Interview: Ira Sachs of “Love is Strange”

Posted on August 24, 2014 at 8:00 am

It’s hard to imagine that there will be a more tender love story on screen this year than John Lithgow and Alfred Molina in “Love is Strange,” from writer/director Ira Sachs. They play a long-time couple who get married after decades together but then end up living separately when they can no longer afford their apartment.

One of my all-time favorite interviews was with Sachs for his film, “Married Life,” so I was doubly thrilled to have a chance to talk to him about this bittersweet new film.

I love opening scene, as the couple wakes up and engages in the kind of shorthand bicker/banter characteristic of a very long-term relationship. How did you capture that?

I would say that the film was inspired by a lot of different couples, including my mother and stepfather who have been together for 43 years. And just being around her, that fundamentally works and that they still love each other and they’re wonderful partners to each other. But it’s real, so it’s imperfect and it has all the momentary challenges of living an intimate life with someone. That is a big inspiration for me. And also John and Alfred and their own years of marriage. I think that’s where they found their deepest resonance in terms of the characters in their own lives.

One thing that I like about the story is that everybody’s nice. There are conflicts, but there’s no bad guy in the movie.

Robert Altman is a very big inspiration for me and also novelists like Henry James, .people who actually try to look with empathy to everyone in their world. I am what you could call a very democratic director. And to me that’s kind of my job which is to be understanding of people and to be attentive to their foibles and their uniqueness. The more that I position myself like that as a director of the more depth the work can have.

John Lithgow plays an artist, a painter, whose work is representational, rather traditional.

My great uncle in Memphis when I was growing up, he had a partner, and they were together for 45 years. His partner was a sculptor who lived to be 99. I was very close to him in the last ten years of his life. I had to grow up to be old enough to be allowed to be that close to someone of that generation. And he was a man who was working on his last sculpture when he was 98 and it was of a young teenage boy with a backpack. His whole life he always did classical, religious narrative pieces. And suddenly at 98 he was working on something very contemporary about youth. That piece remains unfinished. It’s in clay in a glass at a cousin’s house. I was very inspired by that piece. And the sense of man who or of anyone who is living their life to the fullest for as long as possible and with an openness to new things. And I was actually thinking about this said the other day as I was doing a Q&A with John Lithgow who this summer is doing “King Lear.” He’s a passionate reader, he writes children’s books, he paints, I’ve grown to be very inspired by John which is not something I knew when wrote Ben, but it’s what I hoped for and I think we have to create our models sometime. He’s very funny and he’s got humility and confidence and I think those are both very important quality to be an artiste.

Talk to me about Joey, the teenage son of Ben’s teenage relatives. It was such an interesting choice to end the film on him.

To me it’s film very much about the seasons of life and generations and the circular nature of our time on earth. This film is centered on an older couple but you could also call it a coming of age film. And it’s a film about family, however that is defined. To me it is defined both personally and romantically but also communally. And I think that’s something that I hold on to. I wouldn’t be a filmmaker without my communal family. I wouldn’t think of my last two films without finding a new way that is disconnected from the Hollywood system. As an artist I returned to my independent models like John Cassavetes, the guy who was never given the right to make the films he made but grabbed them when he could. In order for my career to be sustained I had to go back in my mind to when I was young. A lot of what happens for filmmakers particularly is they expect the system to work for them and in terms of these kind of films, that’s not how it happens.

How did the financing come together for this?

Twenty five individuals who responded to the script. You know my last film Keep the Lights On was financed by 400 individuals so at this point I’m talking about a little bit of a different model because it’s 25 instead of 400. But it’s still a group of individuals who understood the power of the story. Since we’ve made the film three of the women who were key investors of have gotten married to their long-term partners. All of them were successful business owners, which is why they were able to invest in my film and I think they understood the inherently human quantity of the story.

One of the great powers of the movie that it’s just a relationship that everybody can relate to. Other than one thoughtless but not bigoted comment from a teenager, the fact that the couple is gay is not significant.

For me as a gay person I cannot be defined as that alone. As an artist, I’m trying to understand character in all its complexity so you can’t put one adjective in front of the other. So that is why I hope that I represent people who are fully human. What we’re trying to do, and this is why a film like “Manhattan” and “Hannah and her Sisters” and particularly, “Husbands and Wives” most of all were very inspiring to us because I think what you try to do is get the details right. We’re not all the same but Shakespeare is still relevant for a reason. Humanly we’re all driven often by the same needs.

One of the stand-out scenes in the film is when Lithgow and Marisa Tomei are in the same room while she is trying to work and also to be polite when he wants to chat. You feel her irritation and yet you see both sides. It is heartbreaking but also very funny!

I have the benefit of working with actors I was initially interested in because of their dramatic chops but what I also had were actors train in comedy. I really noticed it when we were working on that scene. Their timing was just so excellent, and it’s kind of brilliant. And those abilities are what give the film its lightness because it talks about things that are very serious and they are dramatic but I think there’s lightness to that these actors bring and then I hope that I bring. I’m lighter than I was the last time I saw you. I mean “Married Life” was a darker film. And it’s a film about what is hidden. And that was something that was very compelling to me until I was forty.

That is a dark film. It’s about adultery and a husband who plans to commit murder. But it ends in a remarkably sunny way.

We’re all generally struggling lovely people. If you get down to it there’s something touching about each of us. I don’t believe in evil, I believe in the creation of evil.

There’s a very tender scene in “Love is Strange” where we get a glimpse of how sweetly this couple support each other.

They loved each other and they believed in each other. There was a Hal Hartley film made in the 90s called “Trust.” I haven’t seen it since then but I remember one of the characters said that love equals respect plus admiration plus trust. And I’ve actually often thought about those three terms as how they intertwine and how they’re also distinct. The respect is different than admiration and trust is yet another thing. And I’m in a marriage that has those things. But marriage is a legal vessel that this film speaks to but it’s actually not the subject of this film. The subject is intimacy.

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Interview: Bo Svenson

Posted on August 19, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Bo Svenson is an actor, writer, director, judo champion, and, as I was lucky enough to find out, an enthralling guy to talk to, turning an interview into a wide-ranging conversation.

Svenson was born in Sweden. His family emigrated to the United States and he joined the U.S Marines when he was 17. Honorably discharged after six years of service, he was in pursuit of a Ph.D. in metaphysics when he was ‘discovered’ by Hollywood. He has starred in over sixty motion pictures, including Delta Force, North Dallas Forty, and Inglourious Basterds, and several hundred hours of U.S. network television, including the Walking Tall TV series.

He has competed in world championships, Olympic trials, and/or international competition, in judo, ice hockey, yachting, and track-and-field. He holds black belts in judo, karate, and aikido, and he is a licensed NASCAR driver. He was honored by the Martial Arts Hall of Fame.

In 1961, when he was a U.S. Marine, he earned his first degree black belt in judo at the cradle of judo, the Kodokan in Tokyo. A year later he heard about a red-haired Jewish American woman from Brooklyn training at the Kodokan (at a time when no women were allowed). She was Rusty Kanokogi, nee Rena Glickman. “She took the name from a neighbor’s dog that she truly loved,” Svenson told me. “After the dog was killed by a car, she wanted the dog’s name to go on, to be embodied, somehow.” After her death in 2009, Svenson got the rights to tell her story. He has written and is about to direct a film about Rusty Kanokogi, called “Don’t Call Me Sir.”

Kayla Harrison It is a remarkable story. In 1959, when she was a single mother, Rusty Kanokogi disguised herself as a man in order to compete in the New York State YMCA Judo Championship. She beat the reigning champion and won the tournament. While on the podium after having received her medal she was asked if she was a girl. She admitted that she was.

They took the medal back.

Rusty Kanokogi vowed to change how women were treated in sports. She got women’s judo accepted as a competitive sport and an Olympic event. Kayla Harrison will portray Rusty. She is the 2012 Olympic gold medalist in judo, the first American, man or woman to be Olympic champion in the event that Rusty created.

“There’s not much difference between martial arts and learning how to type, from my perspective,” Svenson told me. “It’s repetition. Once you get beyond the mechanics of it, it is personalized by who you are, your being. Eventually it’s an issue of the person, the person’s ability, focus, needs. There are people in this world who don’t have a need to conquer someone else. I don’t have a need to beat someone in competition. I enjoyed the competition. I didn’t care if I won or lost. That outlook becomes a problem if you want to stand on top of the podium. I enjoyed the people.”

“A hero is someone who does something at great personal sacrifice for mankind,” he said. “Rusty certainly did. She worked hard for years to get women’s judo to be a competitive sport and an Olympic event. She fought against gender and ethnic bias. She was Jewish and she was a girl and she didn’t feel that either should stand in the way of whatever she was capable of. She set out to right the wrong across the board, and she did.”

Svenson wrote the screenplay. He said that when he was supporting himself as an actor to pay his tuition in the PhD program in metaphysics at USC, one of the most important things he learned was that “art is a word that is derived from the first three letters of the word ‘artificial.’ The greater the art, the less noticeable the artificiality. When it comes to my writing — to everything, really — I am attracted to authenticity, to that which is least contrived.”

He told me that judo is the world’s second most popular sport, with more than 50 million people participating internationally. He resisted the pressure from Hollywood to put a “name” actress in the story to cast someone who was a judo champion like the woman she is portraying. “I abhor deceit of any kind. Kayla Harrison is the most extraordinary young lady. She has been confronted with challenges that would break any other person. She is fabulous and I know she will be fabulous as Rusty in the movie. After all the dumb movies I’ve been in, I’m thrilled to be part of something that has heart, soul, authenticity. It is about something. People who see it will have experienced something. They will be better off than they were before it began. It is a wonderful, wonderful journey to be on.”

Interview: Gayle Forman of “If I Stay”

Posted on August 19, 2014 at 8:00 am

Gayle Forman is the author of If I Stay, the source for this week’s movie starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Mia, a talented young cellist in a coma following a car accident. As she hovers between life and death, she remembers incidents from her life with her family and with her rock musician boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). Ms. Forman wrote a touching essay for the New York Times describing the tragic loss that helped inspire the characters in the book.

It was a great pleasure to talk with Ms. Forman about how she thought about the music in the book and what she learned from her travels around the world.

How did you establish the properties and parameters of what Mia could see and remember while she was in a coma?

To some degree there was this intrinsic sense of how the state would be. At one point I did write myself a list of rules just to make sure I wasn’t violating it. And then I think there are maybe one or two little references to it just so you can kind of clarify it to readers but I really did want to make it clear that this is solitary state that she was in and that this was very particular to her. She was wondering why there were not other people in the hospital because she was not seeing them. She wondered whether other people were experiencing what she was. And she asked those questions and there is no answer because she was alone in this at that moment.

The music is so critical to the story and yet in a book you can’t hear music. You have to describe it. Did you listen to music while you were writing it? Did you have particular songs or musicians in mind?

It’s so funny because it wasn’t until after the book was done and people were reading it and started remarking about how much music was in it that I went back and realized that (a) I had name-dropped a lot of songs and bands and (b) that even the way the characters related was sort of musical I think. There was a part where Mia talked about her feelings for Adam and compared it to a tuning fork. So I think part of it was that when you’re in the mindsets of musical characters that’s what happens because I’ve written other books where the characters are not musicians and it certainly did not have the same amount of music in it.

In terms of listening to music, I had this little Pavlovian trick which was that I would listen the song Falling Slowly from the movie Once. I would listen to it before I start writing and then I would start to cry. I’m not sure why I would start to cry because the movie is not that sad, it’s melancholy but the song is not sad. There was something about that song, it was just like an emotional trigger for me. And it wasn’t even like a sad cry it was like an emotional fullness crying and it would put me the right state of mind to write. It’s almost like your subconscious knows what you need to listen and when you need to listen to stuff and when you don’t.

Why did you chose to set it in the northwest?

You know it’s interesting. Partially it was because it was it was where that part of my life happened. It was like falling in love, I met my husband when we were in Oregon and I met this wonderful group of friends when we were in Oregon, so falling in love and music is all tied up in Oregon. It’s also a part of the world where it snows an inch and everything shuts down and we don’t know what to do about it. So the whole premise of the snow day works there. It’s Oregon and it’s weird because I went to college there and I did not love living there and yet it seems to have stamped itself on my literary DNA because I keep returning to it for novels.

You travelled a lot when you were young. How did that affect you as a writer? How did that inspire you as a writer?

I think traveling made me who I am. When I was 16 I was an exchange student in England and that was the year that I kind of feel like I was on the road going one direction in life and it just kind of shifted me over and I finished high school and I went traveling for three more years instead of going to college. And so it’s impacted me in a lot of different ways. It sort of I think made me probably more of empathetic person than I would otherwise be. Because you kind of learn how it feels to look at things from a different points of view. I think that that served me well when I was a journalist. I think it also made me a little bit more willing to take risk. Every time you sit down to write a novel it’s a leap of faith and think that the willingness to do that sometimes is the scariest part. People always ask me what is the hardest part of traveling around the world. I think they think it’s the saving of the money or the planning and I always see the hardest part as deciding that I would do it. It was such a leap of faith and the rest of that was a matter of meticulous planning and saving.

That question of empathy comes into play because you wrote a sequel to this book that was from the perspective of another character. Why do it that way?

I’ve done it twice now. I think I’ve done a duet of duets, for different reasons and I don’t see doing it again for the foreseeable future. I didn’t have any intention to write a follow up but what happened was I was writing this entire other book which I actually wrote and revised and turned in but all the time that I was writing it I was waking up at four in the morning. The characters from If I Stay were waking me up and yelling at me like, “Where have you left us?” Because even though the book ends on a hopeful note they have really some hardship along the way.

So I didn’t want to contemplate those years along the way. So I kind of just skipped ahead. I kind of saw where they were and it was Adam’s story that started to take shape. I and actually was ready to start revising the other book and it was already scheduled to be published and I told my editor, I said “Nope, I want to hold on to that one.”

But with Just One Day/Just One Year it was more intentional. You’ll read one and you’ll sort of have one half of the story, you’re pretty sure about things and then you read the other and then you’re like, “Oh wait, I had it wrong.” I think that you have this hopefully satisfying experience as a reader being able to see the complete narrative in a way that neither of the characters can. It goes back to that sense of what happens when you travel, an understanding that sometimes it’s the perspective that just changes the narrative completely. It was very interesting in Just One Day/Just One Year just exploring that idea.

Adam is such an endearing character. Tell me a little bit about him.

Adam is inspired by or based on my husband. He was like this sweet bighearted lovely indie rock musician when I met him. He was my first love and I felt hard for him. And so when I was first writing that love story, when I first started writing, I didn’t realize that that relationship was going to be such an important one. I didn’t realize it until I wrote that first date scene and then I was like, “Oh, this is something real,” and then it kind of added a dimension. It created that tug of war in her life before the accident that becomes all the more amplified in the tug of war after. So that’s where the Adam in If I Stay came from and then with Where She Went I really liked writing that Adam so much because it was sort of interesting to look at grief and unconditional love through somebody one degree removed, who maybe didn’t feel like he had the same right to grieve as the people directly affected and what happens when you don’t own your feelings. It’s so caustic. You know no matter what, you feel what you feel but I think sometimes you’re ashamed around your feelings. Sometimes if you feel like “Oh, I don’t have the right to feel that way,” what happens after that is terrible. It was so interesting to see what happens and I felt so terrible for him and then just really grew to love him even more.

So much of the book and movie are Mia’s memories about her wonderful family.

Mia has fights with her parent, she has times when she can’t stand her mom and when her brother is annoying but she’s not thinking about those when she’s in her ghostly state because she knows what she has lost. She is thinking about the beautiful high points which sometimes are just these quiet days in her life but there are the days which really illustrate the love. So that’s why you don’t the typical fights of course she would’ve had with her parents. She’s thinking about these moments that will never be again. I didn’t know what her decision was going to be until halfway about through the book. I didn’t have it in mind. I knew the end of the book would be her decision but not what the decision would be. And people asked me why I made the choice that I did. I don’t necessarily I have an answer for that one. I just think Mia has so much still to live for. As Kim says you still have a family, and she does. There so many way to define a family and she has Adam of course. But she has music which has been a singular force of her life and she’s also steely and strong and through the course of that day I think she has always been strong. And when you see her family and kind of love that she marinated in for 17 years you understand where that strength comes from and she can really harness that. But it could also just be I was too wussy. I just couldn’t bear it because I love her too much.

Does every teenager feel like a Martian born into an Earth family at times?

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something whether it’s in their family I think or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don’t belong somewhere. Every human being has a sense when something good happens of them like “Why me? I don’t know that I deserve this? Why do you think I’m special?” I think those are universal, those feelings of insecurity. We all feel that way, so that’s why seeing something in a book or film makes you feel like “Yes” because it’s so nice to know that you’re not alone out there.

Right, we’re all Martians together.

We’re all Martians together, I guess, beautifully put.

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Interview: Elan Mastai, Screenwriter of Daniel Radcliffe’s Romantic Comedy “What If”

Posted on August 16, 2014 at 7:49 am

what-if-daniel-radcliffe — Copyright 2013 CBS Films

Daniel Radcliffe’s first romantic comedy is “What If,” co-starring Zoe Kazan. Radcliffe plays Wallace, a former medical student who dropped out after his romance fell apart. He meets a girl named Chantry (Kazan) who seems perfect, but she has a boyfriend (played by Rafe Spall as Ben). Wallace and Chantry become friends. Will they ever become more?

I spoke to screenwriter Elan Mastai about the challenges and pleasures of romantic comedy. He is just as charming as the characters he created. (Don’t forget to enter the contest for free tickets to see “What If” in the theater.)

Why is it so hard to find a good romantic comedy?

Part of the problem is that romantic comedies are the one genre that we’re all experts in from our own lives. I mean, most of us do not live legal thrillers or space operas or horror stories. But we all live romantic comedies. We’re all experts in love and flirtation and missed connections witty banter and bittersweet longing and love. This is the stuff of our everyday lives and for a lot of us it’s the thing that kind of gives our lives meaning and it’s a reprieve from our work life or whatever our personal problems are. Without getting too philosophical about it, we’re all experts in romantic comedy so we all immediately recognize when one is phony or glib or contrived. And it makes us angry because we know that it’s not the way it feels when it’s really happening to us. The good thing for me, I didn’t set out to revolutionize the genre. I just wanted to write a romantic comedy that was actually romantic and actually funny. We just took the situation seriously with both the comedy but also the emotion of what it really feels like when it’s happening to you.

We in the audience know before the characters do that they’re perfect for each other just from the rhythm of their conversation.

Yeah, I absolutely agree but at the same time that’s both a marker of a potentially perfect romantic partner and also the marker of a great new friend. And I was interested in the messy line between those things. When you meet somebody who you just have a great spark with and makes you laugh and gets your sense of humour and makes you feel like you could talk to them forever, that’s also where you are looking for a new friend. And as you get older it gets harder to make new friends because you don’t always have the time sit around and just shoot at the breeze and get to know each other that way. And so I was interested in the idea — if you have that connection with somebody and you know that it’s not going to get romantic because of their personal circumstances, what’s wrong with just being friends, what’s wrong in trying to make the friendship work and going into it open eyes but just saying, “I’m can to make this work because I’m a grown up, because I like spending time with them?”

Well, the only problem with that is you can go and do something with good intentions but your feelings evolve, circumstances evolve and even in a situation where you went in trying to do the right thing, it can suddenly spiral out of control, emotionally speaking.

One of the hurdles that comes up in designing a romantic comedy is creating the character who is going to be dumped to make room for the happy ending. He or she has to be good enough that we believe the lead character would like them but not so good we want them to stay together.

First of all I agree completely. I think that a problem with many movies in this genre is that the make the sort of Ralph Bellamy character, the boyfriend character, like such a clearly bad guy, like manipulative or a liar. They make it so clear that it reflects negatively on the character that’s with them. I mean what would it say about Zoe if she was living with her boyfriend of five years and he was like totally a jerk and obviously a lying cheating scumbag. Why would we invest in her if she has such terrible taste? I like the idea that this is a totally loving committed relationship and we get why they are together but also see that there’s a difference between her dynamic with Daniel and her dynamic with Rafe. They don’t talk and joke in the same way, but there is love commitment and support.

There are some sparks that she finds with Daniel that she’s obviously missing because she’s drawn toward him. Even though she sets up very clear boundaries early on to make sure that it can’t go anywhere. And I think in real life it’s not the obstacles about internal/external, you know when work takes Ben away from her it’s plot but also to me it’s realistic at a time in your life when you’re balancing out between the relationship you’re in but where you’re work is taking you. And when you’re committed and ambitious to your work, and you feel like it’s good and important work the way Ben does about his work.

I mean he’s got a very different job than Daniel does, Daniel doesn’t care about his job but Ben does and so it’s totally in character that he would go where his career is taking him, and that also he’s totally aware of the potential for damage it can have on his relationship and they’re very upfront when they’re having conversation about it. He doesn’t want to sacrifice his relationship for his work but it’s also an amazing opportunity and they try to be open and honest with each other about it. That was important for me. I think it is funny because people have very different reactions to Ben and part of that was a divide, it was trying to find the right pitch of a character. Some people think that he’s just like a super nice, sweet, ambitious good guy. Some people perceive sort of like sinister motives or manipulation or controlling elements of this character which I don’t think were intentional, and often say more about the reviewer’s point of viewthan I think we actually are in there. But that’s life, people are free to make their own interpretation.

I also like that you’re seeing this guy and he’s standing next to this attractive, very beautiful work colleague and even if he hasn’t done anything wrong there is this sort of just like implicit threat or Chantry can perceive it that way if she choose to. And so it becomes a marker of where the trust level is between them. And it’s likewise for him you know to be like actively threatened by Daniel being in her life in being a friend. That could also imply a lack of trust and so Ben’s character has to decide, does he trust his girlfriend or not and he does.

Ben is aware that Wallace makes Chantry laugh, which is very intimate.

Again that is something that we were all — me as a writer, Michael Dowse as a director, our cast, Zoe and Daniel — that was something that we really wanted to embrace, that very messy and complicated question. If you’re spending so much time with somebody and you love to be with them and they make you laugh and you’re revealing personal stuff to them and you have an intimacy that’s growing, when does that become cheating? If you’ve never touched, if you have never kissed, if the most physical contact you’ve ever had is a handshake but you’re connecting on a deep, deep level, when does that start counting as cheating?

A bacon and peanut butter and jelly sandwich called Fool’s Gold is an important part of the movie. Have you tried one?

Yes, many times, many times and I have to admit even the day we made them on set I ate them because I was like, “Oh wow this is so great.” We hired a chef to make it on camera, so I said, “I’m going to eat this.” Funny story actually, the only two people that tried it on set the day were Daniel and me, and then the props guy told me afterwards sheepishly that they had sprayed it with this weird kind of like lacquer to make it shiny on camera. So we just ate this thing that basically was partially poisoned but it still tasted delicious. I’ve had it many times and I don’t think that Daniel really knows that we were accidentally almost poisoned but the props master.

I think it’s hilarious that you think that whatever they put on the outside is more poisonous than the actual sandwich itself.

As Zoe says in the movie, bacon isn’t even a food; it’s technically just pure fat. Yes, I know it’s terribly unhealthy and really you can’t get through more than a couple of bites. It is delicious but it’s is kind of overwhelming. I go to these parties for the movie and there are plates of Fool’s Gold and trays of nachos and deep-fried pickles, and it’s just like my head has exploded out into the world. But it’s so funny and kind of a rewarding in a perverse way that these weird little obsessions of mine, because they’re in the movie, are being brought out into the world.

One thing I thought was both funny and true in the film is that everybody has got some friend couple that in every possible rational world would be a total train wreck of a relationship and yet it just works in some way that is incredibly frustrating to those of us who think we understand what the rules are.

On the one hand there’s a structural thing that’s I’m doing as a screenwriter, showing two couples who meet within minutes of each other, where one couple lunges into a relationship and one couple gets kind of caught in this complicated complex nuanced sort of emotional limbo. I love the idea of counter-pointing with a couple that was completely going for it. They have a lot of advice but it’s not like their advice is always good. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. It’s what works for them, but what works for them isn’t necessarily going to work for Wallace and Zoe because they are in different circumstances.

Like in real life, I don’t have any sage-like friends who are like relationship gurus. I have like friends who sometimes give me good advice and sometimes give me bad advice. But I love the idea that of just like one of them like really launching without all the sort of obsessive ethical kind of emotional debate into just for better or for worse they are going to try to make it work and they’re volatile and very sexually frank and they’re full of energy and it’s a great counterpoint, and I think a necessary counterpoint to a nuanced, witty, emotionally resonant story line.

What are you working on next?

We’re adapting an episode of “This American Life” into a movie. It’s a comedy about love, heartbreak, and how it can feel like the worst thing that can happen to you can turn to be the best thing that’s ever happened to you. It’s great and Ira Glass is amazing to work with, exactly as you hope he’d be. He’s a delight to work with, incredibly smart, incredibly insightful about the creative process, and has the best stories.

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Writing for the Industry: Black Writers Talk About Their Work

Posted on August 9, 2014 at 7:00 am

This afternoon at 3PM, the 8th annual Leimert Park Village Book Fair in Los Angeles will host a “Writing for the Industry” panel, which will aid “beginning, advanced and aspiring screenwriters through the steps of writing their first feature length script, getting representation, being staffed on a TV show, pitching to studio executives and more.” The panel will take place in the Community Room at the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Plaza, located at 3650 Martin Luther King Blvd in L.A.

Moderator writer/filmmaker Erica Watson (“Roubado,”), will present Gina Prince-Bythewood (“Love & Basketball,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” “Beyond the Lights”), Rob Edwards (“The Princess and the Frog”) Lena Waithe (“Bones,” “Dear White People”), Abdul Williams (“Lottery Ticket”), Aaron Rahsaan Thomas (Co-executive producer “Southland” and “Sleepy Hollow”) and Tyger Williams (“Menace II Society”).

And if you can’t make it to LA, take a look at this advice on writing from Matt Stone and Trey Parker of “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon.”

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