Television and Film
My initial work in television involved updating several PBS children's shows with playful as well as educational wraparound scripted scenes for a studio cast and audience. I was also the screenwriter for a produced interactive film enabling viewers to select multiple narrative paths. Residing now in Los Angeles, I've written original pilot scripts. The shows include an historical drama (currently represented) about Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin and their dysfunctional family who take New York by storm in the late 1800s. My other pilots are comedies. One is based on my award-winning play featured in two best-of anthologies "The 5564 to Toronto." Not included in the highlighted list below are shows still in the writing stage. This includes a dark comedy about an assassin who works for a PR Agency in the hi-stakes game of politics, big business, and tech. But after she falls in love during an Ayahuasca trip in Machu Pichu, she starts down a humane path that turns the world upside down, company-by-company (based on my award winning full length play, Roadkill). I'm also finishing up a few half-hour comedies about small towns populated by quirky, yet very real characters.
As an instructor of dramatic and comedic writing for both stage and screen, I focus television and film skills on structure, beats, story, and traceable character arcs. Stage writing, I find, lends itself more to thematic composition and the interplay of archetypes.