways,” Joshua adds. “I grew up watching Boy Meets World. I really was impacted by it. For a lot of people it’s a great show, but for me it was also my dad’s real advice.” Joshua turns to face an imagined audience of fans: “Sorry to break it to everybody, but he was talking to me!” He resumes: “I very much want to carve my own path and be my own person, but I also want to absorb everything I can from both of my parents, who I’m very fortunate to be in awe of. To be a part of the continuation of something that so shaped me and to learn from him on a more professional level, I can’t be more grateful and appreciative for that experience. I’ve learned from the best. And it was great. We had a lot of fun together, too.” “The most emotional idea in the world, on a show about the second generation, is that the second generation joins you,” Michael adds. Both father and son agree that co-writing “Girl Meets Commonism” and working together on the series has been a great experience, but it’s all crashing to a close with Disney’s announcement of the show’s cancellation. Michael’s amazed by the timing: “It’s funny, the show got canceled, we got nominated for the Writers Guild Award, the Producers Guild Award, and Matt [Nelson] got nominated for the Humanitas Prize for ‘The Forgiveness Project’ [episode]. The pure writer is always upset on cancellation day. Sometimes you expect the call,” Michael confides. “But Girl Meets World did not deserve cancellation. The story wasn’t over. However, Disney Channel is a kids’ network and this cast outgrew the venue and there is really no question about it, so I completely understand. These kids shoot up like crazy.” Michael’s son gets the last word: “When this all started out, I said to my dad, I really want to be a writer. And he said, ‘You are not allowed to talk to me about writing anymore. Writers write. Show me a script.’ So I have to just keep writing. Because I would like to call myself a writer.” FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 29 WRITTEN BY ERNEST HARDY PORTRAITS BY TOM KELLER Dancing in Serious Moonlight BARRY JENKINS ILLUMINATES THE LUNAR LANDSCAPE. I t’s an overcast day in Los Angeles, the sky’s grayness intermittently giving way to rainfall. During a break in the weather, 37-year-old writer-director Barry Jenkins sits on an outdoor patio of the Four Seasons Hotel, clutching a cup of hot tea and thoughtfully dissecting his approach to making the critically acclaimed Moonlight. After his Medicine for Melancholy feature debut in 2008—a well-regarded but little seen film about a one-night stand that turns into a weekend of witty banter and philosophical musing while measuring the toll of gentrification on San Francisco’s black residents—Jenkins fell off the radar. For a time he made short films and commercials, wrote almost a dozen screenplays (including one inspired by the music of Stevie Wonder), and worked with a loose-knit collective of fellow Bay Area filmmakers. He was paying bills but making minimal headway in his filmmaking career. That is, until he received a copy of In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, an unproduced piece by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the celebrated dramatist and Yale School of Drama playwriting chairperson whose experimental work fuses mythology, religion, and questions of race and sexuality. Mutual friends had passed the work to Jenkins, thinking the similarity in his and McCraney’s backgrounds—though they’d never met before, they grew up in the same Liberty City, Florida neighborhood, attended the same school, and both had mothers that battled drug addiction—might strike a creative chord. It did. McCraney’s admittedly “very visual” piece isn’t a play, and was written originally for his 2003 graduate school application. Nevertheless, Jenkins adapted it into a screenplay, knocking out a first draft in 10 days while self-exiled in Brussels. The result is a dazzling coming-of-age film that follows the life of Little/Chiron/Black (each name/nickname demarcating periods in the lead character’s life) in Miami, told in three chapters as he navigates his way through poverty, his mother’s crack addiction, his sexuality and homophobic bullies ... and a betrayal so deep and painful that it alters the course of his life. The film lays bare Jenkins’ cinematic and literary influences (he has degrees in both Creative Writing and Film from Florida State), while marking him as a singular filmmaker whose style is poetic and achingly insightful. Two days after the film earned a Writers Guild nomination for Best Original Screenplay (adding to its bounty of year-end awards, including Best Picture nods from the National Society of Film Critics, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars), Jenkins discussed screenwriting discipline, responsibilities as a filmmaker, and the power of oldies R&B. Ernest Hardy: In interviews Tarell McCraney has said he put the work away in frustration after writing it because he couldn’t figure out how it would be realized onstage or as a film. What did you see when you read it? What made you think you could make it work? Barry Jenkins: You know, it’s funny. It’s been called a play, a screenplay, a teleplay. I don’t know what the hell it is. I’ve never read anything that looked like this or that sounded like this. It could not have been staged. It could not have been filmed. But it had that thing in it. There was dialogue in it that was piercing. There were visuals in it that were piercing. The original piece was 45 or 46 pages, and [my] finished script is either 98 or 103 pages, I can’t remember. So they were different but … You know how you get a jewel that’s really, really heavy because it’s so dense? It was like that. It was this very small thing that was super, super dense because it had so much weight. It was a beautiful process of digging in and pulling out and seeing, This goes here, that goes there, this goes there, oh, shit—where does that go? That’s what it was, man. I do think that if Tarell wrote this, say, two years ago as opposed to when he did [2003], it would have been a very different piece. I think it would have been a gorgeous piece of material, but I don’t think it would have been that dense, core, gobbledygook of stuff that had all these ingredients that could lead to Moonlight. It would have been too much its own fully fleshed out thing. When he wrote it, it was just this beautiful, undeniable open wound, so to speak, but you had to apply a structure to it. And then I had to allow my full self to enter it. I mean, I literally went to the other side of the fucking world to write this script. I had to get far away from everybody. What made you choose Brussels to write the script? So this was five-and-a-half, six years post-Medicine, and my Plan B had become my Plan A at that point, which is a bit of a pun since [production company] Plan B ended up becoming heavily involved with this film. But I’d been making short films and creating content for commercials in the Bay Area. It was me and three other filmmakers and we just worked so hard at it, but since none of us had any business acumen we ended up working probably four times as hard as someone who knows how to do those things would. I felt like I needed to get far away from all that stuff and have nothing to do but focus on story, character, and scenes. I polled people and asked, “What’s the most boring place in the world in the summer, in August?” And everybody said Brussels because everybody who lives there goes to the coast. My plan was to get my James Baldwin on and go to Europe to write. I’m not gonna speak the language, not gonna know anybody. Gonna find a flat on a side street, which FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 31 “On the page, when I’m writing the script, I approach it the same way. The language of constructing the story is me as a writer, as a craftsman, and it’s housing this authentic language of the neighborhood I grew up in. Yet I’m still presenting it in a professional sort of craftsman voice that’s been developed by studying the craft of screenwriting.” is exactly what I did—a flat on a side street with a bar, a café, and a menswear store. My whole life was on that block. It was beautiful. I would wake up with Moonlight and I would go to sleep with Moonlight, and in-between I would eat, drink, and shop Moonlight, which is sort of what had to happen. There was no way to do this without fully inhabiting the main character. How long did it take you to get a working draft? The first draft was written in 10 days. Now, the finished film is not the first draft, but it’s not that drastically different. Maybe 50, 60 percent [of the final version] was written in those first 10 days. The finished script differs from the source material in that Tarell’s piece ended after that phone call in the third chapter, so you never see Black get into the car and drive back to Miami. You never see them sit down in the diner. That stuff didn’t happen. As I’m in Brussels writing, I have this thing from Tarell that had all these waypoints—I’m obsessed with aviation—and some of them were very linear. Story two [in 32 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 the film] was very linear even in the source material, story one not so much, and story three, as I said, just stopped at a certain point. So I have these waypoints, have this outline, and I’m working very loosely, not super structured. I’m just drinking coffee, drinking whiskey, eating fries—‘cuz it’s Belgium— drinking coffee, drinking whiskey, eating fries, and working. Once I get into that third chapter, I’m now working way past the waypoints. It’s like jazz. I get this Barbara Lewis song [“Hello, Stranger”] into my head and write it into the screenplay, and I’m going, going, going. Then we get back to Kevin’s apartment and I wrote that entire scene in one swoop. I remember exactly where I was, exactly what I was drinking— that was a whiskey night at Lord Byron café, and it was almost like “pencils down,” like you’re taking a test. I was like, okay, this is done. And it was scary as fuck because I was like, shit, what do I do now? So I adapted a book [If Beale Street Could Talk] by James Baldwin. For the next four weeks that was the next thing I did. GOOD HABITS Are you someone who writes on scraps of paper wherever an idea hits you, who jumps out of bed at 3 in the morning to get an idea down, or are you someone who writes largely on a schedule and gets into a certain headspace and that’s when your juices flow? I think more the latter. Once I get into a certain headspace is when the ideas come and I’m most productive. That’s why this film was written in such a compressed period of time. When I’m working on something I try to put notes in my phone. I usually keep a long form, freeform document in—I think the app is called Scribe? I forget the name of it. I use a technique when I’m outlining—and I always outline—that is based on Jessica Bendinger, who wrote Bring It On. She did a guest-post on John August’s ‘How I Write’ website—I don’t know if I was in film school or just out of it at the time I read it—and she had this simple approach to generating a story outline. It was three beats: the beginning, the middle, the end. And then you craft the beginning, middle, and end of the beginning, middle, and end. And so on. You build the story from all these mini-stories within the stories. I always do that no matter what project I’m working on. It’s a very simple thing you can always do. The first book I ever read in creative writing class was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and my favorite chapter from that is “Shitty First Drafts.” So I have no problem writing a terrible first draft. I pretty much journal until I get to the point where I say, Okay, now there needs to be a first draft of this. And then I plow through it. But I’m not keeping a scrapbook or anything like that. That just 32 • W G AW WRITTEN BY D E C E M B E R /J A N U A R Y 2017 17. JUAN Good, good. Now... you gotta help yourself now, gotta move your legs, keep yourself up. Juan watching as Little flails his legs beneath the surface. Juan laughs. JUAN Nah, not like a chicken, you gotta move 'em side to side like, like you making waves with your feet. Juan going into a tread, very smooth, like someone raised in the water, born at its edge. Little taking it to heart, does a passable job of treading. JUAN Not bad, not bad. (and) Bet you ain't know you could float, huh? Juan taking a hand and placing it under Little's legs, gently gesturing him onto his back: JUAN Trust me, I got you. Little laid flat atop the surface now, bobbing with the waves. JUAN Now just relax, alright, relax. Little complying -- Little floating, the look on his face pure joy. For once, a kid. See? JUAN Juan slowly, gently, easing his grasp, letting Littl e go: JUAN Relax now, stay relaxed. See? Juan circling as Little continues to bob with the surface, swimming around Little for this last part, is circl ing him. JUAN You ready to learn how to swim? FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 33 doesn’t work for me. “You know how you get a jewel that’s really, really You wrote Medicine for Melancholy by hand on a notepad. Is that still how you write? This is the first script I’ve ever written the first draft of not by hand. Up to this point, the first draft of everything I’ve written was by hand, red ink on yellow paper. I don’t know why. It’s just always been my thing. I’ve written probably 12 features that way. Now, starting with Moonlight, I’m just typing it in. Part of it was my first producer on this project, Adele Romanski. She was the one who sent me to Brussels to write and told me, “You know, when you come back you’re not going to have time to transcribe, so just go ahead and type it in.” And now that I’ve done it I can’t go back. It kills me because there was something really beautiful about being at the café and everyone else has a laptop and I’m the only person with a pen and paper and I’m moving way faster [than they are] because I’m just whipping through it. heavy because it’s so dense? It was like that. It was Novelists and poets often tell younger writers that they must write a certain number of hours a day, or a certain number of pages or lines a day. Do you have any such rules for yourself? Once I’m in the writing phase of something, I do try to write something every day, seven days a week, even if it’s terrible. I think it’s important to stay in the world of the characters. It’s more about once you enter that space, you gotta just stay in it. I don’t have quotas per se. Usually the way it works for me is I will have two days where I just write a ton, and then on that third day I get very little done but it’ll be a gut check where I’ll say to myself, “You kinda got over today, Barry.” Then I try to hunker down and go back in the next day. I try to end the day in the middle of a scene, that way when I start back up the next day I can just get back to work, as opposed to thinking, Oh, shit, where do I start today? this very small thing that was super, super dense because it had so much weight. It was a beautiful process of just digging in and pulling out and seeing, This goes here, that goes there, this goes there, oh, shit— where does that go? That’s what it was, man.” A DELIBERATE BALANCE How do you strike the balance between posing questions, sketching with ambiguity, and doing justice to characters that have historically been poorly sketched or underwritten? Ah, I see where you’re going. I try to push that stuff out [of mind] as much as I can. I never want to approach a project thinking this is important because X, or this is going to have meaning because Y. I try to push those things out and just focus on the character. At the same time, because of the lack of certain voices, because of the lack of certain characters, there is an added charge. There’s almost this seduction to say everything about these characters that can possibly be said in 110 minutes—to tell their whole story when there are certain things that are unknown to the characters themselves. By extension those things should be unknown to the audience, especially if you’re making a film that arises from the consciousness of the main character, as our film does. In some ways, Moonlight is a first-person piece. It’s meant to be immersive for the audience. It is tough to do the two things at once, to try and approach this film as I’ve done with quite a bit of my work, which is asking questions. Tough? In what way? I often think that creatively, whether it’s on the page or if I’m on the set directing, if I’m working toward questions—whether I’m clarifying questions, or whether I’m figuring out what the question even means—that [process] is going to yield a more satisfying piece of work. And yet because of the responsibility created by a lack of certain images, there is this push and pull to go, “I can’t depict a black mom if [I portray her] this way because we see so few black moms in cinema that I now have to present the most positive version of that figure as possible. Because if I don’t, who will?” But that’s not truthful to the 34 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FFEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 experience [of Chiron]. So there is a tension between those two things. And I will say it’s less seductive on the page than when you’re on set. I think on the page I’m pretty rigorous about what the character is going through, what the movie is about, and sticking to those things. Reading the script really underscores the elegance of your use of language. There’s an absence of “ums,” “likes,” and assorted linguistic placeholders that pepper the way most Americans speak now, and are often used heavy-handedly to establish authenticity in screenplays. Yet you absolutely captured the music and poetry of the way many black people talk. Was that approach a conscious thing, or a carryover from the source material? I don’t know if it’s conscious. I think it’s where my voice— speaking purely in craft terms about my voice—has landed. You could say the same thing about the visuals onscreen. It’s a very black film set in this impoverished inner city, and yet the aesthetics of the film, one could say, are very art house. Know what I mean? And typically you think those sorts of things [art house aesthetics and inner-city poor black realities] clash, run counter to one another. But I think because I’ve authentically arrived at both voices they go together very well. It’s a very fluid pairing. I think on the page, when I’m writing the script, I approach it the same way. The language of constructing the story is me as a writer, as a craftsman. And it’s housing this authentic language of the neighborhood I grew up in. Yet I’m still presenting it in a professional sort of craftsman voice that’s been developed by studying the craft of screenwriting. What would your professors say if they read your scripts today? If my old professors read my Moonlight screenplay they’d say, “I can’t see that, why is it in the script?” Well, the actor can see it. Like at the end of the scene where Kevin first calls Black. At the end of that scene, in the script—I’m paraphrasing—it says, “Black hangs up the phone, sits on the edge of the bed despondent, looks at his phone screen, lies on his back, five minutes twenty-six seconds, dot-dot-dot, a lifetime.” Now, I can’t film all that, but when I’m on set, the actor has read it. So Trevante Rhodes hangs up the phone, sits on the bed, puts the phone against his head, he’s rubbing the phone against his forehead, he lays back, looks at the screen, and the phone drops to his chest. That’s how, through concrete imagery, you’re revealing the interior of the character to the actor, and the actor can perform and externalize it onscreen without resorting to voiceover—which I’m a fan of but I try not to lean on. Who are some of your favorite authors or poets, and do you see 36 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 any of their influence in your own writing style? Baldwin, absolutely. His non-fiction is just searing and powerful and has as much of his artist’s voice as his fiction. I feel like when I’m writing a screenplay, I am trying to create language that—well, not that can stand up to the language in Mr. Baldwin’s work, but I don’t think a screenplay is just a blueprint. I mean, you can’t have all this purple prose in it either. Film is a very difficult medium to translate interiority if you’re not using voiceover. The way I was taught screenwriting was that it’s a blueprint; don’t put anything into a screenplay that cannot be seen or heard. However, there’s gotta be a way to get at the interiority of these people without going to this place where you’re falsely projecting what’s inside their head. When you read some of the best literature, when you read Faulkner, when you read James Baldwin, when you read some Hemingway—like The Sun Also Rises—you’re getting into the interior of characters in concrete terms, in concrete metaphors. I would say those three for sure have had the biggest influence, especially since I was studying it all at the same time—writing workshops, English Literature, and film school. All that stuff was sort of swirling around and I think it ended up affecting the way I approach a script. STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET In Moonlight, silence itself is a kind of text. What is actually on the page in those moments when there is no dialogue, when sound is muted or drops out? There’s a scene in Moonlight’s first story where the kids are wrestling in the field, and it’s written in such concrete language that you don’t even get the idea of silence when you read the script because it’s not like you’re reading and suddenly there’s half a page of white space. There are things transpiring in that silence, emotions that are changing in the space of that silence. I try to write the film so that the person reading it can see the movie. I never indicate a camera, ever. I got beat over the head too many times in screenwriting class to ever go back on that. “I try to write the film so that the person reading it and so warm, and that’s what that song meant to me. can see the movie. I never indicate a camera, ever. Chiron is the fusion of you and Tarell, and you two navigated your ways out of your similar background and became wordsmiths while Chiron has almost surrendered language. Is that something you two have talked about or given much thought to? For sure. I wasn’t always this way, though. I feel like people who went through what Tarell and I went through, more often than not because of the systemic dynamics of the society we live in, they end up more like Chiron than they do myself or Tarell. I can just speak viscerally from the experience of the people we grew up with. Not everybody can become the head of the playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama [as Tarell now is]. Not everybody who comes from the world of Chiron is going to sit and do an interview with you at the Four Seasons. There was a point in my life where I could have become more like Chiron—not like Black in the third story, but more like Chiron in the second story, which is to retreat from the world, to withdraw into myself because as you express yourself the world tells you, “No, don’t talk like that. Don’t walk like that. Don’t look like that.” These characters originate, but in merging myself with him into this character, it felt like that was the personality that kept asserting itself for Chiron—that withdrawn figure. One of the things I most love about the finished product is that there are scenes where Tarell McCraney ends and Barry Jenkins begins. I think within the character of Chiron those seams, over the course of writing and making this film, just became more and more indistinguishable. I think where we ended up is this place where the character very fluidly, organically stood apart from us and ultimately becomes himself. I got beat over the head too many times in screenwriting class to ever go back on that. But I am trying to write the script in a way that if you are reading the screenplay you are seeing the film.” But I am trying to write the script in a way that if you are reading the screenplay you are seeing the film. It’s writing in a writer’s voice, not a director’s. It’s a tightrope but I like it. It keeps me on point. Often in contemporary film, music is used to tell the audience what they should feel or to spackle over shortcomings in the storytelling, but the music in Moonlight was crucial text. Can you talk a bit about the music choices, especially “Hello, Stranger”? Bruh, we played [the Barbara Lewis song “Hello, Stranger”] on set. Like, every time we shot that scene the song is playing out loud, which you’re not supposed to do. There’s no dialogue while the song is playing. They’re just looking at each other, it’s just gestures. Like anyone who’s obsessed with Claire Denis, I’ve seen 35 Shots of Rum and I know how that Commodores song [“Nightshift”] in it moves everyone in the auditorium. I wanted that experience on my set, so it’s written in the screenplay and I’m playing it as we shoot. And I thought, If there’s a version of the world where we can’t get the rights to the song, fine, we’ll find something else. However, I wrote the script with this song in mind because of the feeling I have connected to it from my time in San Francisco where I first heard it played on a vinyl 45. When the producers watch dailies they’re gonna hear this song over and over again. They’re gonna know what it means to me. That feeling of the music as it’s embedded in the film I wanted embedded in the script. I wanted to create this space where here’s this guy just wanting to be vulnerable. He’s yearning for someone to just tell him that he is okay. Trying to pair music with that, there could be a song where the violin is playing and tugging at the heartstrings, but I wanted something that a) existed in the real world, that I had a connection to and other people in the audience might have a connection to, and b) that would acknowledge the intimacy but wasn’t aggressive about asserting it. She’s got a very powerful voice, Barbara Lewis does, but man it’s so gentle. Kevin, especially as played by Andre Holland, is such a charming presence. He talks so much, and yet is so gentle, so kind Ernest Hardy’s criticism has appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award. Blood Beats Vol. 2: The Bootleg Joints, was published in February 2008. He has written liner notes for Chuck D Presents Louder than a Bomb; Curtis Mayfield: Gospel; Chet Baker: Career 1952-1988; and the box-sets Love, Luther; Say It Loud! A Celebration of Black Music in America; and Superstars of Seventies Soul, among others. His short story, “Cold & Wet Tired You Bet” appears in Best Gay Stories 2011 (Lethe Press). FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 37 SPACE ODYSSEY Allison Schroeder’s career trajectory goes into orbit with Hidden Figures. WRITTEN BY LOUISE FARR PHOTOS BY JILLY WENDELL O ne day in 2014, Allison Schroeder was complaining to her manager about sexism on a shoot she was running. A gaffer had glanced at her and suggested she take a film class to learn how to manage a set. “Because then we could take your ideas seriously,” he’d said. Schroeder’s supposed error? She knew that some gaffers aspire to become directors of photography, so when the second unit camera operator couldn’t be found, she had offered the DP role to this ingrate. An angry Schroeder, who has a USC master’s degree in film production, kept griping until finally her manager got a word in. “I have some good news,” he said. Producer Donna Gigliotti wanted her to write Hidden Figures, about the unheralded female AfricanAmerican mathematicians instrumental in lifting the NASA space program off the ground in the segregated 1960s. Being a white female screenwriter in 21st century Hollywood hardly equates with the racism and sexism heaped upon black women in the era of Jim Crow, or even now. As co-chair of the WGAW Diversity Department’s Women Writers Committee, Schroeder is well aware of that. Still, she identifies with those women whose contributions society ignored for so long. “I felt like we could have been friends, or they would have been my mentors,” she says, about Katherine Johnson (played in the film by Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae). Against enormous odds, the women broke ground in their fields, helping America compete in the space race with Russia: John Glenn relied on Johnson’s computations before becoming the first US astronaut to orbit the earth; Vaughan became NASA’s first black supervisor after having the foresight to teach herself Fortran computer language; and Jackson became NASA’s first black aeronautical engineer, possibly the only one in the country, after fighting to attend an all-white school. “They’re the type of women I aspire to be,” says Schroeder. It’s a Thursday afternoon in the West Hollywood apartment Schroeder shares with her husband, TV writer Aaron Brownstein. Dressed in a striped T-shirt and comfy pants, her long hair in a ponytail, she is perched on a dining area chair. A doughnut cushion is in place to ease pressure on the tailbone she broke recently while giving birth. When the call came in that she and Theodore Melfi had been nominated for a WGA Adapted Screenplay Award, she was anxiously awaiting test results that would tell her if baby Emily was healthy or sick. The good news: she is fine. And Schroeder has since been nominated for BAFTA and Academy Awards. But today, Schroeder has been up since 3 a.m. with her beautiful, but fussing, seven-week-old, now burbling happily in the background while her mother gamely answers questions. “This is what a feminist looks like: very, very tired,” jokes Schroeder, who has already done one interview this morning, has another scheduled for later this afternoon, and, as if that’s not enough, she’ll trundle down to Fox tonight for a Q&A ac- companying the latest Hidden Figures screening. With the inspirational movie gathering box office and awards steam, and with five projects pending and an important pitch meeting next week, Schroeder has given up trying to write during the day, which is now reserved for emails, phone calls, and press. At night, she starts writing at 11 p.m. and works until three or four in the morning. “But I can’t imagine not being part of this story,” she emphasizes. “I’ve been writing scripts about strong women for a long time, and they either don’t get bought, or they get drastically changed. So this is my dream coming true.” Then she hesitates. “I know that sounds cheesy.” No, it doesn’t. Not when you’re talking to a writer who, a few years back, sat through 44 pitch meetings—and 44 rejections—before succeeding with her 45th: a proposal for Side Effects, a musical about a mixed-race family, starring a teenage girl struggling with depression. Shot in two parts, it landed on YouTube’s Awesomeness TV (the online channel later bought by DreamWorks). “All those jobs I didn’t get, wouldn’t have led to Hidden Figures,” says Schroeder. Despite having been pigeonholed as a teen writer, in retrospect it becomes clear that Schroeder, who wrote Mean Girls 2, and was a staff writer on 90210, was a natural for the film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s now best-selling Hidden Figures book. In a prescient move, after reading Shetterly’s 55-page book proposal, the Oscar, BAFTA, and Independent Spirit Award-winning Gigliotti (Shakespeare in Love, Silver Linings Playbook) scooped the project up for her New Yorkbased Levantine Films. It was Schroeder’s spec script, Agatha, an imagined account of 11 days in 1926 when famed mystery writer Agatha Christie disappeared, that led Gigliotti to speak with her. Wincing, she recounts Gigliotti’s version of the conversation, which Schroeder doesn’t recall. “She says that I said, ‘I was born to write this! You have to hire me!’ And she said, ‘Oh, Lord, these Hollywood writers.’” “Cheesy,” Schroeder says again, about her plea. NASA BABY But Schroeder was born to write it. She had grown up in Florida, near Cape Canaveral. Her grandfather worked on the Mercury space capsule, her grandmother was a NASA programmer, and she interned at NASA throughout high school. Later, while an economics major at Stanford, Schroeder worked for a missile launch company. Digging down, her backstory gets even better. “I grew up visiting my grandmother at the vertical assembly building,” she told Gigliotti. “I’d been in the original mission control, and played on the prototype. They used to time our fire drills at Gemini Elementary so that we could go outside and get to look in the sky and see the missile launches.” FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 39 WOMAN POWER I f female solidarity is a major theme in the film, it was also the catalyst that drew Schroeder, her Stanford friend Elizabeth Martin, and Martin’s writing partner, Lauren Hynek, to their first Guild women’s committee meeting. The three were already acting as a support group and reading each other’s work a few years ago, but as feature writers they still felt isolated. “We said, ‘Let’s go and find a community,’” remembers Schroeder. When someone suggested the trio create a sub-committee to make changes leading to more work for women, they jumped in. After brainstorming with the committee, for one project they invited writers to submit pilots for peer review. The top seven or eight received one-on-one meetings with showrunners. They also held “how to pitch” events. And in a twist on speed-dating in 2015 and 2016, in association with the Alliance of Women Directors, they got female directors together with female writers who had finished scripts. The idea: team up to create a package. A number of teams were formed through the meetings. Last year, Schroeder and Martin became Committee of Women Writers co-chairs, with Hynek as vice-chair. Schroeder’s theory behind their strategy? “A director, or a studio, or whoever, has a hard time saying, ‘There’s just no women writers,’ when they’re surrounded by 50 of them. So it’s just been a lot of how to get women working, and women working with other women. Essentially, the point is to make people aware of the problem, and get people in the room together so you can bypass the middle man.” When the Guild was invited to the 2016 White House United State of Women Summit, Schroeder attended, as did Diversity Committee chair Glen Mazzara (“a huge advocate for women,” Schroeder points out). Appearing with a panel of other women writers, she spoke about Hidden Figures and the Guild’s efforts to try and change the image of women on screen. The WGAW has also teamed with the DGA, Google, and The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media to address unconscious bias in the television industry. “Things you don’t even realize you’re thinking, and evolutionary things, and how we have to retrain our brains to look beyond our stereotypes, instinctual racism, and judgments of people,” explains Schroeder. This year, for Women’s History Month, the women’s committee has created a video in which female writers talk about the biggest obstacles they have overcome in their careers. “I think we need to talk about the struggle,” says Schroeder. “Because if we just pretend it’s an easy road—that’s not actually helping other women. But when you hear someone else describe a struggle you’ve also faced, you think, Oh, it’s not just me. If they could overcome it, I can overcome it.” The entertainment business is sometimes impossibly difficult, Schroeder admits. “There was never a time when I thought I’d give up,” she says of her own career, “but there were definitely times when I cried pathetic tears.” Often tears of frustration. Once she pitched a psychological thriller, with two female leads. “We love it,” executives told her, “can they both be men?” Schroeder’s answer? No. —Louise Farr 40 • W G AW WRITTEN BY D E C E M B E R /J A N U A R Y 2017 An early memory is of the devastating day in 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its seven crew members. “They couldn’t find the cabin right after the explosion,” Schroeder says. “I actually thought I could find it, and find them alive, because I was young and believed in the best. And so my friends and I got on our bicycles, and we searched all the vacant lots, convinced we could save the astronauts.” Another early memory is of the devastating day in 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its seven crew members. “They couldn’t find the cabin right after the explosion,” Schroeder says. “I actually thought I could find it, and find them alive, because I was young and believed in the best. And so my friends and I got on our bicycles, and we searched all the vacant lots, convinced we could save them.” There was more, since Schroeder had written unsold pilots about NASA and the Manhattan Project. Her background was perfect. But Gigliotti had an important question: How would Schroeder make math exciting? After reading Shetterly’s book proposal, Schroeder had zeroed in on the stories of Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson. And she knew that John Glenn had refused to launch into space without Johnson’s okay. “Have the girl run me the numbers,” he’d said. “You see her frantically crunching numbers as the countdown’s clicking down, then racing into the control room. And she’s not allowed in, of course, because they wouldn’t let her. And at the last second, she finally gets to be in the room,” Schroeder told Gigliotti. “Okay,” she remembers Gigliotti saying. “That’s exciting.” In the same conversation, Schroeder pitched the idea of switching the iconic image of men on sliders working underneath capsule engines to a woman in a skirt and pumps, the prim mid-century dress code for female workers. That made it into her draft, though in the film, the shot is of Vaughan under the engine of her ’57 Chevy. “One of my favorite visuals,” says Schroeder. Once she landed the job, she conferred with author Shetterly, who emptied her research files for Schroeder. “Literally, we were looking at YouTube punch card videos, so that we could understand the [computer] programming,” remembers Schroeder, who spent four weeks on research, then 12 weeks on her first draft. “It was just doing the research up front, knowing each of the characters’ thought points that needed to be hit, and then shuffling them around to intertwine them. Structure is ingrained enough in me that I can just sit down and write a little more free-form, to discover as I’m going. I really try to hit the point of attack midpoint at the end of act two, so that’s something I stick with pretty solidly.” Initially, Schroeder suggested covering a 40-year span in the film. “Donna was, like, ‘All right, lady. Do you know how many vintage cars I’d have to get to cover that time period?’ So we just kind of kept shifting, and then there came a point where she said, ‘Okay, you’ve got the math, you’ve got the science. Now go have fun.’ And that was one of the best notes I’ve ever gotten in my career.” Among Schroeder’s additions: the women getting tipsy together; dancing at a house party; and ogling the handsome astronauts. In other scenes, Vaughan talks to an enormous IBM computer, and Johnson speaks up at a Pentagon meeting. “I think the script went out in the summer, and we were in pre-production in December.” Of course, not everything in the film was based on Shetterly’s research. “I could draw from my own experiences as a woman,” says Schroeder. In one powerful scene, Jackson finally arrives in the previously segregated classroom she has fought to enter. Says the professor about his course, filled with white men: “This isn’t designed to teach a woman.” A similar slap in the face happened to Schroeder when she was enrolled in an Oxford, England international economics trade tutorial. Her response became Jackson’s in Hidden Figures: “You teach it like you teach a man.” Schroeder offers a sly smile. The Oxford professor’s attitude changed, she says, after she turned in her first paper. On a more positive side, she wanted to reveal that the black women mathematicians of NASA (referred to as “colored computers”) shared the kind of supportive female friendships she enjoys today. Scene after scene shows them looking out for each other. They carpool so as not to have to sit in the back of the bus. They join a mass march through the NASA corridors in their high heels. And they look on in solidarity as the gum-chewing composite character of Space Task Group head Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) takes a hammer to the “colored” sign over the black women’s bathroom: this was Schroeder’s invented Hollywood reward for an audience that’s suffered along with Johnson, watching her make a regular half-mile trot from her white workplace to the run-down restroom reserved for black women. To Schroeder’s delight, the Hidden Figures budget rose after Ted Melfi signed on as director: “We went from being an indie film to, not a huge film, but a studio film, so suddenly we could go into space. He added a lot of the astronauts, and the parades, and all the things that Donna’s like, ‘We don’t have the budget.’ So, in my draft, it was always on a TV set that they would be watching a launch. Now in the final film, they can watch it on a TV set and they can cut to John Glenn in space, orbiting the earth. Which is obviously, as we all know, much more cinematic. You feel the gravitas of the situation.” SLIPPERY SLOPE? Maybe Schroeder’s weariness is talking, but after a quick break for an Emily diaper change, she adds, “I worry: Is it all downhill from here?” Perhaps anyone would wonder if a future project could top Hidden Figures’ surprise success. By most standards, no matter how inspirational, a movie about mathematics, with CONTINUED ON PG 90 FE EC BE RM UB AE RR Y / J| AMNAURACRHY 22001 177 D WG GA AW W W WR R II TT TT EE N N B BY Y W 41 •• 55 WRITTEN BY PETER HANSON PHOTOS BY JILLY WENDELL SPACE RACE THEODORE MELFI FINDS THE LIGHT IN DARKNESS TO REVEAL HIDDEN FIGURES. “When I started the film, I was scared,” recalls Theodore Melfi, the director and co-writer, with Allison Schroeder, of Hidden Figures. Adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same name, Hidden Figures celebrates the African-American women whose mathematical wizardry was crucial to the success of the Mercury space missions during the 1960s, a time of rampant racism and sexism. Melfi’s fear emanated from the incongruity of a white filmmaker being the vessel for an important but previously unheralded chapter of African-American history. “I was like, ‘What do I have to offer?’ But I was so moved by the story, I had no choice. Then I said to myself, ‘I have plenty to offer. I grew up dirt-poor. My mom was a single mom. I ate government cheese. I understand struggling.’” What Melfi didn’t fully comprehend was the scope of white privilege. “I didn’t really get that until I was at an airport with [Hidden Figures actress] Octavia Spencer about two months ago,” he says. “We were in London. We had just done a BAFTA screening, and we were at the first-class lounge. Octavia was there with her stylist, Val. I said, ‘Guys, I’ve got to get something at the duty-free shop.’ I was gone for about a half an hour. When I came back to the lounge, I walked up to Octavia and Val, and they had not been served yet. Not a damn thing. And the moment I walked in, the server came running up to me and said, ‘What can I get you, sir?’ “At that moment, I looked at Octavia’s face, and she said, ‘You see?’ “That’s the first time I really kind of got it. As a white male, it’s privilege that you’re not even aware of, regardless of where you come from. That deeply impacted me, and it’ll deeply impact every decision I make going forward—about the films I make, the people I choose to work with, the people I hire. Inclusion and diversity can’t just be buzzwords. They are responsibilities.” 42 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 DR. FEELGOOD Starring Taraji P. Henson, singer/actress Janelle Monáe, and Spencer—who receive support from Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, and Jim Parsons—Hidden Figures has emerged as the feel-good hit of this awards season. Melfi accepts the designation proudly. “I think a feel-good movie gives the audience hope to take home,” he says. “They’re taking home the thought that if that character can do it, they can do it too. People are hungry for hope, especially this past year, when we’ve realized maybe the country is a lot more divided than we thought.” Melfi’s dedication to uplifting entertainment extends beyond Hidden Figures. By way of explanation, he discusses his breakthrough, the quirky dramedy St. Vincent (2014). “If you’re looking at St. Vincent,” Melfi explains, “Bill Murray plays a drunk gambler. He’s not a great guy, but he discovers a friendship with a little boy that shows him his value, and they get to laugh and enjoy life together. In Hidden Figures, you can laugh in a film that has unspeakable things happening, and yet you don’t feel preached to. You feel inspired. You feel light. I think comedy is the way to open the human heart, in order for that heart to receive a real message. “The core thing for me,” he adds, “is finding the light in darkness.” Ironically, the fact that Melfi achieved his goal of making a positive movie that touches audiences has created unexpected challenges. He spoke by phone with Written By from the center of the awards-season storm, navigating a hectic schedule of interviews, personal appearances, Q&As, and screenings, even as he explores new opportunities—the success of Hidden Figures has not gone unnoticed by the Hollywood community. “The biggest benefit I see is people actually return my emails now,” he says. “People I’ve called for years on end— “I wanted 40 percent space [program], 60 percent home life. I took a mathematical approach to the rescripting. I note-carded every character, and every character’s trajectory. Then I made cards for NASA and what they were going through, and each mission. I just kind of shuffled and juggled. The last third of the film, thankfully, we knew—each one of these launches is archived verbatim.” who would never return my calls—all of a sudden call me. It’s a fascinating business in that regard, and you’ve just got to stay on the ground. If you’re not on the ground, I think your stories suffer. You start getting out of touch with what is human and what’s really happening in the world.” Nonetheless, Melfi scoffs at suggestions he’s finally “arrived” in the business. “Looking from the outside, people might think so,” he says, “but I don’t have a satisfied bone in my body. I don’t know if it’s a poor man’s mentality, but I think all writers and directors have a fear that on any given day, your stuff isn’t good enough anymore—so I guess that keeps me motivated, keeps me moving.” TWO ROADS DIVERGED An unlikely path brought Melfi to his current success. He grew up in Brooklyn, where a father he describes as “abusive” made a meager living by operating a small newspaper. Although Melfi contributed to the paper for years, beginning when he was just eight years old, he didn’t envision writing professionally. (“I never knew writing was something you could do and get paid for,” he says.) After the family relocated to Missouri, Melfi’s father abandoned the household, leaving Melfi’s mother responsible for Theodore and his two brothers. Following high school, Melfi explored a number of possible careers, earning degrees in architecture and psychology. Yet he couldn’t shake his lifelong interest in storytelling, so he cut short the pursuit of a third degree—a Master’s in Psychology—and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-’90s. Through a lean period of crashing with friends and working in restaurants, he took acting classes to learn how to communicate with performers, and he pounded out scripts that went nowhere. Eventually, he met a producer who needed help with a project, so Melfi cold-called investors and found the backing for an indie called Park Day (1998). A year later, he put financing together for his directorial debut, Winding Roads (1999), which he co-wrote with his wife, 44 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 Kimberly Quinn, whom he’d met in an acting class. “From then on, I [produced] about nine films like that, and then my wife said, ‘This doesn’t cut it—you’ve got to start making a living.’ I’d make 20 grand a year, [because] the business was designed to never pay anyone a back end at that budget level.” Quinn suggested Melfi pursue work directing commercials. “I got lucky right away with a spec commercial for MTV starring Ron Jeremy. The next thing you know, it was eight years of commercial directing—and finally making a living. Then I decided to get back to my first love: writing.” His script St. Vincent landed on the 2011 Black List and Jack Nicholson briefly flirted with playing the title role before Murray signed on. What began as a personal project soon became a $13 million feature. The buzz around St. Vincent raised Melfi’s profile as a screenwriter, landing him jobs including a remake of the 1979 comedy Going in Style. (Directed by Zach Braff, the picture hits theaters later this year.) St. Vincent also put him on director lists throughout the industry. A DOUBLE LIFE Melfi’s achievements in multiple craft areas raise the question of which has primacy: Is he a writer who also directs, or vice versa, and how does producing fit into the mix? He says that everything he does is a means of protecting the stories he chooses to tell. “I just always wanted to be a writer my whole life,” he says. “I loved telling stories, I loved reading, I loved anything to do with narrative. I initially started directing to get the stuff I wrote out there, to actually see it made. All of us have so many scripts and thoughts and ideas, and so few get made that it gets frustrating.” Acting classes gave Melfi his first opportunities to blend writing and directing. “In that process,” he recalls, “I got to work really closely with actors. I was writing scenes, bringing them in, putting them up, and directing them. All the actors there kept telling me, ‘This [material] is great, you should pursue this as a career.’” Making indie features helped Melfi learn long-form storytelling, but he says that making ads—often on spec—provided his technical education. “Once I started directing commercials,” he says, “I learned everything there was to know about the trade. On a Friday night, I’d rent the truck myself and go to the equipment house myself, and load up the truck myself, and learn every piece of equipment. It was a function of just wanting to tell stories.” Melfi says his immersive filmmaking experience informs his ability to balance and compartmentalize the various jobs he does on movies. “I didn’t see a difference between writing and directing,” he says. “How they conflict is I have to turn one off at points. When I do the writing, I don’t write in the screenplay ‘the camera dollies here.’ I don’t try to direct it on paper. I keep myself as pure as I can. Once the script is in the shape where it’s possibly going to be shot, I turn the writer switch off and I just become a director. The story needs to live visually. I break down the script as if I had never seen it before.” Expanding on the topic, Melfi says his “reverence” for both writing and directing explains a noteworthy personal choice. “I never have and I never will take a ‘film by’ credit,” he says. “I don’t take that credit because I don’t believe in that credit. I believe everyone on the set makes the film together. It’s a community.” TRACING FIGURES Prior to Melfi’s involvement in Hidden Figures, producer Donna Gigliotti acquired the rights to Shetterly’s book (then in proposal form) and commissioned Schroeder to write the screenplay. When Gigliotti asked Melfi’s reps about his availability to helm Hidden Figures, he was in the midst of chasing a high-profile gig: directing Marvel’s impending Spider-Man reboot. “The [Hidden Figures] call came in on a Friday night, and Marvel was going to give us an answer about Spider-Man on Monday,” Melfi recalls. “I said to my agents, ‘Guys, my head’s full.’ They said, ‘You have to hear about this.’” Intrigued by the historical facts underpinning the story, Melfi read the book proposal and Schroeder’s script over the weekend. Afterward, he got other producers involved and helped present Hidden Figures to Fox. Once the project had studio backing, he commenced rewriting. “I kept Allison’s structure mostly intact, and I went to town adding levels and layers that I wanted to explore in more depth,” he says. “I wanted 40 percent space [program], 60 percent home life. I took a mathematical approach to the re-scripting. I note-carded every character, and every character’s trajectory. Then I made cards for NASA and what they were going through, and each mission. I just kind of shuffled and juggled. The last third of the film, thankfully, we knew—each one of these launches is archived verbatim.” Although the two screenwriters didn’t work together, they discussed story concepts. “There was a little interaction [with Schroeder] here and there, but I just wanted to do my own thing,” Melfi explains. “To be crude about it, I wanted to put a masculine touch on the script, because it already had a feminine touch. I thought combining two voices would make a great movie.” By landing the elusive Murray for St. Vincent and by securing the impressive cast of Hidden Figures, Melfi appears to have cracked that most difficult of codes: writing movie-star parts. Yet he rebuffs the notion of deliberately courting important actors. “If you give an actor an honest role,” he says, “they’ll want to play it, and they’ll know how to play it. When I showed St. Vincent to Jack Nicholson, he said, ‘This is an actable piece.’ I spent a lot of time thinking, ‘What does that mean?’ What an ‘actable piece,’ to me, ended up meaning is that it’s honest and it’s real and it’s raw, and in that you have heart and humor and pathos and everything you want. If you look at the movies that are out this year, you’ll find honest work. You’ll find honest work in Moonlight, honest work in Manchester by the Sea. I think that’s the key. “As a writer and as a director,” he continues, “your sole purpose in life is to make your work for the audience, period. This business, this work that we do, is not for ourselves, and it’s not for critics, and it’s not for the Hollywood community. It’s for the world. I was at a screening [of Hidden Figures] in Los Angeles, at the back of the theater. The movie ended, and a black woman—probably in her mid-50s—was walking down the aisle, crying and crying and crying. I just stopped her and I said, ‘Are you okay?’ She said yes, and she found out that I’m the director. I just hugged her. I didn’t know what else to do. And she goes, ‘This film has given me the strength to carry on.’” “Ultimately,” Melfi says, “that is all that matters in this life. At the end of the day, when we’re all on our deathbeds, we’re not going to look back and say, ‘I made that really cool, hip thing that didn’t do anything for anyone.’ We’re going to say, ‘I had some impact on people.’” FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 45 WRITTEN BY PAUL BROWNFIELD PHOTOGRAPHY BY MERON MENGHISTAB Making Comedy Great Again TREVOR NOAH AND HIS WRITERS TALK ABOUT THE NEW ABNORMAL. 46 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 O n Sept. 28, 2015, Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show after Jon Stewart called it quits. By then, Stewart had been hosting the Comedy Central latenight program for 16 years, giving it franchise status—not to mention primary news source legitimacy for the million or two who watched each night. As Noah himself noted on his first broadcast: “Jon Stewart was more than just a late-night host. He was often our voice, our refuge, and in many ways our political dad.” There was a punchline, of course: Dad had abruptly left, and here was Noah, all of 31, apparently a globally touring comedian. How nice for him, but what was he doing here? Painting himself as something like a fifth or sixth choice to succeed Stewart, Noah had a nice line that night: “Once more, a job Americans rejected is now being done by an immigrant.” The sarcasm belied what has become a unique experiment in American comedy: the transfer of power from a familiar voice (Stewart’s patter and persona is firmly in the tradition of the American Jewish comedy canon) to a fresh-faced African millennial. The shift was inevitably jarring, cost Comedy Central a portion of Stewart’s faithful following, and, as Donald Trump for President went from sideshow to main event, left classic Daily Show progressives pining for how comedy’s Cronkite might have consoled them. A year-and-a-half later, the with Trevor Noah part of The Daily Show is coming into focus, not least in the way he’s handled the Trump-ocalypse. It isn’t doomsday. It’s almost as if Noah’s seen this guy before. The second week in the anchor chair, Noah did an incisive segment showing how Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and unbridled egotism sometimes matched him, almost line for line, with African autocrats and warlords, from Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabi to South Africa’s Jacob Zuma. And so we have arrived at what Noah predicted, more than a year ago: America’s first African President. “To understand how I apply my comedy is to understand how South Africans have dealt with a country that oppressed them for so long,” Noah says, sitting in a conference room at The Daily Show headquarters on 52nd and 11th Avenue in New York. “We couldn’t exist in a space of outright rage because then as a nation we would have been wiped out. The military was controlled, the people were oppressed.” Noah is the product of an illegal act— sexual congress between a white man and a black woman during the era of Apartheid. His new book, Born a Crime, provides ample anecdotal evidence of an upbringing circumscribed by the constancy of threats from racial prejudice and violence. The day before Trump’s inauguration, Noah and three of his writers—head writer Zhubin Parang, Dan Amira, and Hallie Haglund—emerged from their offices to discuss the Trump presidency, The Daily Show’s shifting point of view under Noah, and the Trump presidency (because after all, what else was there to talk about?). Paul Brownfield: Trump is our 45th president. The joke has told itself. What are you guys talking about in the room? Trevor Noah: What’s great about the FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 47 room is, because we have so many different minds, the conversations are generally, “This has never happened, we’re all gonna die!” “Don’t panic. Man, this is funny.” That’s the general evolution of every single conversation, I think. Zhubin Parang: Once you get through that layer of terror, everything is still funny. The fact that’s he’s president has just added this little skin of fear to it. Noah: I’m just a firm believer in, Anything is going to happen anyway. So I do not believe in stress. I believe many emotions are a choice. So as much as people fight me on that, I go, “You choose to be afraid.” It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be cautious or wary. Parang: I think you’re helped, though, by the fact that you’ve had this experience with this kind of leadership before. This is new for people who’ve lived in America our whole lives. It’s a relationship we’re brand new to and terrified of. Noah: But even in South Africa I wasn’t terrified. It was literally our Trump coming in. It was chaos. We were like, He’s going to destroy the country. But it still wasn’t terrifying. You know what it was, actually, it’s not the fact that we had that leader, it’s the fact that we had come from Apartheid. So we were like, 48 48 •• W WG GA AW W W WR R II TT TT EE N N B BY Y FD EE BC RE UMAB RE YR /| J A MN AU RA CR H Y2 2 00 1 71 7 “What’s the worst that could happen?” Hallie Haglund: When you already have a fundamental distrust of government, you can’t distrust it more when a shitty guy gets elected. Versus me who feels like I’m a freshman in college realizing what the world is like. THE DAILY GRIND Brownfield: When Trevor took over, he was an unknown commodity to most of the audience. How hard was it to go from writing for Jon Stewart to serving Trevor Noah’s point of view? Dan Amira: You learn over time to slowly adapt to Trevor’s perspective and to Trevor’s literal way of speaking, which is different. Jon was a 50-year-old white Jewish-American. You’re not any of those things. Noah: I’m 50. Amira: We couldn’t make black jokes with Jon, but we made a lot of Jewish jokes. Now we make black jokes, not Jewish jokes. It’s going through Trevor’s voice. Noah: It happened around the conventions. I realized for me the process wasn’t working, in trying to just teach people how to write for me, because I don’t want that. What I like is a room where we are writing together, and I’m the voice. What we slowly started doing was making it more of a collaborative writing experience. I can’t be in a space where if I tell you a joke, now you’re afraid to write it down, because you’re like, “Can I write this?” I am black. I am African. So if you make a joke about Africa and it goes the wrong way, I’ll tell you why. But I don’t want you to be afraid to try, because then you will never be writing with me and for me. Haglund: It’s also so much an issue of getting to know a person on a one-to-one level. Someone can tell you how they are, but sometimes it’s hard to know yourself well enough to give someone a laundry list. So I think that’s why the show and the writing have gotten so much stronger over time, because it becomes so much easier to write for Trevor once we know Trevor and we’re not just assuming. Parang: It’s especially difficult to do that when we hit the ground with only six weeks of preparation before our first show. Trevor’s been incredibly patient. We had to restructure the process while we were doing daily shows. And Trevor, I think, was able to begin tinkering with the process as we were doing the shows, which I think is a lot harder than just being able to have several months to start over and do the whole process from scratch. We had four test shows in six weeks and then began the show. So a lot of it was like building a plane while flying it. Noah: What I liked about the [Republican and Democrat] conventions was we got out of the building. Old habits very quickly die. So now it is a new thing. We’re in front of a new audience in a new space. Now it was almost like we went and did a new show, and brought that back with us. Now we were shooting toward the audience, writing sketches that involved the audience. We were breaking the fourth wall. That was a mistake I made. People would say, “Your writers need to write in your voice.” I disagree with that. I think the best writing is when you get along as people. Because then you are thinking closer to a hive as opposed to people trying to parrot what they think you would say. Parang: I think the show’s growth over the past year has been aligning our process and the news stories through his voice. I don’t think of The Daily Show as having a voice outside of what Trevor Noah’s voice is, if that makes sense. Brownfield: Much as you’ve gone after him, Trump hasn’t Tweeted about “the failing Daily Show.” Are you upset about that? FE UA D EB CR EM BR EY R / |J AMNAURACRHY 2 2001 17 7 WWGGAAWW WWRRI ITTTTEENN BBYY •• 49 55 Parang: Does it hurt a little bit? Sure. Noah: Let me tell you why I’m not hurt at all. Because I remember, we reached out to Donald Trump to get credentials to one of his events early on. And all his people did was, they replied to us with an email, no subject, no body, it just had three links of shows we had done. That’s all they replied with. And then we did, that was the Amira special, “Don’t Forget Donald Trump Wants to Bang His Daughter.” Amira: We don’t need to give me credit for that. It was really more of a group effort. Noah: When we did that, which was combing through the archives and realizing that this man had like a creepy history of saying things that left everyone uncomfortable, we did the show, and within the next few days he appeared on Live with Kelly and Michael, and of his own volition he just brought it up in an interview. I don’t think he would Tweet 50 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 at us because I don’t think he thinks he can handle the heat. I wouldn’t Tweet at The Daily Show, I would Tweet at an organization where that’s not what they do for a living. I would go after NBC News. I’d go after SNL because they can’t spend can relate to because we’re all under the same asteroid hurtling toward the earth. We talked about India this week, we do Russia. Austria and Spain, we did yesterday. There’s a reason, I think, the show’s viewership has gone up 400 percent in the world. It seems like a small change, but people connect with it now. I meet people in South Africa and Peru who go, “Ben Carson, jeez, Ben Carson, that’s so funny.” At the end of the day it’s all characters. These are characters in a story that we are telling. the whole show [on him], they have to do other things, someone’s hosting. Brownfield: A staple of Stewart’s approach was to expose the corrosive effect of cable news on political discourse. The Daily Show has moved away from that. Noah: Originally, because cable news was this new thing, Jon was holding their feet to the fire. But then at some point cable news became normal. People have just accepted that 24 hours of news, people shouting at each other all the time, no facts, just opinions, little boxes on a screen with people shouting—that’s news. And so I went, “If I don’t watch this, which I don’t, and if I consider myself a millennial and I look at other millennials, I go, ‘They don’t watch this either. They don’t get their news from this thing anymore.’ Then what are we missing out on and what can we be doing that’s a little bit different?” And that is actually talking about the news itself. Amira: It’s always on everybody to pay attention to that stuff, but it’s definitely less of a focus of the show now, for sure. Noah: You’re always aware of it. For instance, there’s that guy who runs around doing racist impressions of everyone. Jesse Watters. Haglund: He’s on Bill O’Reilly’s show a lot. Noah: He did a segment on how stupid Asian people are, according to him, and so we did a piece in response to that. [Daily Show correspondent] Ronny Chieng went down to Chinatown. The gist of our piece was, you’re saying people are stupid because they don’t speak your language. But if you ask them questions about politics and policy in Chinese, they would probably be able to give you better answers. HAIL, TRUMP! Brownfield: In a general way, the show remains about America but is talking to the world more than it once did. Noah: That’s where the blessing of Trump is, regardless of all his curses. Trump is a world-wide phenomenon. Everyone in the world is looking at America’s politics now. Doesn’t matter where you go. The new parties that are forming in Australia and in Austria, they’re talking about Donald Trump. The man who’s against globalization has in effect created a form of globalization in and around news and information. It’s enabled the show to speak about a wide berth of things that everyone Brownfield: How do you feel about the criticism that The Daily Show has lost a certain satirical edge because you come across as softer? Noah: I’ve said this to everyone here: I do not wish to add to the fray. I do not wish to add to the panic. I’m not an alarmist. Yes, there are things that get us heated up and riled up, but that’s not what I’m trying to create. Oftentimes, people make the mistake of misinterpreting anger and shouting as piercing. I’m like, no, that’s just rage. Rage is rage. Oftentimes, I feel like in comedy people make the mistake of thinking the bang is what creates the damage. But you can put a silencer on a gun and create even more damage without the sound. Get in, stick your target, smile, and keep moving— that’s what I thought Colbert was brilliant at. Brownfield: Still, it means shifting the show’s purview. The other night, you did an item about Amazon discontinuing sales of flip-flops with Gandhi’s likeness on them in India. But your comedic takeaway was, wait a minute. Gandhi himself espoused racist and sexist views during the years he spent living in South Africa. I sensed the studio audience didn’t quite know how to react. Noah: That’s why Jon and I got along so well. Because we have similar views in what we’re trying to do. It’s how it’s perceived that’s different. That’s what I find a lot of the time. Essentially what we’re trying to do is tell the truth. We’re also trying to find the answers together. Haglund: This whole election has—when I think about it, I feel like everybody wants to watch a show where it’s just pure vitriol directed at Trump. But Trump didn’t come from nowhere. Trump is a reflection of us. He’s not this guy who just snatched our country and ran off with it. We elected him. I feel like this whole thing has forced me to question so much. I was OK with this kind of stuff when the ends were results that I wanted, or when the guys I liked were doing it. And now that FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 51 the person on the other side is doing it, it horrifies me, so I need to re-evaluate what’s important to me, and what’s not. If you’re just watching someone who’s echoing your belief system, you just want to turn on TV to have someone be angry and match your anger, then you’re not challenged to re-examine why we wound up with a president like Trump. This whole argument about fake news. Now every news item I hear, it’s like, is this fake news? Because this really did happen, there was fake news. I feel like people should be questioning us as much as they’re questioning legit news sources. You can’t always put blind faith in the person who’s delivering you the information just because you like them. HILARIOUS AFRICAN ROOTS Brownfield: Ultimately it gets back to Trevor’s life experiences that inform his comedy. That’s what I find so interesting about you being here. When have the keys to an American late-night franchise ever been handed to a quote-unquote foreigner? From Africa, no less? Noah: That’s what’s been fun. I’ve got a writer from Uganda here who makes me look like I’m American. When he first came, no one could even understand what he said. Some people still can’t. Amira: He has a very thick accent. Noah: Wait, I’ll get him. (Noah phones for writer Joseph Opio, pictured bottom left.) Noah: This was a guy that I discovered through a friend. He was running The Daily Show in Uganda. He basically made his own news satirical show. He’s super-smart. (Opio enters the room…) Noah: Tell Paul a little bit about what you were doing in Uganda and how you came to be here. Opio: I had a show like The Daily Show, but it was like a one-man operation because we didn’t have the kind of resources The Daily Show has here. It was on television. All our TVs are free to air, so to speak. Amira: Joe tells us he was one of the most famous people in Uganda, and I have no idea how to verify that. Noah: This is a person I bring in, you hear how he speaks? Opio: Perfect American accent. Noah: He comes in, he knows more about American culture than some people in the room. He’s watched American movies that people... Haglund: Ask him anything about Baby’s Day Out. He knows. Noah: But on the page, Joseph Opio doesn’t have an accent, is not from Af52 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 rica. It is an experiment. That’s what I’m growing in time. People think about things now differently in a room. One of my favorite moments was when Hallie made Joe a feminist. It was around the tennis and soccer disputes. It was about equal pay, remember? The US women’s soccer team? There was an argument, and then Hallie broke down the argument for equal pay. He truly does not understand. Culturally we’ve come from a different place. Even small things in the building, stupid small things. In Africa, a man walks into a room first. In America, ladies first. And the reason we do that is because in African culture they say a man must go into the room because you don’t know what danger awaits. So if there’s a snake or something in there, why are you sending a woman in? You’re a coward. Opio: The hugging thing. Noah: Yeah, hugging is weird where we’re from. Opio: You don’t hug someone you’re not intimate with. Amira: They could have a snake on them. You just don’t know. Noah: You see? That joke is informed by the fact that an African came in the room. He may not have ever made that joke without being in contact with an African and having a conversation. This is essentially what The Daily Show is trying to carry on creating. It’s the spice trade of jokes. FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 53 WRITTEN BY LISA ROSEN PORTRAITS BY TOM KELLER Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick make short work out of long waits. Writers Paul Wernick(left) and Rhett Reese photographed at the The Little Bar. or those wondering why the superhero movie Deadpool was nominated in WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay category, look no further than the film’s opening credit sequence. Set to the dulcet tones of Angel of the Morning, over a frozen moment in the life of an upturned SUV full of combatants, we read: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX PRESENTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT SOME DOUCHEBAG’S FILM STARRING GOD’S PERFECT IDIOT A few more credits, then: PRODUCED BY ASSHATS before the pièce de résistance: WRITTEN BY THE REAL HEROES HERE Done, sold, give them the gold. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick lost track of who came up with which faux credits during post-production, but there’s no question who came up with theirs. “Nobody else would have written that,” Reese says. They’re as surprised as anyone else that Deadpool would give them cause to buy tuxedos. (The film also garnered nods from the PGA and DGA.) “Rhett and I feel like we have that movie in us, the serious drama that’s usually considered for awards season,” says Wernick. “We didn’t think this would be it.” Then again, they’ve worked on it as long and hard as any prestige film, and created a sort-of-anti-superhero movie, teeming with action and dripping with gore, that’s also a smart, funny, ribald love story. It’s a Marvel marvel. And kudos to the WGA for once again recognizing that comedy is harder than death. Deadpool started as a comic book series in 1990. Character Wade Wilson was a mercenary with a heart of gold who learned he had terminal cancer. An effort to find a cure eventually turned him into the powerful, disfigured, massively messed-up Deadpool. The series poked fun at its own genre, with Deadpool breaking the FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 55 third version, but you’re not allowed to go back to what was there originally.” Occasionally that rule fails them. “There will be a line that the other will change, and then the other will change back, and then we’ll change back again. At times we can get a little passive-aggressive,” Wernick confides. “We’ll have to jump fourth wall to comment on the action. The comic won a slew of fans, including star Ryan Reynolds, who attached himself to a Deadpool film project 11 years ago. At that point, Reese and Wernick were about six years into their writing partnership. The two had gone to the same high school in Arizona a few years apart, then met up again in Los Angeles after college. Wernick was producing reality television, and Reese was a screenwriter. The two put their talents together, coming up with an idea for a scripted parody of a reality show that was also a reality show in itself. The Joe Schmo Show stuck an average guy in a mansion with nine other contestants in an elimination game. Unbeknownst to him, everyone else was an actor, working off of loosely scripted plots and improvising around him. The truth was revealed at the end of the game. Reese describes it as “very much The Truman Show in a reality setting.” Adds Wernick, “It was probably the most fun we’ve ever had in Hollywood, even to this day. It was early 2000s, we didn’t really know what we were doing, it was the Wild West in reality TV. We had a writers’ room—it was a WGA show—and then you plug this X factor into it.” After a couple of seasons, Reese convinced Wernick to try writing a fictional series. Their Schmo writers’ room experience inspired them to use a corkboard and break stories together. Then, as now, they’d split up and go to their respective homes to write. “We leapfrog each other chronologically through the script. So you take Scenes 1 and 2, I’ll take 3 and 4,” Reese explains. “We divide up scenes based on how badly we want to write them, generally—” “Or how badly we don’t want to write them,” Wernick tosses in. “A very good point. Then we trade the scenes back and forth, revising each other’s changes. Our basic rule, and most often we follow it, is if the other person changes your line, you’re allowed to then rechange it to a 56 56 •• W WG GA AW W W WR R II TT TT EE N N B BY Y FD EE BC RE UMAB RE YR /| J A MN AU RA CR H Y2 2 00 1 71 7 on the phone and go, ‘How much do you really love this line?’ An example would be in Deadpool, when he says, ‘I’m Audi 5000.’ I love the line; for whatever reason it made me giggle. Rhett kept changing it, and I’m like, ‘We’ve got to keep it.’ Rhett’s like, ‘Nobody remembers what Audi 5000 was,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s exactly right, it’s Deadpool, he can make those obscure pop-culture references. And almost the more obscure they are, the funnier they become.’ Rhett still maintains that it doesn’t get a laugh in the theater. I have been in the room where people have laughed.” Reese’s even reply: “I think it’s very charming.” Back and forth the scenes go, with very little discussion necessary. “The iterative process of writing and rewriting and bolding things that have changed, and unbolding when you’re satisfied with them, and rebolding when you’re not, it’s like thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” Reese says. “It really does come together, and you don’t have to talk as much as you think during the writing.” That said, they talk at least half a dozen times a day, but mostly about business. “And how much we hate this person or that person,” Wernick says. Of the many advantages of working with a partner, “the objectivity that a person provides, looking at your scene for the first time fresh, is just invaluable, and something you can’t get on your own,” Reese says. The two have a trust built over decades; they’ve known each other for more than 30 years, and have written together for 17. Reese introduced Wernick to his future wife, married the couple, and is now godfather to their children. They also have minds that work along similarly skewed lines. Their first film was Zombieland, a zombie movie and a parody of a zombie movie at the same time. “The common thread from Joe Schmo Show to Deadpool is a tone in which we both make fun of a genre and also still are the genre,” Reese says. The combination makes for a lot of wrangling with tone. How do you go from humor to pathos without making the audience feel manipulated? “Life isn’t a comedy or a drama, it’s all those things wrapped into one,” Wernick says. “So we try to mix tones. It’s not easy; if it’s done wrong it can feel inconsistent. But we try to ground the movie with the varying tones by basically presenting life as you see it.” Reese describes a scene in Zombieland, navigating a path from tragedy to comedy that they weren’t sure would work. Woody Harrelson’s character, Tallahassee, reveals that his child died, and the film flashes back to the heartbreaking scene. Returning to the present, Tallahassee’s crying. “I think there were a few misty eyes in the audience, because it’s about a father losing his son,” Reese says. “But then a few seconds later—he’s playing Monopoly at the time with real money—he picks up a pile of $100 bills, dabs his eyes with the cash, and says, ‘I haven’t cried that hard since Titanic.’ We sat in the theater and listened as the audience essentially went from deathly still and feeling the emotion of a moment to a big laugh. We thought, We’re on to something here.” “The spacing of those tones is also very important,” Wernick adds. “If you stay too long in one particular tone, it then starts to feel like you’re in two different movies. It’s exactly why we very strategically bounce in and out of time and space in Deadpool.” They used a non-linear structure, because otherwise the film would have been frontloaded with the tragedy of Wade Wilson’s terminal cancer. “It’s very, very dark, and very serious, and very sad and tragic, and then he goes on this path and has all these torturous things happen to him and loses his girl, and then he becomes Deadpool, and he’s this crazy motherfucker who’s laughing and telling jokes and talking to camera, and knows that he’s in a movie. Had we told that story linearly—and there was a push to tell it linearly from the studio at one point—it would have been a very dark movie for the first half or two-thirds, and then once he becomes Deadpool it would have become a very silly movie. It would have felt very inconsistent in tone. By creating that non-linear structure, it allowed us to be tragic and dark, and then immediately pop in with some laughs, so the audience felt like, I’m on this ride with him, I’m not investing too much into one particular tone before I bounce to another one.” DFEECBERMU BAERRY/ J| AMN AU RA CR HY 22 00 11 77 W WG GA AW W W W RR II TT TT EE N N BB YY •• 57 55 “Most writers have that passion project that sits in their desk and gathers dust. It’s usually a small indie movie that tells an obscure story. Our passion project was a Marvel superhero movie. In a world of superhero movies each making a billion dollars, we couldn’t get it off the ground, and that was so terribly frustrating, so demoralizing, because we believed in it so much. We felt like, if we can’t get this made, we don’t know if we can get any movie made.” –Paul Wernick Remember how they stopped doing The Joe Schmo Show to create a series? That series was Zombieland Zombieland. Say what? They wrote it as a spec TV pilot and sold it to CBS in 2005, where it sat on shelves for a year and a half, because nobody thought a series about zombies would hit. They credit their producer, Gavin Polone, along with Sony Television, for letting them expand it into a two-hour TV movie that could serve as a back-door pilot. “We basically used that pilot episode as the first 58 pages of the screenplay,” Wernick says. “Episode 2 became the back half and climax of the feature.” As with Deadpool, the film jumps around in time and space. “A lot of people have examined the structure in Zombieland,” Reese says, “subjecting it to Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 analysis. And it’s all BS, because it was literally written for commercial breaks.” Zombieland came out in theaters in 2009, and was a huge success. The writers became Hollywood darlings for a while, “which we embraced in a real way,” Wernick says. “In the press, the talking point was, ‘There are so many sequels out there, and so many movies based on comic books and toys. Zombieland is this breath of fresh, original air,’ and we came off the success of Zombieland and booked a comic book movie and two sequels, one based on a toy. I’m not sure what that says about us.” The two sequels were Zombieland 2 and G.I. Joe: Retaliation. 58 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 The superhero movie was Deadpool. The Deadpool pitch didn’t go smoothly. The writers met with Reynolds and spun a tale that omitted the origin story, since it was such a cancery downer. “He was like, ‘Thanks but no thanks,’” Wernick says. Their agent begged for another shot, and sent over their pilot for an HBO drama called Watch. They met up again for lunch, “and we talked about the pathos and the darkness, and embracing all that amidst all the humor,” and by the time the check came he’d hired them. They worked with Reynolds to break the story for several months before going off to write it. “Our fear was that we were writing a dark, R-rated superhero movie, and would the studio ever make that,” Wernick recalls. “Ryan said, ‘Let’s write what’s in our hearts, and worry about whether they’re going to make it later.’” “And then we did worry about them making it later, for the next six years,” says Reese. “Exactly. All our fears were realized.” Worse, they had to take it out and rewrite another draft every single year, only to watch it get shelved again and again. “It was a very, very difficult six years, because it was a script that we were immensely proud of,” Wernick says. “Most writers have that passion project that sits in their desk and gathers dust. It’s usually a small indie movie that tells an obscure story. Our passion project was a Marvel superhero movie. In a world of superhero movies each making a billion dollars, we couldn’t get it off the ground, and that was so terribly frustrating, so demoralizing, because we believed in it so much. We felt like, FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 59 if we can’t get this made, we don’t know if we can get any movie made.” They kept busy throughout the ups and downs, working on other projects. “G.I. Joe gobbled up a year and a half. That was a monster,” Reese says. They made another HBO project that wasn’t picked up. “I would say the vast amount of our energy, when we’re not writing, is spent convincing people to trust us. It gets somewhat easier, but you’d still be shocked at how difficult it is, even when you acquire some success and some ammunition to say, we generally know what we’re talking about.” That said, Deadpool also taught them “that there is no final no. Something is still alive until the day you die, I guess.” Back in 2011, Deadpool director Tim Miller created two minutes of test footage for Fox. “We sat on it for three-plus years, Rhett, Ryan, Tim, and myself, wondering, how do we leak this and not get caught?” says Wernick. “We were like this hapless band of thieves who had this piece of gold that we were trying to get out to the open market and couldn’t figure out how to do it. We’re technological idiots.” Fortunately, someone savvier leaked it at Comic-Con 2014. They swear they have no idea who. “It was not the people who stood the most to benefit,” Reese insists. The subsequent fan frenzy lit a fire under Fox, and they greenlighted the project. After six years of misery, they went into production within a few months. ‘They’ included the writers, because Reynolds and Miller wanted them on set for the entire shoot. “We always felt like if we could contribute one 60 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 “Writers on films are generally relegated to the back half of the donkey’s costume,” adds Wernick. “Yes, there needs to be one voice, the director’s. But it all starts in the writer’s head. So as long as there’s collaboration and trust, and the director doesn’t feel threatened by the writer, and the writer doesn’t make the director feel threatened, it’s such a wonderful experience for everyone involved.” little thing every day that helps the movie get better, we’ve done our job, and oftentimes it was only one thing a day,” Reese says, crediting Miller and Reynolds for creating an inclusive atmosphere. “Writers on films are generally relegated to the back half of the donkey’s costume,” adds Wernick. “Yes, there needs to be one voice, the director’s. But it all starts in the writer’s head. So as long as there’s collaboration and trust, and the director doesn’t feel threatened by the writer, and the writer doesn’t make the director feel threatened, it’s such a wonderful experience for everyone involved.” Even after the shoot wrapped, they stayed on, spending every day in the edit bay, adding dialogue. “A lot of it was written in post, because it’s a man in the mask,” Wernick says. “You can change lines, much like an animated movie.” Fox marketing then hired them to work with Reynolds on much of the film’s ad campaign. By the end of the process, the studio gave them executive producer credits as well. Even after all the dicking around they endured, the writers empathize with the studio’s hesitation. “Fox took a massive risk by making this movie,” Wernick says. “There was always “Somebody went to Stanford,” Wernick says. “There’s some really high-minded classy stuff in there, but then there’s bawdy and blue humor—The Miller’s Tale being the prime example—that make you go, Oh my god.” Adds Wernick, “Mel Brooks and Steve Martin are geniuses; nobody looks at their art and goes, well that’s puerile. By no means am I putting us in that class, but those are our heroes.” The film gets super meta super fast. As in the comic book, Deadpool breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging he’s a character in a movie, and cracking on other Marvel movies. the fear that it would appeal to one group of people: comic book nerds.” Surprisingly, the movie tested higher with women than men. “I do think we tapped into something by telling a love story, and giving the movie a beating heart,” Wernick says. Make that two. Lest we forget, Deadpool is, at heart, a love story. (As is Zombieland.) “People are always trying to find that next generation of romantic comedy,” Wernick says. “How do you tell that so it doesn’t feel like boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl? That stale formula works, if you do it right.” Deadpool is the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. It isn’t just a romantic comedy, it’s a romantic fucking comedy, fabulous in its filthiness. “Blue and classy don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” Reese says. “Not to compare this to what we do, but if you look at The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer—” Hence the opening credit sequence. “We weren’t sure it was going to work, but it really does set the tone for an irreverent movie,” Reese says. After all the drafts—adding characters, taking out characters, even trying to rein it into PG-13 territory—they estimate the final draft contained about 70 percent of the first. “Ultimately, I think it was this mix of tones and textures and all that that made it the success it was,” says Wernick. “Because it did feel fresh and original.” In that vein, up next is Life. This film isn’t meta-anything. “Life is intended to make you sweat the way Deadpool is intended to make you laugh,” Reese says. “We haven’t seen it yet ourselves, but if it works it’s a terrifying thriller about a crew of astronauts in the International Space Station, in a very claustrophobic space, discovering life that comes from beyond earth, and challenged when that life proves to be hardier and more dangerous than they expected.” Starring Jake Gyllenhall and Reynolds, the writers call it an A-lister movie with a B-movie heart. They’re also in pre-production for Deadpool 2, because apparently a year can’t go by without them working on a Deadpool script. When asked how they were going to make that and their Zombieland sequel not suck, Wernick replies, “Got any ideas?” Says Reese, “You’re trying to find that perfect balance between what’s familiar and what people loved about the first one, and then enough new stuff so that you don’t feel like you’re rehashing the first one.” With the original elements, “you twist them just a little bit.” They are well aware that most sequels don’t end up as good as the originals. “You’re always working with that fear in the back of your mind,” Reese says. “But you also know there are movies like The Godfather 2, Aliens, The Road Warrior, sequels that at least match if not surpass the original. You try to hit that mark, or at least make one as good as the first, and if you fall short you fall short.” Wernick groans. “Lisa’s headline for the article is going to be: “Deadpool 2, Writer Says as Good as Godfather.” Leaving nothing on the field, Reese goes deep: “Have I mentioned that breaking the fourth wall goes back to Shakespeare?” FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 61 Writers Guild Awards NOMINATIONS Transparent, Written by Arabella Anderson, Bridget Bedard, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster, Jessi Klein, Stephanie Kornick, Ethan Kuperberg, Ali Liebegott, Our Lady J, Faith Soloway, Jill Soloway; Amazon Studios SCREENPLAY NOMINEES ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Hell or High Water, Written by Taylor Sheridan; CBS Films Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Written by Emily Altman, Robert Carlock, Azie Mira Dungey, Tina Fey, Lauren Gurganous, Sam Means, Dylan Morgan, Marlena Rodriguez, Dan Rubin, Meredith Scardino, Josh Siegal, Allison Silverman, Leila Strachan; Netflix La La Land, Written by Damien Chazelle; Lionsgate Loving, Written by Jeff Nichols; Focus Features Manchester by the Sea, Written by Kenneth Lonergan; Amazon Studios/Roadside Attractions Veep, Written by Rachel Axler, Sean Gray, Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck, Erik Kenward, Billy Kimball, Steve Koren, David Mandel, Jim Margolis, Lew Morton, Georgia Pritchett, Will Smith, Alexis Wilkinson; HBO Moonlight, Screenplay by Barry Jenkins, Story by Tarell McCraney; A24 ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Atlanta, Written by Donald Glover, Stephen Glover, Stefani Robinson, Paul Simms; FX Deadpool, Written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick; Based on the X-Men Comic Books; Twentieth Century Fox Film Better Things, Written by Pamela Adlon, Louis C.K., Cindy Chupack, Gina Fattore; FX Fences, Screenplay by August Wilson; Based on his Play; Paramount Pictures Stranger Things, Written by Paul Dichter, Justin Doble, The Duffer Brothers, Karl Gajdusek, Jessica Mecklenburg, Jessie Nickson-Lopez, Alison Tatlock; Netflix Hidden Figures, Screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi; Based on the Book by Margot Lee Shetterly; Twentieth Century Fox Film Nocturnal Animals, Screenplay by Tom Ford; Based on the Novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright; Focus Features DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY Author: The JT LeRoy Story, Written by Jeff Feuerzeig; Amazon Studios LONG FORM ADAPTED 11.22.63, Written by Bridget Carpenter, Brigitte Hales, Joe Henderson, Brian Nelson, Quinton Peeples, Based on the novel by Stephen King; Hulu The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Written by Scott Alexander, Joe Robert Cole, D.V. DeVincentis, Maya Forbes, Larry Karaszewski, Wally Wolodarsky, Based on the book The Run of His Life by Jeffrey Toobin; FX Madoff, Written by Ben Robbins, Inspired by the Book The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth by Brian Ross; ABC Westworld, Written by Ed Brubaker, Bridget Carpenter; Dan Dietz, Karl Gajdusek, Halley Gross; Lisa Joy; Katherine Lingenfelter, Dominic Mitchell, Jonathan Nolan, Roberto Patino, Daniel T. Thomsen, Charles Yu; HBO The Night Of, Written by Richard Price, Steve Zaillian, Based on the BBC Series Criminal Justice Created by Peter Moffat; HBO Roots, Written by Lawrence Konner, Alison McDonald, Charles Murray, Mark Rosenthal, Based upon the Book by Alex Haley; History Channel COMEDY SERIES SHORT FORM NEW MEDIA – ORIGINAL Atlanta, Written by Donald Glover, Stephen Glover, Stefani Robinson, Paul Simms; FX “Episode 101” (Now We’re Talking), Written by Tug Coker, Tommy Dewey; go90.com Silicon Valley, Written by Megan Amram, Alec Berg, Donick Cary, Adam Countee, Jonathan Dotan, Mike Judge, Carrie Kemper, John Levenstein, Dan Lyons, Carson Mell, Dan O’Keefe, Clay Tarver, Ron Weiner; HBO 62 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY “Escape the Room” (Life Ends at 30), Written by Michael Field; vimeo.com “Itsy Bitsy Spider” Episode 1 (Thug Passion), Written by Motrya | “Fish Out of Water” (BoJack Horseman), Written by Elijah Aron & Jordan Young; Netflix “A Princess on Lothal” (Star Wars Rebels), Written by Steven Melching; Disney XD “Switch” (Better Call Saul), Written by Thomas Schnauz; AMC Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel’le, Written by Dianne Houston; Lifetime Stranger Things, Written by Paul Dichter, Justin Doble, The Duffer Brothers, Karl Gajdusek, Jessica Mecklenburg, Jessie Nickson-Lopez, Alison Tatlock; Netflix “First Day of Rule” (Elena of Avalor), Written by Craig Gerber; Disney Channel LONG FORM ORIGINAL Harley and the Davidsons, Written by Seth Fisher, Nick Schenk, Evan Wright; Discovery Channel Game of Thrones, Written by David Benioff, Bryan Cogman, Dave Hill, D.B. Weiss; HBO “Barthood” (The Simpsons), Written by Dan Greaney; Fox EPISODIC DRAMA Confirmation, Written by Susannah Grant; HBO Better Call Saul, Written by Ann Cherkis, Vince Gilligan, Jonathan Glatzer, Peter Gould, Gennifer Hutchison, Heather Marion, Thomas Schnauz, Gordon Smith; AMC “Under Siege” (The Strain), Written by Bradley Thompson & David Weddle, Based on the novels by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan; fxnetworks.com Westworld, Written by Ed Brubaker, Bridget Carpenter, Dan Dietz, Karl Gajdusek, Halley Gross, Lisa Joy, Katherine Lingenfelter, Dominic Mitchell, Jonathan Nolan, Roberto Patino, Daniel T. Thomsen, Charles Yu; HBO Zero Days, Written by Alex Gibney; Magnolia Pictures The Americans, Written by Peter Ackerman, Tanya Barfield, Joshua Brand, Joel Fields, Stephen Schiff, Joe Weisberg, Tracey Scott Wilson; FX “Part 4” (Fear the Walking Dead: Passage), Written by Lauren Signorino & Mike Zunic; amc.com “Stop the Presses” (BoJack Horseman), Written by Joe Lawson; Netflix American Crime, Written by Julie Hébert, Sonay Hoffman, Keith Huff, Stacy A. Littlejohn, Kirk A. Moore, Davy Perez, Diana Son; ABC DRAMA SERIES SHORT FORM NEW MEDIA – ADAPTED This Is Us, Written by Isaac Aptaker, Elizabeth Berger, Bekah Brunstetter, Dan Fogelman, Vera Herbert, Joe Lawson, Kay Oyegun, Aurin Squire, K.J. Steinberg, Donald Todd; NBC Command and Control, Telescript by Robert Kenner & Eric Schlosser, Story by Brian Pearle and Kim Roberts; Based on the book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser; American Experience Films TELEVISION AND NEW MEDIA NOMINEES “The Party” (The Commute), Written by Linsey Stewart & Dane Clark; youtube.com ANIMATION NEW SERIES Arrival, Screenplay by Eric Heisserer; Based on the Story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang; Paramount Pictures Tomycz; vimeo.com MARCH 2017 “Gloves Off” (Better Call Saul), Written by Gordon Smith; AMC “I Am a Storm” (Shameless), Written by Sheila Callaghan; Showtime “Klick” (Better Call Saul), Written by Heather Marion & Vince Gilligan; AMC “The Trip” (This Is Us), Written by Vera Herbert; NBC “The Winds of Winter” (Game of Thrones), Written for Television by David Benioff & D.B. 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ROBOT 1.51exfiltratiOn, Story by Adam Hines, Kor Adana; Written by Adam Hines; Night School Studio “Muhammad Ali: Remembering A Legend” (48 Hours), Written by Jerry Cipriano, John Craig Wilson; CBS News QUIZ AND AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION NEWS SCRIPT – ANALYSIS, FEATURE, OR COMMENTARY Hollywood Game Night, Head Writer: Grant Taylor; Writers: “CBS Sunday Morning Almanac” June 12, 2016 (CBS Sunday FEBRUARY Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Written by Neil Druckmann, Josh Scherr; Additional Writing Tom Bissell, Ryan James; Naughty Dog | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 63 SCREEN LAUREL AWARD WRITTEN BY FX FEENEY ILLUSTRATION BY DREW FRIEDMAN From JFK to Zero Days Casting Our Ballots in the United States of Storytelling, with Oliver Stone and Alex Gibney. “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” —Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975 (Courtesy Wikileaks) E arly on the 23rd of November, 1963, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover briefed his new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, over the phone about an important discovery he’d made regarding the previous day’s events in Dallas. President Kennedy had been murdered less than 20 hours earlier. News reports were circulating that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald—still alive and under arrest at that moment—had, two months earlier, crossed into Mexico to contact the Soviet Embassy and arrange for a visa to Cuba. LBJ had been briefed minutes earlier by the CIA, and director John McCone told him their evidence of this trip proved Oswald killed Kennedy as part of a communist plot. Following-up on the CIA’s revelation, Johnson asked his FBI chief: “Have you established any more?” “No,” Hoover told him. But: “There’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason—we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. … It appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there.” A second person. Calling himself Lee Harvey Oswald. Who was not Lee Harvey Oswald. According to the transcript at the Johnson Presidential library in Austin, Texas, after pointing out that the Soviet Embassy visitor only posed as Oswald, Hoover let LBJ silently “chew on the implications,” as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable. Their so-called lone assassin had been the target of a high-level imposter, eight weeks prior to his deed. Johnson was free to “draw his own conclusions as to who was responsible for that impersonation.” Think of that. The President of the United States and his FBI chief, staring at an apparent plot to kill the previous president, one whose operational fingerprints implicate their own side. Yet (as Hoover found even more galling) being treated FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 65 Oliver Stone’s JFK remains a polemical, muckraking marvel, rivetingly suspenseful despite 53 years of spoilers. The questions this film ignited in the American imagination not only revealed a long-held, heartfelt, widespread rage against chroniclers of the news—a resentment which has reached forest-fire proportions in the presidential election of 2016—but led directly in 1992 to the passage, through Congress, of the JFK Records Act. The bill directs that all existing documents related to the assassination be made public by October 2017. by their supposed peers as collateral players—mere chumps to be conned. Later, in December of ‘63, still seething at the CIA’s lie to Johnson and himself, Hoover cautioned one of his agents to be wary when dealing with the agency. “I hope you aren’t taken in,” he scribbled in the margin of a memo: “I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor the [italics his] false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico. Only to mention two instances of their double-dealing.” MUCKRAKERS, UNITE! That Johnson’s once-classified conversations with Hoover are now on the public record at all is the direct result of a well-written film. Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991)—co-scripted with Zachary Sklar, drawn from books by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and assassination scholar Jim Marrs—survived a potentially lethal crossfire of attacks on its first release, a brutal barrage from every major US news outlet of the day, aimed not only at the contents of the film but against Stone’s personal integrity. In defiance of this, in fulfillment of a nationwide appetite, the American public nevertheless rebelled and flocked to see what the picture had to say, earning it over 66 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 $200 million dollars at that year’s box office. To this day JFK remains a polemical, muckraking marvel, rivetingly suspenseful despite 53 years of spoilers. One can argue with its theories and conclusions, but not the questions it raises. The blaze these questions ignited in the American imagination not only revealed a long-held, heartfelt, widespread rage against chroniclers of the news—a resentment which has reached forest-fire proportions in the Presidential election of 2016—but led directly in 1992 to the passage, through Congress, of the JFK Records Act (upgraded in ’98). The bill directs that all existing documents related to the assassination be made public by October 2017. Among those items already declassified are the LBJ transcripts quoted above. We have to look past movie history and to two pillars of American literature—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair—to find a specimen of dramatic storytelling so politically consequential. Small wonder the WGAW is awarding Oliver Stone this year’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement. His Nixon (1995) is of a thematic continuum with JFK, as is W (2008) which he directed. Stone’s perpetual engagement with the drama and riddles of American history are likewise of a piece with his more diverse forays into Salvador, Vietnam, Wall Street, talk radio, “natural born” killers, or even professional football. Each of his films has political bite and could be characterized as a period piece set in the Historical Present. “Even Stone’s most amoral characters are, in the end, like us: all too human,” Guild president Howard A. Rodman writes in tribute. “Stone has held a mirror up to our times, and dares us again and again to look at our nation, and ourselves—without turning away.” Stone’s latest, Snowden (2016), is a perfectly wrought chamber piece that accompanies us in a dance along shadowy moral tightropes over which Obama, for all his excellence, had been condemned to preside. His film calls our attention to the abyss below, a snake pit of invasive surveillance into which we appear to be hurtling for keeps alongside Trump. It speaks volumes about how much the world has caught up with Stone’s preoccupations that Snowden has been so serenely received—even taken for granted—by pundits and critics who, if anything, complain Stone has “mellowed.” Grown subtle, I would argue. In the past, he grabbed viewers by the shoulders and would direct us as much as he did the movie itself. In unfurling the story of CIA employee Edward Snowden and his evolution from patriot to whistle-blower, embraced and vilified worldwide on a sudden par with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Stone is at pains to let the facts speak for themselves, with particular attention to those pressures and choices that reveal Snowden as a human being. Ironically, given the paranoia that has become so much the air we breathe over the past 50 odd years, when Snowden went public with his hacked treasures in June 2013, my initial impulse was to think of him as a double or triple agent. “We need to cultivate our own Assange,” I pictured the team at the National Security Agency plotting, prior to giving this prodigy the assignment of going rogue. Stone has applied his fierce intellect to arguing the opposite: the mystery of how conscience operates in a company man; of how the virtues that made Snowden such a trusted CIA and NSA contractor (loyalty to an ideal; a relentless dedication to problem-solving) became the seeds of his rebellion as he grew to believe that our overzealous National Security Agency was, if anything, the greatest threat we face to America’s constitutional security. IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL “This is not a Snowden kind of thing,” the NSA insider tells Alex Gibney, in his latest documentary Zero Days (2016), a WGA nominee for Best Documentary screenplay. “What he did was wrong. He went too far. He gave away too much.” This insider is an anonymous “woman” (the implied gender could be a disguise) whose voice and face Gibney abstracts. Their topic is “Stuxnet,” the public name for the 2010 Cyber Attack launched against Iran’s nuclear reactors. According to her, this malware’s actual code name was “Olympic Games.” O.G., Stuxnet—by whatever moniker the international spy agencies used—circled the cyber-globe, set up shop in Iran and, as Gibney’s informer says, closed the doors behind it. “Once inside, the worm acted on its own.” A Zero Day assault, computer executive Liam O’Murchu tells Gibney, “is an exploit that nobody knows about except the attacker, so there’s no protection against it—there’s been ‘zero days’ protection against it. That’s what attackers value.” O’Murchu discovered Stuxnet, together with his fellow civilian coworker Eric Chien, while employed at the Santa Monica offices of Symantec. The virus briefly throbbed through the Symantec computer systems en route to Iran in June, 2010. Its passage was muscular, self-contained, and palpably dangerous, like an anaconda in full swoop beneath the kicking feet of defenseless swimmers. Chien and O’Murchu explain to Gibney how they realized this was no ordinary malware, that it was “elegant,” devised by “someone powerful,” navigating worldwide, literally FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 67 Alex Gibney’s only access to a bottom-line truth comes through the words shared by his documentary’s masked source: “We did Stuxnet. It’s a fact: CIA, NSA, and the Military Cyber Command. It was a huge, multi-national, inter-agency opera- tion. What I’m willing to give you will be limited, but we’re talking because everyone’s getting the story wrong, and we have to get it right.” just-passing-by, coursing and coiling underfoot as it probed every private station (millions, billions) in search of a specific target. Conscious of what they were staring at, Chien joked to O’Murchu: “Neither of us is suicidal, right? If one of us turns up dead on Monday, the other will know.” Grassy Knoll Gallows Humor, native to these realms of the unreal we’ve been inhabiting for half a century. Gibney’s Zero Days graphics are characteristically brilliant at dramatizing Stuxnet’s technical intricacies, just as they were for the hacks described in his 2013 film, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. We’re shown in luminous precision how the cyber-worm penetrates the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz and—acting for itself like an independent Artificial Intelligence entity in a science fiction movie—takes charge, lying to Iran’s technicians and prompting the fast-spinning centrifuges under their bug-eyed scrutiny to wobble, accelerate, and tear themselves apart. This destroyed plans by Iran’s leaders for building a nuclear arsenal any time soon; it also added a new and terrifying dimension to world warfare: “Malware capable of real-world physical destruction,” as the NSA insider describes it. No government or entity has ever claimed official responsibility—neither for the attack, nor for the double murder of Iran’s two top nuclear scientists that preceded it. Hillary Clinton, shown in an archive clip from her tenure as Secretary of State, adamantly denies any US role in the attacks. Former CIA director Michael Hayden smiles like The Cheshire Cat when asked on camera about Stuxnet: “Next question, please.” Gibney persists: Why can’t he talk openly? “Classified,” Hayden replies. Pressed further, still smiling, he offers, “Two answers: ‘I 68 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 don’t know,’ and ‘I wouldn’t talk about it anyway.’” Counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke and other bigwigs try to be helpful but are opaque. Gibney—who also narrates—is understandably exasperated that it can be this monumentally impossible to get anybody in the know to talk with him on the record: How can you have a debate, he asks, if everything’s a secret? THE PLAYERS AND THE PLAYED Gibney’s only access to a bottom-line truth comes through the words shared by the documentary’s masked source. She admits to what no one else will tell him: “We did Stuxnet. It’s a fact: CIA, NSA, and the Military Cyber Command. It was a huge, multi-national, inter-agency operation. Our main partner was Israel—Mossad unit 8200.” Why has she come forward? “What I’m willing to give you will be limited, but we’re talking because everyone’s getting the story wrong, and we have to get it right.” She insists upon a more challenging limit. This mystery source is—of necessity—not a single person, but a composite of several NSA operatives who were only willing to answer Gibney under conditions of complete invisibility. It is actress Janice Tucker who wears the digital mask. She speaks verbatim the transcripts taken by Gibney during his off-camera, deepcover interviews. He reveals this trick at the movie’s end, but fairly. One could see he was getting nowhere with Hayden, Clarke, or other public gatekeepers. If the deeper-level NSA players who’ve come forward are somehow “playing” Gibney—using his film as a mouthpiece to plant a leak agreedupon at some higher level—he invites us to join the charade, eyes open. The final effect he achieves is like that of a magician, whipping a tablecloth away with a snap—while the facts he’s painstakingly gathered gleam upright and undisturbed, right where they were standing. (The NSA, CIA, and the Mossad have issued no denials against the film since its 2016 release.) What stands is the warning we’ve been accorded. Cyber War is no longer a figment of the future—that future is here, now—and it is world warfare’s first major step beyond the splitting of the atom, the unleashing of Weapons of Mass Disruption. The Stuxnet malware was a spectacular success against Iran, but by so boldly playing our hand we exposed the cards we’re holding to the eyes of other hostile players around ALEX GIBNEY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 57 the global table, and have invited reprisal. “If we can do it to them, they can do it to us,” the source(s) tell us. We’ve invited our handiwork to be reverse-engineered, particularly by any phalanx of cybernauts hard at work for Vladimir Putin. Gibney’s WGA-nominated documentary feels all the more prophetic now that it’s been convincingly argued, with bipartisan support, before the United States Congress that Russians aggressively sabotaged Hillary Clinton with their latest mischief and slyly boosted the fortunes of their fair-haired boy. Blowback: Donald Trump, the Stuxnet President. WARRING NARRATIVES Call this the Age of Disbelief. Conspiracy theories now flourish like a national sick joke, left and right, about every pivotal event, whether it’s 9/11 or the slaughter of children at Sandy Hook. It’s as if we’ve driven ourselves mad by not squarely facing the molestation we suffered as a society under those bushes behind the grassy knoll. Whoever did or did not kill JFK, his death closed one chapter in American history—our sense of the United States and its heritage as a shared adventure, “the masterpiece of human history,” as my late friend Michael Cimino put it. The murder of Lee Oswald in police custody two days later began the chapter we are still living in—the one in which almost nobody believes anything we’re told, especially by the government, a schism in the American imagination which continues to dominate our politics, and has reached a surrealist, even psychedelic climax with the elevation of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. Trump’s resistance to his Intelligence Briefings is understandable if we remember how the CIA lied to LBJ and Hoover— but they had the sense to play their doubts close to the vest. For the alternative is an insane howl: “We’re in a death battle, New World Order,” barks Alex Jones, a Texas talk show host of whom Trump is particularly fond. “9/11 was an inside job,” Jones likes 70 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 to holler. “The Sandy Hook Massacre was a hoax! Globalists are pulling out every stop to plunge the world into war!” Early in his campaign, Trump told Jones on the air: “I just want to say your reputation is amazing … We’ll be speaking a lot.” The day after the election—9/11, meet 11/9—Trump phoned Jones in private to reiterate his respect and gratitude. “Everything is true and nothing is true,” President Barack Obama sighed post-election to David Remnick of The New Yorker, coming to grips with the shrieking gusts of Assange-level Wiki-whistles and Breitbart-bartered Fake News that defined the 2016 Election. “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel-Prize winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll,” he went on to say. “And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.” Stone has been making this point for years, not only in his hyper-kinetic, multilayered style of filmmaking (especially since JFK), but also through the more meditative examinations to which he’s given voice in such documentary work as his 2012 series, The Untold History of the United States (director). Once a lone voice in the wilderness, today he has plenty of company. “History,” wrote James Joyce “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” We may be at the mercy of storytellers, but here’s the good news: We are storytellers. That is a truth fundamental to all human beings—each of us lives and breathes our own life story. Our times on this earth are made spiritual by our needs to seize and comprehend not only our own stories, but those of whom we love. Those of us accorded the gift and vocation of “writer” merely live this quest with conscious intensity. “Power corrupts, poetry cleanses,” John F. Kennedy said in his last public address. The date was October 26, 1963. He was in Amherst, Massachusetts to dedicate the Robert Frost library, and had only a few weeks to live. “The great artist,” continued JFK, “has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world … If sometimes our greatest artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes [her, or] him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” We have our work cut out for us. WARNER BROS. TELEVISION GROUP PROUDLY CONGRATULATES OUR NOMINEES FOR THE 2017 WRITERS GUILD AWARDS DRAMA SERIES NEW SERIES WRITTEN BY ED BRUBAKER, BRIDGET CARPENTER, DAN DIETZ, HALLEY GROSS, LISA JOY, KATHERINE LINGENFELTER, DOMINIC MITCHELL, JONATHAN NOLAN, ROBERTO PATINO, DANIEL T. THOMSEN, CHARLES YU EPISODIC DRAMA “I AM A STORM” WRITTEN BY SHEILA CALLAGHAN LONG FORM ADAPTED WRITTEN BY BRIDGET CARPENTER, BRIGITTE HALES, JOE HENDERSON, BRIAN NELSON, QUINTON PEEPLES BASED ON THE NOVEL BY STEPHEN KING SHORT FORM NEW MEDIA - ORIGINAL “EPISODE 101” WRITTEN BY TUG COKER, TOMMY DEWEY ON-AIR PROMOTION (TELEVISION, NEW MEDIA OR RADIO) WRITTEN BY DAN GREENBERGER (CBS) TM & © 2017 WBEI. All Rights Reserved. VALENTINE DAVIES AWARD WRITTEN BY DAVID GRITTEN PORTRAITS BY BARRY MARSDEN What Have You Done for Me Lately? Richard Curtis’ activism and screenwriting change the world—for the better. I t’s been more than 20 years since Richard Curtis won a WGA award (and landed an Oscar nomination) for his screenplay of the British comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral. His distinctive writing, rooted in sharply observed but benign comedy, was equally evident in the subsequent hit films Notting Hill and Love Actually, as well as his adaptations of the first two Bridget Jones novels. With these films, he effectively created his own sub-genre; and for a decade or so, it felt as if he had personally shifted the epicenter of movie romantic comedies to England. All of these films bear Curtis’ unmistakable stamp, which itself feels like an extension of his own character. In person he is cheerful, affable, self-deprecating—and just occasionally a little halting, shy, and awkward. Not so far removed, then, from Hugh Grant’s characters in those first three hits. Yet there are other facets to Curtis. He is upbeat and optimistic about life, and even in these harsh times he clearly believes people are essentially good. Not only do these traits serve the comic aspect of his films, they also inform the other half of his life, which has to do with helping make the world an immeasurably better place to live. Curtis, 60, is this year’s recipient of the WGAW’s Valentine Davies award in recognition of his humanitarian efforts and community service. There are numerous reasons why he’s especially deserving of such an honor. He is co-founder and vice-chair of Comic Relief, the charitable organization he launched in 1985 with British actor-comedian Lenny Henry after they visited famine-ravaged Ethiopia. Three years later, Comic Relief launched the BBC telethon Red Nose Day from Ethiopia; this fund-raising initiative featured dozens of comedians and other celebrities who urged viewers to make donations to causes and projects in the Third 72 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 World. Watched by an astonishing 30 million people (half the population of the entire UK), it raised £15 million ($18.15 million). The telethon has since grown enormously as an annual TV event, and donations now exceed £1 billion ($1.21 billion) representing a success of extraordinary proportions. Red Nose Day only launched in the US on NBC in 2015, but the first two annual broadcasts have already raised a total of $57 million. CAMPAIGNING & ACTIVISM Curtis heads up an enormously influential fundraising organization with worldwide clout. You might imagine this would be a full-time job. In his life, it is precisely half that: “I’ve tended to spend 50 percent on fun and games (by which he means screenwriting) and 50 percent on fundraising,” he says. “I’ve twice taken an entire year off [from writing] to do a mix between campaigning and activism. I did that in 2005, and then again in 2014-15.” His attraction to the idea of philanthropy first struck him in his student days at Oxford: “I used to sit around at university with lots of people who were complaining about poverty and the government—while they bought themselves five rounds of beer. And I used to think: Take the cash, give it to someone whose life you want to change. Get yourself out of the pub and do some political work. That was when I became interested in making a difference to people’s lives in any way I could. And that’s what finally happened with Red Nose Day.” At the point he and Henry launched RND (as they call it in-house), Curtis was by no means a public figure, but he already had a reputation as a writer in British TV comedy. At Oxford, he met and befriended Rowan Atkinson, who later became globally famous as the comic character Mr. Bean. The FEBRUARY 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 73 Richard Curtis sees his advocacy work and screenwriting as part of a continuum: the one feeds the other, and always did. Films and TV, he says, have opened his mind and broadened his horizons. “I feel I’m part of a large community that’s very aware of how it’s possible to use entertainment skills to change people’s hearts and minds.” two men appeared together in university revues (“Rowan was the talent and I was just the stooge,” Curtis explains). Curtis was featured in Atkinson’s breakthrough show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and they co-wrote a BBC radio show in 1978 before advancing into TV, writing sketches for the series Not the Nine O’Clock News. Starting in 1983, Curtis co-wrote the popular BBC series Blackadder, first with Atkinson and then with Ben Elton. He had become a significant name within the British TV industry—but when Red Nose Day launched, Curtis could still walk through London unrecognized. He was already gravitating toward writing for feature films, and his underrated screenwriting debut, The Tall Guy, was released in 1989. Jeff Goldblum played Dexter, an unsuccessful American actor in London understudying for the lead role in a musical about the Elephant Man; his main job is as fall guy to an egocentric comedian (played by Atkinson). Dexter falls for a nurse (Emma Thompson) who treats him for hay fever; one of their amorous encounters is so vigorous they succeed in wrecking an entire bedroom. “It never occurred to me I was writing romantic comedy,” says Curtis about the film. “I was just trying to write what I thought I knew about. The Tall Guy was about someone who was a stooge for a comedian—something I’d done with Rowan—and someone who had also fallen for a nurse while she was administering hay fever injections, which I’d also done. So it started a pattern of me writing characters who said things I’d never had the nerve to say.” He has always insisted this was even true of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), now regularly cited as one of the great romantic comedies of all time. Some scenes in it sprang directly from Curtis’ life: he cites an incident when, after a dance at a wedding, an attractive woman cheerfully propositioned him, but he was too bashful to accept her offer. That found its way into the film, which became the top-grossing British movie at the time of its release—until Curtis’ Notting Hill superseded it five years later. He struck box office gold a third time in 2003 with Love Actually. Altman-esque in structure if not in tone, it’s a largely upbeat account of various people falling in love in nine loosely intertwining stories. It capped a decade of astounding commercial success. 74 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 COMIC & FAMINE RELIEF Yet during this period, when Curtis’ film career soared to stratospheric heights, his work for Comic Relief not only continued, it increased. It coincided with Curtis broadening the sweep of his humanitarian interests through his role in Make Poverty History, an international coalition focusing on issues relating to aid, trade, and justice. For his part in Make Poverty History, Curtis joined forces in 2005 with musician Bob Geldof, a prime mover of the historic Live Aid rock concerts 20 years previously; together the two men helped organize the string of 10 “Live 8” benefit concerts, held around the world, mostly on the same July day. (The biggest, in London’s Hyde Park, starred Paul McCartney, U2, The Who, and Pink Floyd.) Since Love Actually, Curtis had been mulling over the notion of bringing together the two disparate strands of his working life—by making a film that directly reflected his concerns about the future of the planet. The result was The Girl in the Cafe (2005), made for television and financed by the BBC and HBO. 2005 had long been scheduled as the year for a G8 conference to address global poverty, and Curtis seized the chance to write a screenplay about political commitment and a worthy cause. “I had an extra valve put in when I started doing the Make Poverty History campaign,” he recalls. “I thought, What we want to try and do is convince the G8 that our responsibilities must be taken seriously—and that the public would like to live in a world without extreme poverty, where climate change wasn’t wreaking havoc, particularly among the poor.” To maintain the audience’s interest, he unsurprisingly framed this serious-minded movie as a sophisticated romance, though a tentative one of the May-December variety. Bill Nighy (a perennial Curtis acting favorite) plays Lawrence, a shy senior civil servant in the British government who happens to meet Gina, a fiery young Scottish woman with strong opinions about global poverty. He invites her to accompany him to the G8 summit conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she jeopardizes his career by speaking out fiercely at a formal dinner attended by several heads of state. Yet the summit eventually agrees to honor promises they made five years earlier about the issue. The Girl in the Cafe was seen by a tiny fraction of the audience who saw Four Weddings or Notting Hill—some three or four million—though Curtis calls it “the film I’ve been involved in of which I’m most proud.” Yet ironically, his participation in The Girl in the Cafe more or less started and ended with the screenplay: “I was very busy that year with the Make Poverty History campaign, so it was also the film of mine I had the least to do with. It’s slightly alarming it turned out so well. Perhaps I should have been more hands-off throughout my career. I only turned up on one day’s shooting.” On that day, he recalls, he made a single suggestion to director David Yates: Surely Gina should stand up to make her impassioned plea about world poverty to these eminent politicians at the dinner table? “Yates said no. And he was right. So a good thing I wasn’t there for longer.” As if to underline that making The Girl in the Cafe was not an isolated quixotic gesture, in 2012 Curtis wrote Mary and Martha, another BBC-HBO venture, starring Hilary Swank and Brenda Blethyn as two mothers (one American, one British) who lose their sons to malaria in Africa and join forces to help combat the disease. Has the film helped? It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise effect, but it has been shown in 50 countries across the world, has certainly increased awareness, and contributed to a significant downward trend in malaria-related deaths worldwide, though they still stand at 429,000 a year. That figure is just one statistic that underlines the sheer size of the task in eradicating diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS, as well as addressing global poverty. It’s reasonable to wonder if Curtis’ innate optimism is ever dented by the scale of the problems he and his colleagues try to address. CHEER UP Not really, it would seem: “Things are getting better,” he insists. “But it depends on how you look at it. There was a very interesting day recently in New York when the papers headlined a story about an ineffective bomb that had gone off in a trash can, killing nobody. It was on that very same day that the Global Fund announced it had reached commitments of $13.8 billion in the fight against AIDS, TB, and malaria. Now that’s wonderful news—but it literally wasn’t mentioned in the papers.” Curtis is a believer in process and targets, and another of his ventures, Project Everyone, which he founded in 2014, sets “Global Goals” for sustainable development, aiming to end extreme poverty and combat inequality and climate change, by the year 2030. He has directed a series of eye-catching short films to aid this endeavor. Where does all this frenetic activity leave his screenwriting career? The annual telecast of Red Nose Day is broadcast in March in the UK and in May in the US. It’s a hectic time of year for him. One wonders if he still has the same enthusiasm for screenwriting, given the extent to which he throws himself into “good works.” “In an odd way, it makes [writing] more fun,” he says. He currently has an idea in mind—“a delightfully joyful movie, and I still get a lot of pleasure from that. But I think 76 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2017 my subjects are changing. It’s not all about first love any more. About Time (2013) was really about family and marriage and how to spend your days. This new film is sort of about family and creativity and love. As long as I can think of new things, writing gives me just as much pleasure when I think of something funny as it ever did.” And Curtis being Curtis, he takes the same assiduous approach to writing as he does to his charity and advocacy work. I remind him of something Four Weddings director Mike Newell told me when the film was on its way to becoming a massive hit: that Curtis seemed unique among British screenwriters because he would write drafts over and over again, until he was convinced he had nailed a scene. Curtis credits his long-time partner Emma Freud (with whom he has four children) for encouraging him to rewrite vigorously: “She just read the first draft of my new film and rejected half of it. Now that is a very useful counter-voice—I really had to throw it up in the air and start again. She’s the one who pushes me to do more drafts, which is great—because she loves me, I love her, and she knows what I’m trying to do.” He offers an example of his wife’s tough-minded criticism: “Emma also thinks strangely that the charity work has given me less time to write but more time to think. I tend to do projects I’ve had in mind for two years, so they’re slowly boiling on the stove like stock. And by slowing yourself down, you only write stories that really resonate. I’m always choosing between three films I’d like to make and I always choose the one that means the most to me. If I hadn’t been doing the other [charity] stuff, I might have done all three, and that would have been less good for the world.” Curtis sees his advocacy work and screenwriting as part of a continuum: the one feeds the other, and always did. Films and TV, he says, have opened his mind and broadened his horizons: “I didn’t know anything about British poverty till I saw Ken Loach’s Raining Stones. I knew nothing about South America until I saw Missing, very little about slavery until 12 Years a Slave, and not much about American politics until I watched The West Wing. The China Syndrome first alerted me to those issues [about nuclear power]. “Jose Padilha, who directed the 2014 RoboCop remake, also made this extraordinary documentary about people starving in Brazil. Jay Roach has made political films—the guy who did Meet the Parents and Austin Powers! There’s something wonderful about that. So I feel I’m part of a large community that’s very aware of how it’s possible to use entertainment skills to change people’s hearts and minds. I’m just more impatient in applying it.” And what does being a recipient of the Valentine Davies Award mean to him? “I’m really delighted, because you’re aware of the different levels of fame. People will have heard of Notting Hill, but probably not Mary and Martha. Red Nose Day isn’t really connected to me. No one watching it in America would make that connection. So the fact that people have put the two pieces together is delightful.” FEBRUARY 2017 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 57 PADDY CHAYEFSKY TELEVISION LAUREL AWARD AARON SORKIN WRITTEN BY DAVID GRITTEN There are no definitive statistics to back this up, but one imagines that if a few hundred of today’s aspiring screenwriters were asked whose career they most admired and whose writing they wished to emulate, Aaron Sorkin would top the list. With more than 25 years of writing for the screen, Sorkin has developed a style so distinctive that aspects of it can be parodied: brainy, complicated characters, tasked with solving complex problems, often walking and talking simultaneously as they urgently, eloquently, and wittily spill out ideas as fast as a listener can assimilate them. There’s way more to him than that, though vast swaths of the public, confronted by a scene fitting this description, would recognise it as Sorkinesque. He has attained huge success both in film (A Few Good Men, The American President, The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs) and TV (Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Newsroom, and of course The West Wing). It’s for the latter that Sorkin is being honored by the Writers Guild of America, West. Appropriately, Paddy Chayefsky proved equally as adept at writing for TV and movies in his day as Sorkin is today. For generations now, screenwriters have fretted that they receive insufficient attention and credit for their part in the filmmaking process. Directors and actors tend to hog the glory and publicity, while the writer, who after all is the prime mover in the whole process, gets elbowed out. As someone who regularly meets and talks to screenwriters for Written By, I’ve long felt sympathy for you. But Sorkin breaks that pattern of anonymity. He isn’t a man given to false modesty, and in person he isn’t shy about stressing the huge influence his scripts, especially their dialogue, have on a finished film. And guess what? He’s a screenwriter with a high profile, a guy whose mere name can sell movie tickets or persuade TV viewers to switch to the channel that airs his shows. How bad can that be for the profession? I got an inkling of all this late in 2015 when Steve Jobs opened in London. I was due to interview Sorkin for Written By on a Sunday, but the previous evening there was a BAFTA screening of the film, followed by a Q&A session that I moderated. It was a crowded stage—the six lead actors, including Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet, alongside director Danny Boyle and Sorkin. Strikingly, after hearing from all eight in turn, I turned the Q&A over to the audience—and almost everyone who raised their hand had a question for Sorkin. Forget that Boyle is arguably Britain’s best-loved director, or that Fassbender and Winslet are two of our most highly-regarded actors. The audience wanted to hear from the screenwriter. And why wouldn’t they? He has a brilliant talent for restructuring a story (imagine the Steve Jobs story as a conventional biopic, and shudder). His gift for dialogue sets him apart: at its best it can feel operatic, while some of the longer speeches he writes for his characters have the ebb and flow of great soliloquies. I made the observation to him that some of his dialogue had a musical quality. “Dialogue is music,” he shot back. Because he genuinely believes that, Sorkin is insistent that actors should get every word exactly right and in order. I informed him that more than 20 years ago, Billy Wilder had told me precisely the same thing. Sorkin shrugged silently with a broad smile, as if to say: point proven. It’s significant that Sorkin originally wanted to be a playwright; his first big hit film, A Few Good Men, was a stage play. He wrote the film adaptation largely without interference, which colored his attitude to interference and “studio notes” on his scripts: “The idiosyncrasies, the authorial voice gets stripped out,” he told me. “And those idiosyncrasies are not mistakes, I think they’re beautiful. You want that. And you shouldn’t have to get a unanimous vote from everyone around a table to be able to do that, because you won’t get unanimity.” Sorkin, then, has fought his own battles and developed his writing style relatively unimpeded, partly because of his formidable personality. He admits he’s acutely aware of the possibility of failure, that with his next script he’ll be “found out.” But then if it’s really anxiety that fuels his work, maybe it also infuses his writing with a zest and urgency. And for those of us who admire his work, who’d want him to lose that? PA R A D I G M C O N G R A T U L A T E S O U R N O M I N E E S F O R T H E 2 017 WRITERS GU ILD AWARDS D R A M A S E R I ES LO N G FO R M A DA P T E D PAU L D I CH T ER T H E D U FFER B ROT H ERS S T EP H E N K I N G STRANGER THINGS CO M E DY S E R I ES DA N O ’K EEFE SILICON VALLEY N E W S E R I ES PAU L D I CH T ER T H E D U FFER B ROT H ERS 11.22.63 P E T ER M O FFAT * THE NIGHT OF CO M E DY / VA R I E T Y ( I N C LU D I N G TA L K ) – S E R I ES O P U S M O R ES CH I THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT CO M E DY / VA R I E T Y – M US I C, AWA R DS, T R I B U T ES – S PEC I A L S STRANGER THINGS RO D N E Y BA R N ES AU R I N S Q U I R E 88 TH ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS THIS IS US LO N G FO R M O R I G I N A L C H I L D R E N ’S S C R I P T – LO N G FO R M O R S PEC I A L S E T H FI S H ER C A M ERO N FAY HARLEY AND THE DAVIDSONS DANCE CAMP Shared Representation: * United Agents MORGAN COX AWARD WRITTEN BY BURT METCALFE I met Dan Wilcox in 1979. I was executive producer of M*A*S*H, M*A*S*H and he and partner Thad Mumford had joined the writing staff for the last four of 11 seasons. Dan was a smoker then, the only one in the group, and was relegated to an arm chair in the far corner of the writers’ room. The rest of us sat at a large round table. Dan did so without complaint, perhaps yet another example of service to fellow Guild members. He was always a prolific contributor to the day’s work. My wife felt he was the most adult, least neurotic writer in the group. Certainly all comedy writers know what a supreme compliment that can be—or in some cases a badge of honor. After long stretches of trying to solve a story problem, or searching for a joke amidst unproductive hilarity (much of it obscene), I would often beg in frustration, “OK guys, now one for the script.” Countless times Dan, after sitting pensively in his remote corner, would be the one to come up with the “one.” Dan grew up in Manhattan and became a Guild member on the East Coast in 1965, when he got a job writing for Bob Keeshan’s children’s show Captain Kangaroo. Following that, he worked on Sesame Street for two-and-a-half years, joining a group that signed cards to authorize the Guild to represent them in collective bargaining. Following the M*A*S*H years he moved to MTM, where he worked with Allan Burns. Perhaps sensing the same energy and wisdom I had perceived, Allan was the first to suggest Dan consider running for the board. In 2005 he did just that, beginning the first of four full two-year terms. He has become passionately active in several areas, including the Internet and new media. He chairs the Career Longevity program, and has long fought for the causes of local news writers and daytime writers. Dan Wilcox has been heartened by having been able to support news writers Kathy Kiernan (KNX) and Courtney Ellinger (KCBS/KCAL), and daytime writer Karen Harris get elected to the board. DAN WILCOX In addition to serving the Guild, he continues to write and teach. He stopped smoking years ago. WILCOX ON WILCOX I ran for the Board in the 80s, and I lost. Later, someone called from the nominating committee and asked me to run again. I thought, Now I can do it. And again, I lost. I came in ninth place. Then someone stepped down and in the constitution if an opening occurs, the board can fill it. I was invited to take the place. I served for another year and got a feel for the board and how it worked. This time I knew what I wanted to do. Now, while chairing the Longevity Committee, I try to get attention to older writers and get them hired. But it’s not easy to change things. What I’ve succeeded at is hard won and not enormous, but still satisfying. I used to go camping and I remember one of the campgrounds had a sign: Please leave the campsite in better condition than you found it. My goal is to leave this campsite better than I found it. WE PROUDLY CONGRATULATE OUR 2017 Writers Guild Award Nominees ADAPTED SCREENPLAY COMEDY SERIES NEW SERIES HIDDEN FIGURES SILICON VALLEY STRANGER THINGS THEODORE MELFI MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY JUSTIN DOBLE ZERO DAYS ALEC BERG ADAM COUNTEE CARRIE KEMPER JOHN LEVENSTEIN RON WEINER ALEX GIBNEY TRANSPARENT (BOOK BY) DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY STRANGER THINGS BRIDGET BEDARD MICAH FITZERMAN-BLUE NOAH HARPSTER JESSI KLEIN ETHAN KUPERBERG JILL SOLOWAY JUSTIN DOBLE UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT DRAMA SERIES THE AMERICANS JOSHUA BRAND GAME OF THRONES BRYAN COGMAN WESTWORLD ED BRUBAKER HALLEY GROSS KATHERINE LINGENFELTER DOMINIC MITCHELL CHARLES YU EPISODIC COMEDY UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT: KIMMY FINDS HER MOM! SAM MEANS SON OF ZORN: A TASTE OF ZEPHYRIA EMILY ALTMAN LAUREN GURGANOUS SAM MEANS DYLAN MORGAN DAN RUBIN JOSH SIEGAL ALLISON SILVERMAN LEILA STRACHAN VEEP SEAN GRAY GEORGIA PRITCHETT ALEXIS WILKINSON DAN MINTZ COMEDY / VARIETY – MUSIC, AWARDS, TRIBUTES – SPECIALS LONG FORM ADAPTED 68TH PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS AMERICAN CRIME STORY: THE PEOPLE VS. O.J. SIMPSON JEFF LOVENESS ALEXIS WILKINSON D.V. 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BILL HADER INSIDE AMY SCHUMER KIM CARAMELE KYLE DUNNIGAN JESSI KLEIN CHRISTINE NANGLE CLAUDIA O’DOHERTY DAN POWELL TAMI SAGHER AMY SCHUMER MAYA AND MARTY IN MANHATTAN DAVID FELDMAN R.J. FRIED TIM MCAULIFFE STREETER SEIDELL EMILY SPIVEY NATHAN FOR YOU LEO ALLEN NATHAN FIELDER SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE MICHAEL CHE COLIN JOST ZACH KANIN SARAH SCHNEIDER STREETER SEIDELL EMILY SPIVEY NEWS SCRIPT – REGULARLY SCHEDULED, BULLETIN, OR BREAKING REPORT WORLD NEWS TONIGHT WITH DAVID MUIR: AMBUSH IN DALLAS DAVID MUIR WORLD NEWS TONIGHT WITH DAVID MUIR: BRUSSELS UNDER ATTACK DAVID MUIR WALTER BERNSTEIN AWARD FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE HONOREE JELANI COBB SPECIAL CONGRATULATIONS PATTON OSWALT HOST, 2017 WRITERS GUILD AWARDS PAUL SELVIN AWARD SUSANNAH GRANT The Guild’s Paul Selvin honorary award is given each year to the WGA member whose script best embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties that are indispensable to the survival of free writers everywhere. WRITTEN BY LISA ROSEN Working on Confirmation was satisfying “in a million different ways,” says Susannah Grant. The first reason that comes to her mind occurred during a visit to a college campus a few years ago. “Great college,” she remembers. “Highly educated young people, all around 20 years old. I was talking to a group that was interested in film, and they asked me what I was working on. I mentioned the story about Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Out of 10 of them, only two knew what I was talking about.” Not long after that, Grant asked Professor Anita Hill if she ever had a difficult moment with her students when they first realized who was teaching them. “And she said, ‘Most of them have no idea who I am or what I’ve done.’” Grant was shocked, even if the hearings happened in 1991. “Regardless of whom you believe, you cannot deny that it’s completely changed how we talk about, think about, and litigate sexual harassment. The fact that that galvanizing moment had just been abandoned from our cultural history was very upsetting, for a couple of reasons. One, you just should never forget moments like that. Two, because it was such a clear example of the sacrifice of public service, and that civil rights are never handed over. There’s usually a body count; they have to be fought for. It’s really important to reinforce that—every day—for people to realize how hard-won the civil liberties we do enjoy were. It’s so easy to forget.” Part of the reason for cultural amnesia? The hardwon victories. “Of course I have healthcare, of course my kids go to school with kids of other races. It was not long ago that that wasn’t the case.” And it may not always be the case going forward. Watching President Trump sign the Global Gag Rule flanked by seven men was all too reminiscent of Anita Hill facing an all-male panel of senators. Which brings Grant to another reason this story is so timely. “Everybody who knows about Anita Hill—if they believe her, and not everyone does— knows that she spoke up because she thought it was her civic responsibility. But the only reason those hearings were held was because the American people demanded it.” Grant lists the public’s actions that forced the hearings: “The news got out that she had these allegations and the Judiciary Committee was not pursuing them. The American people flooded Capitol Hill with calls. They shut down the switchboard. It’s so important to remember the power of the citizenry, and that those people work for us. If we make our will known, and it is overwhelming, it can become impossible for them to ignore it. That’s the thing I was most struck by, and that I find to be most relevant for today.” The resulting HBO film that premiered last April is a revelation, even for the people who were glued to their televisions while the hearings unfolded. Grant, executive producer Michael London, and star Kerry Washington were all compelled to make the movie after seeing Freida Lee Mock’s documentary, Anita. “It’s beautiful,” says Grant. “But I came away from it thinking, I really want to know what happened when the cameras weren’t rolling.” To write the screenplay, she dove into the research, fully cognizant that only two people know with absolute certainty who was telling the truth. “And I’m not going to pretend I’m one of them. I thought that was really important. You can say whom you believe, and whose story makes more sense to you, but I think when you approach a story like this, you end up with a much better script if you open your mind to all the possibilities.” Grant also wanted the script to be fact-checked by all involved, so it would become bulletproof to critics on that front. She reached out to both Hill and Thomas for their participation. (Thomas declined.) After all of her interviews, Grant came away feeling the story was not primarily about who was telling the truth, as compelling as that angle is. “The conflict didn’t seem to be between him and her—it seemed to be between the powerful and the powerless. In that situation, I would put both Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas on the more powerless end of the scale.” Grant is thrilled to receive the Paul Selvin Award, even as she hastens to note that Anita Hill was the one who did the real hard work, not her. But as the college visit highlighted, writing stories that dramatize constitutional rights and civil liberties is one key to protecting them. In a democracy, hidden figures need to be revealed, for the betterment of all. Grant is more comfortable discussing what the Guild means to her. A family member recently came down with a mysterious illness that took five doctors to diagnose. “Honestly, every single doctor’s visit, I thought, Thank god for everyone in the years before who fought their butts off for us to have fair pension and health programs. And I’m really proud to be a part of the group that’s on the negotiating committee now to make sure that that right—not privilege, the right— of healthcare is sustained for writers in the future. I’m a huge believer in the power of collective bargaining and fellowship of a union, so I’m really pleased to be among the members.” 2017 WRITERS GUILD AWARDS We Proudly Congratulate Our Clients on Their Nominations Drama Series Better Call Saul The People vs. O.J. Simpson: Comedy / Variety – Music, Awards, Tributes – Specials VINCE GILLIGAN GENNIFER HUTCHISON THOMAS SCHNAUZ GORDON SMITH American Crime Story 88th Annual Academy Awards The Americans STEPHEN SCHIFF Comedy Series Veep BILLY KIMBALL Transparent ARABELLA ANDERSON ALI LIEBEGOTT FAITH SOLOWAY Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Long Form Adapted MAYA FORBES WALLY WOLODARSKY JEFFREY TOOBIN Episodic Drama “Gloves Off” (Better Call Saul) GORDON SMITH “Klick” (Better Call Saul) VINCE GILLIGAN “Switch” (Better Call Saul) THOMAS SCHNAUZ Comedy / Variety (Including Talk) – Series The Daily Show with Trevor Noah AZIE MIRA DUNGEY DAVID ANGELO New Series JOSH GONDELMAN This Is Us KAY OYEGUN Long Form Original American Crime DAVY PEREZ Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Late Night with Seth Meyers BEN WARHEIT Children’s Script – Episodic and Specials “Just Add Mom” (Just Add Magic) JOHN-PAUL NICKEL CHRIS ROCK BILLY KIMBALL 68th Primetime Emmy Awards JOSH HALLOWAY Comedy / Variety – Sketch Series Maya and Marty MIKEY DAY JEREMY BEILER Saturday Night Live JEREMY BEILER MIKEY DAY KATIE RICH DAVE SIRUS WILL STEPHEN Daytime Drama General Hospital ELIZABETH KORTE Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing MR. ROBOT 1.51exfiltratiOn KOR ADANA ANIMATION WRITERS CAUCUS AWARD Mike JuDGe WRITTEN BY STAN BERKOWITZ Who is the real Mike Judge? Is he a snickering overgrown adolescent, like his creations Beavis and Butt-Head? Or does he see himself as a calm, sensible guy, surrounded by eccentrics like Hank from King of the Hill, which he co-created with Greg Daniels? I couldn’t say. I’ve only met him once, just a few months before he was selected to be this year’s recipient of the Guild’s Animation Writing Award, and back then, he seemed a little guarded—as anyone might when asked to make conversation with a stranger. But then again, he also seems kind of guarded and suspiciously easygoing in the interviews I’ve subsequently read. Which means the best way to discover who he is might be by looking at his work. And there’s a lot of it: 222 episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head, plus a B&B theatrical feature from 1996 that he co-wrote and co-directed, and—just as he did with the series—provided the voices for both Beavis and Butt-Head, as well as some of the other characters. Then there are 258 episodes of the Emmywinning King of the Hill, which provided WGA coverage for its writers––not always a given in the animation field. And let’s not forget his live-action work: most recently, there’s HBO’s Emmynominated Silicon Valley, which he co-created with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, and before that came the feature film Extract (2009), which Judge wrote and directed. Judge’s first live-action feature was 1999’s Office Space, which he also directed, but it’s 2006’s live-action Idiocracy that gives what I believe to be the clearest picture of who Judge is. Co-scripted with Etan Cohen, Idiocracy is set in a cartoonish America of the future, where stupidity runs rampant, the president is a muscular half-wit, and an IQ of 100 qualifies someone as a genius. It’s biting (and, as it turns out, prescient) social satire, and it helps put Judge’s earlier animated creations, Beavis and Butt-Head, into better perspective. A lot of viewers thought they were charming little devils out to puncture society’s pretenses, but in light of Idiocracy, it’s pretty clear that Judge actually intended the two of them to be (slight) exaggerations of the kind of people who took Beavis and ButtHead as their heroes: the MTV audience. That Judge got away with it is an indication of how finely honed his satirical tools are (and that Idiocracy never found a mass audience bolsters George S. Kaufman’s belief that satire is what closes on Saturday night). The one time I spoke with him, Judge was in the midst of writing, producing, and directing Silicon Valley, and I wanted to know if he had any more animation projects lined up. He told me that when he’s working on an animation project, he feels a need to do live-action, and vice versa. So the wait for more animation from this very gifted and very prolific writer/director/producer/animator/actor might not be long. W E P ROU DLY CONG RATU L ATE OU R C L I ENTS O N T HE IR W R IT ERS GU I LD AWARDS NOM I NATI O N S O R I G I NA L S C R E E N P L AY LA LA LAND DAMIEN CHAZELLE MANCHESTER BY THE SEA KENNETH LONERGAN A DA P T E D S C R E E N P L AY ARRIVAL ERIC HEISSERER DEADPOOL RHETT REESE PAUL WERNICK FENCES ESTATE OF AUGUST WILSON D O C U M E N TA RY S C R E E N P L AY COMMAND AND CONTROL ERIC SCHLOSSER DRAMA SERIES BETTER CALL SAUL ANN CHERKIS HEATHER MARION STRANGER THINGS ALISON TATLOCK WESTWORLD DAN DIETZ LISA JOY JONATHAN NOLAN ROBERTO PATINO DANIEL T. THOMSEN COMEDY SERIES ATLANTA DONALD GLOVER STEPHEN GLOVER VEEP RACHEL AXLER ALEX GREGORY PETER HUYCK DAVE MANDEL NEW SERIES ATLANTA DONALD GLOVER STEPHEN GLOVER BETTER THINGS CINDY CHUPACK GINA FATTORE STRANGER THINGS ALISON TATLOCK UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT ROBERT CARLOCK TINA FEY MARLENA RODRIGUEZ MEREDITH SCARDINO “KIMMY FINDS HER MOM!” (UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT) TINA FEY “KIMMY GOES ON A PLAYDATE!” (UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT) ROBERT CARLOCK “PILOT” (ONE MISSISSIPPI) DIABLO CODY BEKAH BRUNSTETTER DAN FOGELMAN JOE LAWSON K.J. STEINBERG WESTWORLD DAN DIETZ LISA JOY JONATHAN NOLAN ROBERTO PATINO DANIEL T. THOMSEN 73RD ANNUAL GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS STEPHEN GLOVER C O M E DY / VA R I E T Y ( I NC LU DI NG TA L K ) - S E RI E S LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER TIM CARVELL JOHN OLIVER WILL TRACY THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT STEPHEN COLBERT * GLENN EICHLER TOM PURCELL BRIAN STACK HARLEY AND THE DAVIDSONS FRED ARMISEN JOHN MULANEY THE NIGHT OF STEVEN ZAILLIAN DAVE BOONE ** RICKY GERVAIS JON MACKS 88TH ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS DAVE BOONE JON MACKS STEVE O’DONNELL FRANK SEBASTIANO TRIUMPH THE PRIMARY ELECTION SPECIAL 2016 BEN JOSEPH ANDREW WEINBERG CHILDREN’S SCRIPT – EPISODIC AND SPECIALS DIANA SON LONG FORM ADAPTED 68TH ANNUAL PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS “STREETS ON LOCK” (ATLANTA) C O M E DY / VA R I E T Y - S K E T C H SERIES EVAN WRIGHT C O M E DY / VA R I E T Y – M U S I C , AWARDS, TRIBUTES – SPECIALS CARRIE ROSEN SETH KURLAND LONG FORM ORIGINAL AMERICAN CRIME TIM HERLIHY CHRIS KELLY PAULA PELL PETE SCHULTZ KENT SUBLETTE BRYAN TUCKER BESS KALB * JIMMY KIMMEL JON MACKS MOLLY MCNEARNEY “R-A-Y-C-RAY-CATION” (SPEECHLESS) THIS IS US DOCUMENTARY NOW! INSIDE AMY SCHUMER CLAUDIA O’DOHERTY “GIRL MEETS COMMONISM” (GIRL MEETS WORLD) JOSHUA JACOBS MICHAEL JACOBS S P E C I A L C ONG R AT U L AT ION S T O MIKE JUDGE ANIMATION WRITERS CAUCUS ANIMATION WRITING AWARD HONOREE MAYA AND MARTY IN MANHATTAN SILICON VALLEY MEGAN AMRAM DONICK CARY MIKE JUDGE CLAY TARVER EPISODIC COMEDY STEVE O’DONNELL GUILLERMO DEL TORO CHUCK HOGAN BRADLEY THOMPSON DAVID WEDDLE JOHN MULANEY MAYA RUDOLPH MARIKA SAWYER MARTIN SHORT BRYAN TUCKER STEVE YOUNG A N I M AT ION SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE JOHN WATERS SHORT FORM NEW MEDIA - ADAPTED “UNDER SIEGE” (THE STRAIN) “STOP THE PRESSES” (BOJACK HORSEMAN) JOE LAWSON EPISODIC DRAMA “KLICK” (BETTER CALL SAUL) HEATHER MARION JAMES ANDERSON FRED ARMISEN* MICHAEL CHE TINA FEY FRAN GILLESPIE SUDI GREEN HERB SARGENT AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN COMEDY WRITING HONOREE AARON SORKIN PADDY CHAYEFSKY LAUREL AWARD FOR TELEVISION HONOREE IAN MCLELLAN HUNTER AWARD FOR CAREER ACHIEVEMENT HONOREE * REPRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH DIXON TALENT, A WME|IMG COMPANY ** REPRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH UNITED AGENTS WRITTEN BY F.X. FEENEY JEAN RENOIR AWARD FOR INTERNATIONAL SCREENWRITING ACHIEVEMENT ABBAS KIAROSTAMI “I don’t like to tell stories,” Abbas Kiarostami once remarked. He was being half-playful. From his birth in 1940 to his death from cancer at 76 in the summer of 2016, Kiarostami lived stories—first as a poet, photographer, and graphic designer, then most unforgettably as a self-taught filmmaker, in the years both before and after the seismic jolt of revolution in 1979 radically transformed his native Iran. What’s more, he loved discovering stories. His great body of work—some 40-plus films between 1970 and his death—bears the glowing stamp of this excitement. Such passion makes it only natural that the Writers Guild should honor his memory with this year’s Jean Renoir Award for International Screenwriting Achievement. What Kiarostami loathed, what he defied, was any impulse to dictate a story to his viewers. “I don’t like to explain, arouse the lower emotions, give advice; I don’t like to burden audiences with a sense of guilt,” he said. Watching other people’s films? “I’m very reluctant when I see an attempt to make me cry. It puts me off.” More playfully still—teasing the slam-bang aesthetics of movie-lovers worldwide, over-awed by Hollywood’s often violent grammar—he welcomed complaints that his methods (long master-shots; nuanced repetitions; slow if sure surprises) put some people to sleep: “There are films that take their viewers hostage. I like films that put you to sleep. I like films that are kind enough to give you a little nap in the theater, but that keep you awake, after. The film that has lasting power is the one you begin to reconstruct the moment you emerge.” Yet Kiarostami himself was always wide awake, in frame after frame. The act of paying attention is the essence of what his movies are about and he invites us to be particularly vigilant on the borders between illusion and reality. THE POET OF THE ZIG-ZAG PATH His breakthrough to an international audience came with Close-Up (1990), in which Kiarostami appears as himself, by name, but with his back to us, covering an actual courtroom trial in Tehran. Amazingly, after the trial, he persuades both the man on trial and his accusers to play themselves in re-enactments of the crime. Much as the word “docudrama” has been applied to this film with a plodding regularity, the result is closer to poetry: unpredictable tensions built into each scene push against the “crime-story” under scrutiny; we’re invited to risk surprise at the mixed motives and mysteries in each of the people we’re watching. “I know my actions cannot be justified legally,” the meek defendant, Hossain Sabzian, tells the turbaned judge, as he confesses to a hoax he perpetrated on a well-to-do family: “But I want my love of the arts to be taken into account.” He had briefly convinced the Ahankhah family that he was a famous filmmaker, and would use them and their house in his next movie. In reality, he was a poor laborer struggling to support a small family. Was he trying to fleece his victims financially? No. Instead, Sabzian relished having “won their respect. They were ready to obey me, to cut down trees in their yard if I asked, simply because they supported me morally as a director.” He’s magically been transformed into a revered being, “a man aware of people’s sufferings and difficulties.” Even when he accepted money from one of the sons as “an advance” against the mirage of a budget, his motive was not theft (though he certainly needed money): What he treasured was that the act of giving money made the charade “more real.” Making matters more real is the heartbeat in Kiarostami’s body of work. Through the 1990s his reputation grew largely in response to what are known as the Koker films, named for the village where they were made, some 350 miles north of Tehran. Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987) and its most direct companion Life, and Nothing More… (1992) chart the fortunes of two young brothers, Babek and Ahmed Ahmed Poor. They played the leads in the first film, but their fates were unknown after the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake of 1990, which claimed the lives of 40,000 people and wracked the region around Koker. The second film details Kiarostami’s search—using actor Farhad Kheradmand as his proxy, in the role of “The Director”—for evidence of what has become of the two boys. The way is made exceptionally hard by blocked roads and widespread devastation. The protagonist and his son encounter a motley of survivors in this oddly silent, oddly pastoral landscape (Kiarostami’s eye dotes on the beauty of zig-zagging roads and mountain valleys) but they never find the two boys. “You can’t forget that over 20,000 children were killed in that earthquake,” said Kiarostami. “My two heroes could have been among them.” “I’m drawn to unique people,” Kiarostami said. The man under arrest in Close-Up and the survivors of the Koker quake have that quality in common. Extremity, whether inner or outer directed, has brought forth something indelible in their spirits that Kiarostami valued above all and was eager to communicate. “Often films don’t represent people,” he said. “They don’t relate to people. None of my characters come from cinema. I don’t let them become fake beings.” The young man who emerges at the center of Through the Olive Trees (1994) is a marvel of stubborn will. Himself a survivor of the quake, deputized by the film crew Kiarostami has once again sent into the breach, he refuses to work as a mason, though that’s what he’s been trained to do—all the endless rebuilding in the quake’s aftermath has left him sick to death of lifting stones. He is happy to work as an actor. Alas, he keeps blowing the simple lines he’s been asked to say. “You’re supposed to say you lost 65 of your family,” he is repeatedly told—but refuses, on principle. “Why? I only lost 25 of my family!” Kiarostami shrewdly juxtaposes dramatic license and life and these little exchanges—one can feel him siding with the boy. Twenty-five is a terrible enough number if they’re your relatives. Meantime, between takes, he delivers an impassioned marriage proposal to the young woman he loves. They were engaged before the quake, but most of her family was wiped out and the distant aunts and uncles who’ve taken over want her to have nothing to do with this young man. “He doesn’t have a house,” they argue. (What do they expect? Nobody does, except in the most makeshift sense.) “Old women only think of rich men and houses,” he argues back. “Intelligence and understanding are important, too.” She is staring at a book, refusing to look him in the eye. “Have you got a heart made of stone or what?” Then we hear the buzzer and he has to break off and do another take of his two or three lines—blowing that death toll figure, again and again, before mounting the staircase to his first mark and hectoring the silent beauty. “I swore I’d never be a mason again,” he tells her. “But I’d do it for you.” KIAROSTAMI’S CHERRY ORCHARD His iconic masterpiece is Taste of Cherry (1997), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Here we follow “Mr. Badii”—we are never given his familiar name—as he drives the ever zigzagging roads, which crown the high hills above Tehran. The surrounding landscape is arid and rugged and he is on a peculiar quest. He wants to find an able-bodied male willing to bury him, after he has committed suicide. “I’m not asking you to help kill me,” he carefully explains to anyone who will hear his pitch. He does not want to violate anybody’s religious beliefs. He has already dug the hole and will crawl in on his own. “I’m only giving you a shovel,” he pleads. “Twenty spades full of earth over my head, if you call my name at sunrise and I don’t answer. If I do, take my hand and help me out of the hole.” He will leave a thick wad of cash waiting for them on the dashboard of his car, which they are free to take, no matter what he may decide. He never says why he wants to kill himself. “When you’re unhappy you hurt other people, and hurting other people is a sin,” is as close as Badii comes to an explanation. The silence surrounding his desire gives his need sympathetic power. We know only that he cannot turn his mind from the prospect, whatever he decides, and that becomes the mainspring of our emotional involvement, and the film’s suspense. The overall feeling is directly akin to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” Kiarostami concludes with a shock—I leave this detail to the film, if you haven’t seen it. Suffice it to say this is the boldest expression yet of his kinship to Pirandello, Brecht, and Thornton Wilder in terms of openly inviting us to resolve his protagonist’s agonies with the power of our own imaginations. An interesting controversy briefly arose, at first, over Taste of Cherry. Critics wondered, including this critic: Was his ending tricky because of censorship? Iran’s present government is, after all, a theocracy legendary for its punitive power, and suicide is a sin that goes against their every acceptable code. Kiarostami rejected this. “Censorship is often the first or second question I am asked in the West. I get irritated,” he says on the Criterion edition of Taste of Cherry. He endured poverty at home, because certain choices of his—like refusing to bring back those two missing boys in Life, and Nothing More...—made his movies unpopular with the Iranian public. “Censorship doesn’t bother me. Not that I endorse it, but the problem of censorship has always existed. Even in our homes we grow up burdened with it.” As an American critic—and an ardent admirer of Iranian actor and filmmaker Parviz Sayyad (Dead End, 1977; The Mission, 1983), who brilliantly satirized the Shah but chose exile in America after the revolution because he knew his brand of confrontation would see him dead under the Ayatollah—I delayed seeing Kiarostami’s films for years because I assumed they’d been crushed under the thumb of authoritarian rule. How wonderful to discover, as with Andrei Tarkovsky and his relation to the Soviet Union, that certain chameleons of genius not only persist, but thrive against hostile circumstance. “No form of inquisition can control our fantasies,” said Kiarostami. In the same spirit by which poet Boris Pasternak chose to stay in Russia after the Soviets took over in 1917, he needed native soil to stay fertile, and fruitful—to become himself, artistically. Whether navigating the court systems or observing the workers, Mr. Badii engages in his lonely quest; his portraits of everyday life in contemporary Iran feel timeless, profound. Given that in 2017 we Americans awaken each day in the “homeland security” of a national security state, questions of censorship, of authoritarian rule, have more urgency than ever. Kiarostami sets a wonderful example. His films are built cleanly—free of outward manipulation. He had the strength to face the world as it is, and the cunning to choose his battles. One can fight dictatorship, first and last, by trusting life’s constant transformations, and staying true to that: “All certainty in whatever form is an absolute lie. That’s why doubts persist, and make a situation more real.” congratulates our clients on their 2017 Writers Guild Award nominations Drama Series New Series Long Form Original THE AMERICANS JOEL FIELDS JOE WEISBERG TRACEY SCOTT WILSON TANYA BARFIELD ATLANTA PAUL SIMMS AMERICAN CRIME JULIE HÉBERT KEITH HUFF KIRK MOORE BETTER CALL SAUL PETER GOULD JONATHAN GLATZER GAME OF THRONES DAVID BENIOFF D.B. WEISS DAVE HILL STRANGER THINGS JESSICA MECKLENBURG JESSIE NICKSON-LOPEZ WESTWORLD BRIDGET CARPENTER Comedy Series ATLANTA PAUL SIMMS TRANSPARENT OUR LADY J VEEP LEW MORTON ERIK KENWARD ‡Shared representation STRANGER THINGS JESSICA MECKLENBURG JESSIE NICKSON-LOPEZ THIS IS US VERA HERBERT WESTWORLD BRIDGET CARPENTER Long Form Adapted 11.22.63 BRIDGET CARPENTER BRIGITTE HALES JOE HENDERSON BRIAN NELSON QUINTON PEEPLES THE PEOPLE VS. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY SCOTT ALEXANDER LARRY KARASZEWSKI JOE ROBERT COLE ROOTS ALISON MCDONALD CHARLES MURRAY CONFIRMATION SUSANNAH GRANT HARLEY AND THE DAVIDSONS NICK SCHENK Short Form New Media – Original NOW WE’RE TALKING “Episode 101” TOMMY DEWEY Episodic Drama SHAMELESS “I Am A Storm” SHEILA CALLAGHAN THIS IS US “The Trip” VERA HERBERT GAME OF THRONES “The Winds Of Winter” DAVID BENIOFF D.B. WEISS Comedy/Variety - Series Comedy/Variety - Sketch Series Comedy/Variety - Special THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH TREVOR NOAH ADAM LOWITT INSIDE AMY SCHUMER MIKE LAWRENCE 68TH PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS ROBERT COHEN GARY GREENBERG JEFF STILSON MAYA & MARTY MATT ROBERTS CHRIS BELAIR MELISSA HUNTER PAUL MASELLA DIALLO RIDDLE BASHIR SALAHUDDIN 88TH ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS JEFF STILSON LANCE CROUTHER LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER JULI WEINER LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS SETH MEYERS‡ ALEX BAZE JOHN LUTZ APARNA NANCHERLA AMBER RUFFIN MICHAEL SHOEMAKER THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT BARRY JULIEN Original Screenplay SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LORNE MICHAELS CHRIS BELAIR MEGAN CALLAHAN STEVE HIGGINS COLIN JOST‡ ERIK KENWARD PAUL MASELLA SETH MEYERS‡ JOSH PATTEN TIM ROBINSON LOVING JEFF NICHOLS MOONLIGHT BARRY JENKINS TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY Adapted Screenplay NOCTURNAL ANIMALS TOM FORD TRIUMPH THE PRIMARY ELECTION SPECIAL 2016 ROBERT SMIGEL ANDY BRECKMAN MATT KIRSCH MIKE LAWRENCE and salutes OLIVER STONE Laurel Award Recipient For Screenwriting Achievement SUSANNAH GRANT Paul Selvin Award Recipient CONTINUED FROM PG 41 90 • WRITTEN BY 90 • W G A WF EWBRRI UT TA ER NY B2 Y0 1 7F E B R U A R Y three female leads, would be considered a potential flop. Instead, as Schroeder speaks, it continues to soar at the box office. But Schroeder suffered lean years, when she didn’t make enough money to qualify for health insurance and lived in a rat-infested studio just to stay in the industry. With every rejection, she would give herself no more than 24 hours to wallow on the couch with her cats before getting back in the game. That remains her rule. “This town is flooded, and it’s a real struggle to get the jobs,” she says. “You take odd jobs to make ends meet, and so you have to want it, and you have to keep going. It takes a long time to make it.” Despite her math and science talents, she always danced, and she won a science fiction writing competition in middle school. At Oxford, she actually wrote an award-winning musical, and another for her senior thesis. And she has just sold a scripted music-themed drama, Inspiration, to E!. “I’m pretty extroverted for a writer, and I get bored easily,” she says about her forays into Asian Indian Bhangra dancing, improv, and stand-up. But on graduation, she went into finance. “There was something very exciting to me about a pantsuit, and an expense account, and being the head of a boardroom.” Unfortunately (fortunately?) her timing was off. The Enron scandal hit Wall Street, and the Arthur Andersen accounting firm where she worked collapsed. Restless at KPMG, and assigned to help a client, instead of turning in spreadsheets like her colleagues, she produced a movie. Her boss’s reaction: “Go to film school, for God’s sake, Allison.” And she did. Luckily, she’d saved enough money to pay her way through USC, living with roommates in Los Feliz and budgeting carefully. With her goal of directing, she watched fellow students bankrupt themselves financing movies that went nowhere beyond the occasional festival. She decided to instead write her way into directing via a thesis script instead of a film. Once out of USC, she didn’t flinch about taking entry-level jobs. “A lot of my classmates, they wanted to make it big. Of course, we all wanted to make it big. But it’s a process, and I was willing to be a PA.” Which she was, on the Smallville TV series and Pineapple Express feature, before landing on 90210 in 2008 as a staff writer. “I actually had to take off ‘financial consultant’ from my resume because no one would hire me.” Schroeder spent time on the Hidden Figures set where she had her hair done in a beehive, and did a cameo. She was watching the lead actresses perform a scene in the segregated NASA cafeteria when she noted their demeanors were reserved, as befitted that time. “The moment they yelled ‘cut,’ they all just burst out laughing and joking with each other,” Schroeder says. “Octavia Spencer said last night, ‘I’m a modern woman with agency.’ And I thought, that’s right. The characters had to hold themselves back, but these women don’t. They’re modern women. They can laugh and rule the set. It’s okay now.” One reason the movie is touching people, Schroeder believes, is because audiences keep expecting something terrible to happen to these women during their struggle, and it doesn’t. As the stakes in their stories grow higher, the women just keep rising above adversity. “I’d like there to be justice in this world, and there rarely is, and I get pretty devastated by it,” Schroeder says. “I hope we can see the hope in Hidden Figures.” W G AW | MARCH 2017 CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2017 WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA AWARD NOMINEES EPISODIC DRAMA “GLOVES OFF” WRITTEN BY GORDON SMITH “ K L I C K ” W R I T T E N B Y H E A T H E R M A R I O N & V I N C E G I L L I GA N “SWITCH” WRITTEN BY THOMAS SCHNAUZ DRAMA SERIES B E T T E R C A L L S A U L W R I T T E N B Y A N N C H E R K I S , V I N C E GILLIGA N, J O N A T H A N G L A T Z E R , P E T E R G O U L D , G E N N I F E R H U T CH ISON, H E A T H E R M A R I O N , T H O M A S S C H N A U Z & G O R D O N SMIT H ©2017 AMC Network Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved. McMorgan & Company congratulates all nominees and winners of the 2017 Writers Guild Awards Behind every dream, there is a plan. 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The Writers Guild of America, West thanks our sponsors for their generous support of the 2017 Writers Guild Awards PLATINUM PEN WINE CONFECTIONS GOLD QUILL SILVER STYLUS STERLING INDUSTRY PARTNERS © Angela Weiss, AFP 9 DAYS OF FILM AND TV PREMIERES IN HOLLYWOOD ALL SCREENINGS ARE FREE FOR ALL WGA MEMBERS. (EXCEPT OPENING NIGHT) A $5 CONTRIBUTION IS NOW REQUESTED FOR YOUR GUEST WHEN YOU RSVP FOR TWO TICKETS FOR THE SAME SCREENING. NO CONTRIBUTION IS NECESSARY FOR A ONE TICKET RESERVATION. NO CONTRIBUTION IS REQUESTED FOR FREE SCREENINGS. BRING WGA MEMBERSHIP CARD. CONTRIBUTIONS TO BE MADE ONSITE AT PICKUP. Writer/Director/Actor Roschdy Zem and FACF Board Members at COLCOA 2016, incl. Andrea Berloff, Katherine Fugate, and Howard A. Rodman AN EXCLUSIVE PROGRAM OF 70+ FRENCH FILMS RSVP REQUIRED AT WWW.COLCOA.ORG • PROGRAM AVAILABLE STARTING APRIL 5, 2017 RESERVATIONS START THURSDAY, APRIL 6, AND END THURSDAY, APRIL 20 SCREENINGS AND PANELS ARE HELD AT THE DIRECTORS GUILD OF AMERICA THEATRE, 7920 SUNSET BLVD., LOS ANGELES. FILMS ARE SUBTITLED IN ENGLISH. LIMITED FREE PARKING ON SITE – ENTER ON HAYWORTH. LIMITED SEATING. F O R Y O U R C O N S I D E R A T I O N BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY BY BARRY JENKINS “A STORY BY TARELL ALVIN McCRANEY CLASSIC STORY TOLD IN NEW WAYS THAT SHATTER CINEMATIC STEREOTYPES.” “EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE YOU SEE A MOVIE WITH CHARACTERS SO WELL WRITTEN, WITH ACTORS SO VULNERABLE, THAT YOU WANT TO THROW YOUR ARMS AROUND THEM. FOR ME, THAT MOVIE IS ‘MOONLIGHT.’ IT’S PERFECT.” “JENKINS RENDERS THIS PORTRAIT OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE AND UNREQUITED LOVE WITH BOUNDLESS EMPATHY, EXTENDING GENEROSITY TO EACH AND EVERY CHARACTER.” “‘MOONLIGHT’ ALLOWS ORDINARY INDIVIDUAL LIVES TO BE CONTEMPLATED IN SUBLIME HEROIC SCALE.” W R I T E R S G U I L D AWA R D S BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY SCREENPLAY BY BARRY JENKINS STORY BY TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY N O M I N E E A24AWARDS.COM
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