WrittenBy

THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA WEST

F E B R UA RY I M A R C H 2 02 0

©
w w w . w r i t t e n b y . c o m

Charles Randolph
on predators, pitching, &
BOMBSHELL
2020 Paul Selvin
Award Recipient

P O R T R A I T: TO M K E L L E R
6BEST PICTURE
G O L D E N G L O B E® INCLUDING
N O M I N A T I O N S
B E S T S C R E E N P L A Y

(Drama)
(MOTION PICTURE)
NOAH BAUMBACH

8BEST PICTURE
C R I T I C S’ C H O I C E AWA R D N O M I N AT I O N S
INCLUDING
B E S T O R I G I N A L S C R E E N P L AY
NOAH BAUMBACH

NORA
We can accept an imperfect Dad.
Let’s face it, the idea of a good
W INNER
BEST SCREENPLAY
father was only invented like 30 Noah Baumbach
years ago. Before that fathers Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association • Detroit Film Critics Society
were expected to be silent and
absent and unreliable and selfish Gotham Awards • Indiana Film Journalists Association
and we can all say that we want Los Angeles Film Critics Association • San Diego Film Critics Society
them to be different but on some St. Louis Film Critics Society • Vancouver Film Critics Circle
basic level we ACCEPT them, we Washington D.C. Area Film Critics
LOVE them for their fallibilities.
But people absolutely DON’T accept
those same failings in mothers.

We don’t accept it structurally

and we don’t accept it spiritually
because the basis of our Judeo-
Christian Whatever is Mary Mother
of Jesus and she’s PERFECT. She’s
a virgin who gives birth,
unwaveringly supports her child,
and holds his dead body when he’s
gone. But the Dad isn’t there.
He didn’t even do the f***ing
because God’s in heaven. God is
the father and God didn’t show up
so you have to be perfect and
Charlie can be a f*** up and it
doesn’t matter. You’ll always be
held to a different, higher
standard and it’s F***ED up, but
that’s the way it is.

F O R Y O U R W G A A W A R D S C O N S I D E R A T I O N

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Best Original Screenplay - Noah Baumbach

Interior of Josefina López’s restaurant

Casa Fina in LA’s Boyle Heights
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FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
VOL. 24 ISSUE 1
COLUMNS
6 SPOTLIGHT ON NOMINEES
Before they were nominated, they
were in Written By.
16 INTO THE DARKNESS
By Peter Hanson
Criminals of all kinds ran the show
this year—and many of the films,
too. From Joker to Hustlers to
Parasite to Barry, onscreen outliers
get their day.
56 CREATING DISSOLUTION
By Jacqueline Primo
In Marriage Story, written &
directed by Noah Baumbach, a
couple falls apart and a script
comes together.
62 TRIBUTE
Writers remember the great
D.C. Fontana—and Dorothy.
DEPARTMENTS
2 FADE IN
4 LETTERS & TWEETS
12 2020 WRITERS GUILD
AWARDS NOMINEES
22 2020 WGAW HONOREES
60 IN MEMORIAM
68 FADE OUT
Portrait of Silvio Horta
by Tom Keller
Written By April 2007
WrittenBy
THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA WEST
24 LOST AND FOUND
By Lisa Rosen
Nothing forges strong friendships like murder,
lies, and grief support groups. Liz Feldman on
bringing Dead to Me to life.
32 OUTFOXING THE SYSTEM
By Louise Farr
Charles Randolph came from a Fox family, and
grew up to drop a major Bombshell.
38 A MOTIVE TO THE MADNESS
By Paul Brownfield
Serial killers may be the subjects, but Joe Penhall
and Courtenay Miles are among the real brains
behind Mindhunter.
44 TRIAL BY FIRE
By Tobias Grey
Self-described “history nerd” Krysty Wilson-
Cairns fulfills a dream in 1917 .
50 POETIC JUSTICE
By Louise Farr
For co-writers Destin Daniel Cretton and
Andrew Lanham, justice is the point:
Just Mercy .
66 FROM THE VAULT
By Arlene Hellerman
From the Nov/Dec 2011 issue: The late Buck
Henry and Mike Nichols talk The Graduate .
In Memoriam PAGE 60
ABOVE: THE LATE SILVIO HORTA (8/14/1974 – 1/7/2020)
CREATOR OF UGLY BETTY
FADE IN IN
FADE THE MAGAZINE OF THE WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA WEST

2019 was the year of the pig, accord-

ing to the Chinese zodiac. But as far as
movies and TV are concerned, 2019 was
Written By ©

the year of friendship—for better or

WGAW OFFICERS
worse. 2020 Writers Guild Award-nom-
David A. Goodman
inated screenplays Booksmart, A Beauti- President

Marjorie David
ful Day in the Neighborhood, and Little Vice President

Michele Mulroney
Women would fall into the “better” cat- Secretary-Treasurer

JILLY WENDELL
egory, alongside TV noms PEN15, Rus- WGAW BOARD OF DIRECTORS
sian Doll, and Dead to Me (see feature on
Liz Alper, Angelina Burnett, Patti Carr, Robb Chavis, Travis Donnel-
page 24 and learn how creator Liz Feld-
Jacqueline Primo ly, Jonathan Fernandez, Ashley Gable, Dante W. Harper, Deric A.
man was inspired by her real-life BFF).
Hughes, Zoe Marshall, Luvh Rakhe, David Slack, Meredith Stiehm,
Even Marriage Story (page 56) is, ultimately, about a couple learning to
Betsy Thomas, Patric M. Verrone, Nicole Yorkin
be friends (or at least get along) after the dissolution of their marriage.
1917 (page 44) saw a friendship forged in war, with indelible repercus- EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR David Young
sions. In Knives Out, an odd-couple friendship wins in the end. GENERAL COUNSEL Anthony R. Segall

But, last year had its fair share of the worse too, both on the list of
nominees, and off of it. Would Joker’s Arthur have gone off the deep WGAW PHONE INFORMATION

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Written By ©

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(December/January, February/March, April/May, June/July,
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4 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

 F O R Y O U R C O N S I D E R A T I O N
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“A FULL-BODIED AND EXCITING TRUE-LIFE STORY.”

– TODD McCARTHY, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
SPOTLIGHT ON NOMINEES

Looking Back at the Nominees

Before they were nominated, they were in Written By.

“I wanted audiences—and especially young

audiences—to get a message from this film,
and to relate to these characters, with the
understanding that this could happen again.”
—Taika Waititi, Winter 2019 Jojo Rabbit, 2020
Nominee for Adapted Screenplay

“My friends are my greatest allies… Your friends

are kind of the family that you picked. Those are
your partnerships. We wanted to dignify that and
de-stigmatize that, and show that this friendship
is better for either of them than being in a shitty
but conventionally acceptable relationship with
a guy or girl.” —Susanna Fogel on The Spy Who
Dumped Me, September/October 2018
Booksmart, 2020 Nominee for Original
Screenplay (written by Emily Halpern &
Sarah Haskins and Susanna Fogel and Katie
Silberman)

“I say to actors, trust the situation and trust

the writing. The writing will do the work
for you.” —Steven Zaillian on The Night Of,
December/January 2017
The Irishman, 2020 Nominee for Adapted
Screenplay

“The people in my show are not good people. But are

they regular, venal, narcissistic people who also happen
to have a huge amount of power and influence, or has
their power and influence made them unusually cynical,
egocentric, narcissistic, and competitive? I either don’t
have or wouldn’t offer a final answer on that.” —Jesse
Armstrong, February/March 2019
Succession, 2020 Nominee for Drama Series and Episodic
Drama

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 PETER TRAVERS

“THE MOVIE HITS YOU LIKE A SHOT IN THE HEART.”

F O R Y O U R C O N S I D E R A T I O N

BEST PICTURE
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C H R I S TO P H E R M A R K U S & S T E P H E N M c F E E LY

DISNEYSTUDIOSAWARDS.COM © 2020 MARVEL

FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 7
 “All the playwrights I knew were men, and I
thought I had to be smarter than I was. And
then I started taking playwriting classes,
and I really found the thing that gave me
the most pleasure, which was being in the
back of the theater and watching actors say
things I had written.” —Greta Gerwig on
Lady Bird, February/March 2018
Little Women, 2020 Nominee for Adapted
Screenplay

“It’s a universe now where people have

consumed so much story. Five thousand
years ago, you’d see one play in Athens a
year, and so the three-act structure works
great, because you’re only getting it once
a year. Here, it’s 5,000 years later, and
you’re watching 70 plays a day, so you
eventually internalize that structure.” —
Bruce Miller, Summer 2018
The Handmaid’s Tale, 2020 Nominee for
Drama Series

“I’ve always been attracted to vice and

its sub-categories. I remember reading
once a quote from David Cronenberg
who said, ‘My films are told from the
point of view of the disease.’ I kind
of feel like that is how I approach
narrative.” —Leslye Headland, Fall
2019
Russian Doll, 2020 Nominee for
Comedy Series and New Series

“For me it’s about honesty. I’m

also a playwright. There’s humor
in horrible times, there’s honest
humor. I wanted to, at every turn,
just try to stay honest.” —Michael
Slade, February/March 2019
After Forever, 2020 Nominee for
Original Short Form New Media

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“The detectives’ determination
and engagement is obvious, but
even the story of Marie—who’s
enduring such enormous pain
and injustice and cataclysmic
violation—is ultimately a story of
a woman who refuses to be buried
by the mountain that’s collapsing
on her, who’s fighting every day
to get to the surface. That’s what
I felt immersed in. That fight and
that strength.” —Susannah Grant,
Winter 2019
Unbelievable, 2020 Nominee for
Adapted Long Form

“It was a lot of responsibility to

go from the comforting embrace
of someone else’s editorial point
of view to having to put yours
on your sleeve at all times. It
takes you out of your comfort
zone for sure. We just have to go
for it.” —Samantha Bee, April/
May 2018
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,
2020 Nominee for Comedy/
Variety Talk Series and Comedy/
Variety Specials

What makes a good Jeopardy! writer?

Billy Wisse answers: “Curiosity. A good
memory. A love of language. A love
of reading. Catholic interests.” And
the ability to answer the questions:
What do people know now? Because
their goal is not to necessarily stump
contestants, but to make knowledge
and intelligence fun. —February/March
2019
Jeopardy!, 2020 Nominee for Quiz and
Audience Participation

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NEVER TOO SOON TO TEACH.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION IN ALL CATEGORIES INCLUDING

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

SCREENPLAY BY TAIKA WAITITI
“
BASED ON THE BOOK CAGING SKIES ”
BY CHRI ST I NE LEU NE NS

FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 11

 2020 Writers Guild Awards
NOMINEES

SCREEN
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
1917, Written by Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns; Universal Pictures
Booksmart, Written by Emily Halpern & Sarah Haskins and Susanna
Fogel and Katie Silberman; United Artists Releasing
Knives Out, Written by Rian Johnson; Lionsgate
Marriage Story, Written by Noah Baumbach; Netflix
Parasite, Screenplay by Bong Joon Ho and Han Jin Won, Story by Bong
Joon Ho; Neon
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue
& Noah Harpster, Inspired by the Article “Can You Say…Hero?” by Tom
Junod; TriStar Pictures
The Irishman, Screenplay by Steven Zaillian, Based upon the book I
Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt; Netflix
Jojo Rabbit, Screenplay by Taika Waititi, Based on the book Caging
Skies by Christine Leunens; Fox Searchlight
Joker, Written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver, Based on Characters from
DC Comics; Warner Bros. Pictures
Little Women, Screenplay by Greta Gerwig, Based on the novel by Louisa
May Alcott; Sony Pictures
DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY
Citizen K, Written by Alex Gibney; Greenwich Entertainment
Foster, Written by Mark Jonathan Harris; HBO Documentary Films
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Written by Alex Gibney; HBO
Documentary Films
Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People, Written by Robert Seidman & Oren
Rudavsky; First Run Features
The Kingmaker, Written by Lauren Greenfield; Showtime Documentary
Films
TELEVISION, NEW MEDIA, AND NEWS NOMINEES
DRAMA SERIES
The Crown, Written by James Graham, David Hancock, Peter Morgan;
Netflix
The Handmaid’s Tale, Written by Marissa Jo Cerar, Yahlin Chang, Nina
Fiore, Dorothy Fortenberry, Jacey Heldrich, John Herrera, Lynn Renee
Maxcy, Bruce Miller, Kira Snyder, Eric Tuchman; Hulu
Mindhunter, Written by Pamela Cederquist, Joshua Donen, Marcus Gardley,
Shaun Grant, Liz Hannah, Phillip Howze, Jason Johnson, Doug Jung, Colin
J. Louro, Alex Metcalf, Courtenay Miles, Dominic Orlando, Joe Penhall, Ruby
Rae Spiegel; Netflix
Succession, Written by Jesse Armstrong, Alice Birch, Jon Brown, Jonathan
Glatzer, Cord Jefferson, Mary Laws, Lucy Prebble, Georgia Pritchett, Tony
Roche, Gary Shteyngart, Susan Soon He Stanton, Will Tracy; HBO
Watchmen, Written by Lila Byock, Nick Cuse, Christal Henry, Branden
Jacobs-Jenkins, Cord Jefferson, Jeff Jensen, Claire Kiechel, Damon
Lindelof, Janine Nabers, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Tom Spezialy, Carly Wray; HBO
COMEDY SERIES
Barry, Written by Alec Berg, Duffy Boudreau, Bill Hader, Emily Heller,
Jason Kim, Taofik Kolade, Elizabeth Sarnoff; HBO
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Written by Kate Fodor, Noah Gardenswartz,
Daniel Goldfarb, Alison Leiby, Dan Palladino, Sono Patel, Amy Sherman-
Palladino, Jordan Temple; Prime Video
PEN15, Written by Jeff Chan, Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, Gabe Liedman,
Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Andrew Rhymer, Jessica Watson, Sam Zvibleman;
Hulu
Russian Doll, Written by Jocelyn Bioh, Flora Birnbaum, Cirocco Dunlap,
Leslye Headland, Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, Tami Sagher, Allison
Silverman; Netflix
Veep, Written by Gabrielle Allan-Greenberg, Rachel Axler, Emilia
Barrosse, Ted Cohen, Jennifer Crittenden, Alex Gregory, Steve Hely, Peter
Huyck, Erik Kenward, Billy Kimball, David Mandel, Ian Maxtone-Graham,
Dan Mintz, Lew Morton, Dan O’Keefe, Georgia Pritchett, Leila Strachan;
HBO
NEW SERIES
Dead To Me, Written by Rebecca Addelman, Njeri Brown, Liz Feldman,
Kelly Hutchinson, Anthony King, Emma Rathbone, Kate Robin, Abe Sylvia;
Netflix
PEN15, Written by Jeff Chan, Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, Gabe Liedman,
Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Andrew Rhymer, Jessica Watson, Sam Zvibleman; Hulu

12 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

 2020 Writers Guild Awards
NOMINEES
Russian Doll, Written by Jocelyn Bioh, Flora Birnbaum, Cirocco Dunlap,
Leslye Headland, Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, Tami Sagher, Allison
Silverman; Netflix
Watchmen, Written by Lila Byock, Nick Cuse, Christal Henry, Branden
Jacobs-Jenkins, Cord Jefferson, Jeff Jensen, Claire Kiechel, Damon
Lindelof, Janine Nabers, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Tom Spezialy, Carly Wray;
HBO
What We Do in the Shadows, Written by Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain,
Jemaine Clement, Josh Lieb, Iain Morris, Stefani Robinson, Duncan
Sarkies, Marika Sawyer, Tom Scharpling, Paul Simms,Taika Waititi; FX
Networks
ORIGINAL LONG FORM
Chernobyl, Written by Craig Mazin; HBO
The Terror: Infamy, Written by Max Borenstein, Alessandra DiMona,
Shannon Goss, Steven Hanna, Naomi Iizuka, Benjamin Klein, Danielle
Roderick, Tony Tost, Alexander Woo; AMC
Togo, Written by Tom Flynn; Disney+
True Detective, Written by Alessandra DiMona, Graham Gordy, Gabriel
Hobson, David Milch, Nic Pizzolatto; HBO
ADAPTED LONG FORM
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, Written by Vince Gilligan; Netflix
Fosse/Verdon, Written by Debora Cahn, Joel Fields, Ike Holter, Thomas
Kail, Steven Levenson, Charlotte Stoudt, Tracey Scott Wilson, Based on
the book Fosse by Sam Wasson; FX Networks
The Loudest Voice, Written by John Harrington Bland, Laura Eason,
Tom McCarthy, Alex Metcalf, Gabriel Sherman, Jennifer Stahl, Based on
the book The Loudest Voice in the Room and the New York Magazine
articles by Gabriel Sherman; Showtime
Unbelievable, Written by Michael Chabon, Susannah Grant, Becky
Mode, Jennifer Schuur, Ayelet Waldman, Based on the Pro Publica &
The Marshall Project article “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” and This
American Life radio episode “Anatomy of Doubt;” Netflix
ORIGINAL SHORT FORM NEW MEDIA
After Forever, Written by Michael Slade & Kevin Spirtas; Prime Video
Special, Written by Ryan O’Connell; Netflix
ANIMATION
“Bed, Bob & Beyond” (Bob’s Burgers), Written by Kelvin Yu; Fox
“The Gene Mile” (Bob’s Burgers), Written by Steven Davis; Fox
“Go Big or Go Homer” (The Simpsons), Written by John Frink; Fox
“A Horse Walks Into A Rehab” (BoJack Horseman), Written by Elijah
Aron; Netflix
“Livin’ La Pura Vida” (The Simpsons), Written by Brian Kelley; Fox
“Thanksgiving of Horror” (The Simpsons), Written by Dan Vebber; Fox
EPISODIC DRAMA
“407 Proxy Authentication Required” (Mr. Robot), Written by Sam
Esmail; USA Network
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” (Ray Donovan), Written by Joshua
Marston; Showtime
“Mirror Mirror” (The OA), Written by Dominic Orlando & Claire Kiechel;
Netflix
“Moondust” (The Crown), Written by Peter Morgan; Netflix
“Our Little Island Girl” (This Is Us), Written by Eboni Freeman; NBC
“Tern Haven” (Succession), Written by Will Tracy; HBO
EPISODIC COMEDY
“Here’s Where We Get Off” (Orange Is the New Black), Written by Jenji
Kohan; Netflix
“It’s Comedy or Cabbage” (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Written by Amy
Sherman-Palladino; Prime Video
“Nice Knowing You” (Living With Yourself), Written by Timothy
Greenberg; Netflix
“Pilot” (Dead to Me), Written by Liz Feldman; Netflix
“The Stinker Thinker” (On Becoming a God in Central Florida), Written
by Robert F. Funke & Matt Lutsky; Showtime
“Veep” (Veep), Written by David Mandel; HBO
COMEDY/VARIETY TALK SERIES
Conan, Head Writer: Matt O’Brien Writers: Jose Arroyo, Glenn Boozan,
Daniel Cronin, Andres du Bouchet, Jessie Gaskell, Brian Kiley, Laurie
Kilmartin, Todd Levin, Levi MacDougall, Conan O’Brien, Andy Richter,
Frank Smiley, Mike Sweeney; TBS
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Head Writer: Melinda Taub Writing
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 13
 2020 Writers Guild Awards
NOMINEES
Supervised by: Joe Grossman, Nicole SilverbergWriters: Samantha Bee,
Kristen Bartlett, Pat Cassels, Sean Crespo, Mike Drucker, Mathan Erhardt,
Miles Kahn, Sahar Rizvi, Special Material by: Allison Silverman; TBS
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Senior Writers: Dan Gurewitch, Jeff
Maurer, Jill Twiss, Juli Weiner Writers: Tim Carvell, Daniel O’Brien, John
Oliver, Owen Parsons, Charlie Redd, Joanna Rothkopf, Ben Silva, Seena
Vali; HBO
Late Night with Seth Meyers, Head writer: Alex Baze Supervising
Writers: Sal Gentile, Seth Reiss, Writers: Jermaine Affonso, Karen Chee,
Bryan Donaldson, Matt Goldich, Dina Gusovsky, Jenny Hagel, Allison
Hord, Mike Karnell, John Lutz, Seth Meyers, Ian Morgan, Amber Ruffin,
Mike Scollins, Mike Shoemaker, Ben Warheit; NBC Universal
The Late Late Show with James Corden, Head Writers: Lauren
Greenberg, Ian Karmel Writers: Demi Adejuyigbe, James Corden,
Rob Crabbe, Lawrence Dai, Nate Fernald, Caroline Goldfarb, Olivia
Harewood, David Javerbaum, John Kennedy, Kayleigh Lamb, James
Longman, Jared Moskowitz, CeCe Pleasants, Tim Siedell, Benjamin
Stout, Tom Thriveni, Louis Waymouth, Ben Winston; CBS
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Head Writers: Jay Katsir, Opus
Moreschi Writers: Michael Brumm, River Clegg, Aaron Cohen, Stephen
Colbert, Paul Dinello, Ariel Dumas, Glenn Eichler, Django Gold, Gabe
Gronli, Greg Iwinski, Barry Julien, Daniel Kibblesmith, Eliana Kwartler,
Matt Lappin, Asher Perlman, Tom Purcell, Kate Sidley, Jen Spyra, Brian
Stack, John Thibodeaux; CBS
COMEDY/VARIETY SPECIALS
Desi Lydic: Abroad, Written by Devin Delliquanti, Lauren Sarver Means;
Comedy Central
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee Presents: Not the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner Part 2, Head Writer Melinda Taub, Writing
Supervised by Joe Grossman, Nicole Silverberg, Writers Samantha Bee,
Kristen Bartlett, Pat Cassels, Sean Crespo, Mike Drucker, Mathan Erhardt,
Lewis Friedman, Miles Kahn, Sahar Rizvi, Special Material by Allison
Silverman; TBS
The Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke Primetime Special 2019, Head
Writers Lauren Greenberg, Ian Karmel, Writers Demi Adejuyigbe, James
Corden, Rob Crabbe, Lawrence Dai, Nate Fernald, Caroline Goldfarb,
John Kennedy, James Longman, Jared Moskowitz, CeCe Pleasants,
14 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
Tim Siedell, Benjamin D. Stout, Tom Thriveni, Louis Waymouth, Ben
Winston; CBS
Ramy Youssef: Feelings, Written by Ramy Youssef; HBO
COMEDY/VARIETY SKETCH SERIES
At Home with Amy Sedaris, Writers: Cole Escola, Amy Sedaris, Allison
Silverman; truTV
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, Writers: Jeremy Beiler,
Zach Kanin, Tim Robinson, John Solomon; Netflix
Saturday Night Live, Head Writers: Michael Che, Colin Jost, Kent
Sublette Supervising Writers: Anna Drezen, Fran Gillespie, Sudi Green,
Streeter Seidell Senior Writer: Bryan Tucker Weekend Update Head
Writer: Pete SchultzWriters: James Anderson, Neal Brennan, Andrew
Briedis, Dan Bulla, Megan Callahan, Steven Castillo, Emma Clark,
Andrew Dismukes, Alison Gates, Tim Herlihy, Steve Higgins, Sam Jay,
Erik Kenward, Steve Koren, Rob Klein, Michael Koman, Dan Licata,
Alan Linic, Eli Coyote Mandel, Dave McCary, Dennis McNicholas, Lorne
Michaels, John Mulaney, Josh Patten, Simon Rich, Josh Patten, Jasmine
Pierce, Katie Rich, Gary Richardson, Marika Sawyer, Robert Smigel, Mark
Steinbach, Will Stephen, Julio Torres, Bowen Yang; NBC Universal
QUIZ AND AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, Head Writer Bret Calvert,
Writers Seth Harrington, Rosemarie DiSalvo; Nickelodeon
Hollywood Game Night, Head Writers Ann Slichter, Grant Taylor,
Writers Michael Agbabian, Marshall Davis, Allie Kokesh, Dwight D.
Smith; NBC
Jeopardy!, Writers Matthew Caruso, John Duarte, Harry Friedman, Mark
Gaberman, Debbie Griffin, Michele Loud, Robert McClenaghan, Jim
Rhine, Steve D. Tamerius, Billy Wisse; ABC
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Head Writer Stephen Melcher,
Writers Kyle Beakley, Patricia A. Cotter, Ryan Hopak, Gary Lucy, James
Rowley, Ann Slichter; Disney/ABC Syndication
DAYTIME DRAMA
Days of Our Lives, Writers: Lorraine Broderick, Ron Carlivati, Joanna
Cohen, Carolyn Culliton, Richard Culliton, Rick Draughon, Dave
 2020 Writers Guild Awards
NOMINEES

Kreizman, Rebecca McCarty, Ryan Quan, Dave Ryan, Betsy Snyder, Katie
Schock; NBC Universal
General Hospital, Head Writers: Shelly Altman, Christopher Van Etten, Dan
O’Connor Associate Head Writers: Anna T. Cascio Writers: Barbara Bloom,
Suzanne Flynn, Charlotte Gibson, Lucky Gold, Kate Hall, Elizabeth Korte,
Donny Sheldon, Scott Sickles; ABC
The Young and the Restless, Writers: Amanda L. Beall, Jeff Beldner, Sara
Bibel, Matt Clifford, Annie Compton, Christopher Dunn, Sara Endsley, Janice
Ferri Esser, Mellinda Hensley, Anne Schoettle, Natalie Minardi Slater, Teresa
Zimmerman; CBS
CHILDREN’S EPISODIC, LONG FORM AND SPECIALS
“It’s Just… Weird” (Alexa & Katie), Written by Romi Barta; Netflix
“Remember Black Elvis?” (Family Reunion), Written by Howard Jordan,
Jr.; Netflix
“Remember How This All Started?” (Family Reunion), Written by Meg
DeLoatch; Netflix
“Stupid Binder” (Alexa & Katie), Written by Nancy Cohen; Netflix
“Time to Make... My Move” (Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of
Resistance), Written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach; Netflix
DOCUMENTARY SCRIPT – CURRENT EVENTS
“Coal’s Deadly Dust” (Frontline), Written by Elaine McMillion Sheldon; PBS
“The Mueller Investigation” (Frontline), Written by Michael Kirk & Mike
Wiser; PBS
“Trump’s Trade War” (Frontline), Written by Rick Young; PBS
NEWS SCRIPT – ANALYSIS, FEATURE, OR COMMENTARY
“Atlanta, EP. 3” (A King’s Place), Written by Jessica Moulite, Ashley Velez;
TheRoot.com
“Fly Like An Eagle” (60 Minutes), Written by Katie Kerbstat Jacobson, Scott
Pelley, Nicole Young; CBS News
“’Tis the Season: Here’s How Jesus Became So Widely Accepted as White,”
Written by Joon Chung, Felice León, Ashley Velez; TheRoot.com
“Toxic Water Crisis Still This Haunts New York Town”, Written by Lena
Jackson; HuffPost.com
DIGITAL NEWS
“A Gridiron of Their Own,” Written by Kelsey McKinney; Deadspin.com
“Stories About My Brother,” Written by Prachi Gupta, Jezebel.com
RADIO/AUDIO NOMINEES
RADIO/AUDIO NEWS SCRIPT – REGULARLY SCHEDULED, BULLETIN, OR
BREAKING REPORT
“CBS News on the Hour with Norah O’Donnell - El Paso, Texas and Dayton,
Ohio - Communities in Mourning,” Written by James Hutton; CBS News
Radio
“Hail and Farewell: Remembering Some Headline Makers,” Written by Gail
Lee; CBS News Radio
“World News This Week, August 9, 2019,” Written by Stephanie Pawlowski
and Jim Ryan; ABC News Radio
“World News This Week, September 13, 2019,” Written by Joan B. Harris;
ABC News Radio

DOCUMENTARY SCRIPT – OTHER THAN CURRENT EVENTS
“Chasing The Moon Part One: A Place Beyond The Sky” (American
Experience), Written by Robert Stone; PBS
“Right To Fail” (Frontline), Written by Tom Jennings; PBS
“Supreme Revenge” (Frontline), Written by Michael Kirk & Mike Wiser; PBS
NEWS SCRIPT – REGULARLY SCHEDULED, BULLETIN, OR
BREAKING REPORT
“Terror in America: The Massacres in El Paso and Dayton” (Special Edition
of the CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell), Written by Jerry Cipriano,
Joe Clines, Bob Meyer; CBS News
RADIO/AUDIO NEWS SCRIPT – ANALYSIS, FEATURE, OR COMMENTARY
“The Enduring Legacy of Jackie Kennedy Onassis,” Written by Dianne E.
James, Gail Lee; CBS News Radio
“Woodstock: Back to the Garden,” Written by Gail Lee, CBS News Radio
PROMOTIONAL WRITING NOMINEES
ON AIR PROMOTION
“CBS Promos”, Written by Molly Neylan; CBS
“Star. Kill. Evil. FBI.,” Written by Ralph Buado; CBS
“Star Trek: Picard” and “All Rise Promos,” Written by Jessica Katzenstein; CBS

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 15

 Reflecting the
complicated moral
landscape of 2019,
nuanced
portrayals of
criminals
permeated
last year’s best
film and
television.
INTO THE
WRITTEN BY PETER HANSON

F ascination with criminal

characters is hardly new,
but something felt dif-
ferent about a handful of
provocative 2019 screen stories that ex-
plored life beyond normal parameters
of legality and morality. Some of these
stories presented lawbreakers as anti-
heroes channeling the angst of income
The Irishman
inequality. Others explored intricate
codes of criminal culture, or the psy-
chology of the criminal mind. All such
stories ran parallel with upheavals in the
real world—wrenching labor disputes,
the continuing impact of the #MeToo
movement, the impeachment of a
ple are angry and confused,” says writer-
director Lorene Scafaria, who adapted
Hustlers from Jessica Pressler’s 2015 ar-
ticle, “The Hustlers at Scores.” “Certain
systems keep people in the positions
they’re born with, and I think that’s hav-
ing a profound effect on people who feel
president whose scorched-earth politics all kinds of marginalization. That’s cer-
epitomize privilege run amok. tainly been a wave for movies. In 2019,
This past year people were wondering, ‘How did we get
raised compli- here?’ Maybe that’s why it’s inspiring to
cated questions watch criminals enact change.”
about account- In Scafaria’s screenplay, which
ability, while is based on real events, a group of
revealing shock- strippers drug and rob Wall Street
ing differences investors (and other wealthy cli-
of opinion on ents). The strippers include women
the seemingly of color, single mothers, and ad-
binary notion dicts—social groups often denied
of right versus upward mobility. What’s more, be-
wrong. What cause their victims belong to a pop-
better climate, ulation not presently held in great
then, for movies esteem—traders whose recklessness
and TV shows helped trigger the Great Reces-
offering em- sion—the women in Hustlers strad-
pathetic—and dle an interesting line. Are they rob-
sometimes even bers or rebels? As Scafaria and other
sympathetic— writers of crime tales know well,
portrayals of audiences relish living vicariously
criminals? through lawbreaking characters.
“I think peo- “The crime genre is inherently dra-

16
16 •• WWGGAAWW W
WRRI ITTTTEENN BBYY FFEEBBRRUUAARRYY I I MMAARRCCHH 22002200
 “I don’t try to build
empathy. I don’t need
to, since a charac-
ter’s behavior will
do that for me, if
there’s any to be had.
Neither do I judge, or
go out of my way to Parasite

vilify.”
— Steven Zaillian,
Joker The Irishman

DARKNESS
matic and also allows us to see sides
of our character we possess but don’t
usually act on,” notes Steven Zaillian,
who adapted The Irishman (2020 Writ-
ers Guild Award nominee for Adapted
Screenplay) from Charles Brandt’s
book I Heard You Paint Houses. “Most
of us haven’t put a horse’s head in some-
one’s bed to get what we want, but we
understand it.”
That notion of understanding is
applicable to some of 2019’s wildest
movies. Consider Joker (2020 nomi-
nee for Adapted Screenplay, written
Avengers: Engdgame
by Todd Philips &
Scott Silver, based
on characters from
DC Comics), the
polarizing origin
story of Batman’s
arch nemesis. In-
stead of portraying
the garishly hued
psychopath as a fully formed “clown
prince of crime,” Joker presents Arthur
Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) as a victim
of mental illness, poverty, and a weak
social safety net. Oceans of ink were
spilled tying Fleck’s
white-male rage to
the toxic masculin-
ity rampaging across
America—the lone-
wolf shooter, the do-
mestic terrorist, the
incel (self-described
“involuntary celi-
bates”), and so on.
Pundits’ troubling
interpretation of Jok-
er seemed to be that
Fleck’s killing spree
provided validation
for the white men of
America who express
El Camino
animus through rampant bloodshed.
Just as incendiary was the interna-
tional critical and commercial smash
Parasite (2020 nominee for Origi-
nal Screenplay, screenplay by Bong
Joon Ho and Han Jin Won, story by
Bong), another funhouse-mirror take
on the have-nots giving the haves
their due. Depicting the adventures
of a poor South Korean family that
insinuates itself into the pristine en-
clave of a wealthy family, Parasite cy-
cles from comedy to tragedy to horror
in startling ways, first asking viewers
to laugh at brazen lawlessness and
then to despair at the social injustice
motivating the lawlessness. Like Jok-
er, Parasite climaxes with carnage that
isn’t so much cathartic as corrective.
Strange times, it seems, invite the
telling of strange stories.
Even 2019’s biggest box-office

FF EE B
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success, Avengers: Endgame (writ-
ten by Christopher Markus & Ste-
phen McFeely, based on the Marvel
Comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby),
followed the vogue for presenting di-
mensional wrongdoers. During the
picture’s nervy first act, Thanos—the
galactic supervillain who murdered
half the universe—suffers emotional
and physical rot. Instead of gloating
like a conventional baddie, he is re-
signed to paying a cost for achieving
his malevolent ambitions.
Nuanced portrayals of criminals
were just as prevalent on television
in 2019. The second season of black
comedy Barry (2020 nominee for
Comedy Series, created by Alec Berg
& Bill Hader) chronicles an amiable
hitman’s problematic attempts to be-
come an actor. The debut season of
Watchmen (2020 nominee for Dra-
ma Series and New Series, created by
Damon Lindelof, based on characters
co-created for DC by Dave Gibbons)
blurs lines even further by presenting
everything from police-sanctioned
vigilantes to cops who secretly belong
to the Klan.
18 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY
“Certain systems keep peo-
ple in the positions they’re
born with, and I think
that’s having a profound
effect on people who feel
all kinds of marginaliza-
tion. That’s certainly been
a wave for movies. In 2019,
people were wondering,
‘How did we get here?’
Maybe that’s why it’s in-
spiring to watch criminals
enact change.”
—Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers
I MARCH 2020
Hustlers
In addition, the telefilm El Cami-
no: A Breaking Bad Movie (2020
nominee for Adapted Long Form,
written by Vince Gilligan) provides a
poignant coda to the Gilligan-created
series about meth cooks with complex
emotional lives.
Surveying last year’s small-screen
climate, one is hard-pressed to find
simplistic portrayals of criminals,
except perhaps the interchangeable
crooks required to keep procedurals
humming along.
It would be dangerous, however, to
draw an inference that all thoughtful
portrayals of criminals are inherently
sympathetic—as if the writers crafting
these characterizations wish for audi-
ences to cheer wrongdoing. Sometimes,
in fact, writers exploring criminality
don’t want to lead audiences toward any
particular emotional outcomes.
“I don’t try to build empathy,”
says Zaillian. “I don’t need to, since a
character’s behavior will do that for
me, if there’s any to be had. Neither
do I judge, or go out of my way to
vilify.” Referring to his screenplay for
Schindler’s List (based on the novel
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 19
“The word sympathetic is not one I
think about. I don’t try to make a char-
acter sympathetic, or unsympathetic, in
anything I write. I just try to understand
them.” —Steven Zaillian, The Irishman
by Thomas Keneally), Zaillian adds that
the nature of certain characters prevents
slotting them into conventional lanes of
morality or immorality. “Someone like
Amon Goeth [the Nazi commandant
played in Schindler’s by Ralph Fiennes]
doesn’t see himself as evil—he doesn’t talk
about it—but his deeds define who he is.”
In The Irishman, Zaillian tells the
story of self-described mob hitman
Frank Sheeran (played by Robert De
Niro), a real person who claimed to
have killed labor leader Jimmy Hoffa.
“Frank Sheeran didn’t have much self-
awareness, in my opinion,” Zaillian ex-
plains. “He said he didn’t feel bad about
what he did to people because they’d
done something wrong to deserve their
fate, and he didn’t feel bad for their
families because he didn’t know them.
But what about Hoffa? What did he
do wrong? What about Hoffa’s family,
whom Frank did know? That’s where he
would have trouble explaining himself.”
The strippers in Hustlers manifest
both self-awareness and remorse, but
they keep committing crimes until they
get caught. Nonetheless, Scafaria con-
trived a scene during which ringleader
Ramona (played by Jennifer Lopez) ar-
ticulates the reasons behind her actions.
“The game is rigged,” Ramona says,
“and it does not reward people who
play by the rules.” Scafaria observes that
Ramona’s speech, to her surprise, has
provoked applause during screenings.
Then she elaborates: “The audience is
looking at this group of women and say-
ing, ‘Why did you do this?’ It was my
responsibility to not tell the audience
what was right or wrong, but to assume
that the audience knows the difference
between right and wrong, and to know
20 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH
at which point in
the story these char-
acters are crossing
the line.”
While pitching
Hustlers around
Hollywood, Sca-
faria discovered
that attitudes to-
ward gender in-
fluenced reactions
as strongly as attitudes toward crimi-
nality. “That was an interesting test,
honestly, when we brought the script
around town,” she recalls. “These
characters were scrutinized more than
male characters ever would be. That
really speaks to what we’re valued
for, which was my reason for making
the movie in the first place. Men are
valued for their money, success, and
power, and women are valued for their
beauty. In that power dynamic, male
characters aren’t questioned. Why are
they striving for more power? Why
are they holding this gun? Why are
they committing this violent crime?
People don’t ask those questions be-
cause they’re used to valuing men for
that behavior.”
Zaillian notes another intriguing
consideration when telling stories about
lawbreakers—the gulf between charac-
ters who knowingly cross lines and char-
acters who cannot even perceive those
lines. “Maybe the distinction is that the
criminal lives in the same world we do,”
Zaillian says, “while the sociopath lives
in his own. The word sympathetic is not
2020
one I think about. I don’t try to make
a character sympathetic, or unsympa-
thetic, in anything I write. I just try
to understand them. I see them as real
people in a real world, and where they
end up on the ‘sympathy scale’ will be
determined by their behavior. I’m sure
there are some stories about sociopaths
I wouldn’t be interested in, and that
would be because I couldn’t find a rea-
son for telling them. But I look more
closely at this than I once did. My wife
talked me out of adapting [the Thomas
Harris novel] The Silence of the Lambs
for that reason, after which she decided
never to advise me again.” (Ted Tally
won a Writers Guild Award and an Os-
car for writing the celebrated 1991 film
version.)
In the same way that uplifting narra-
tives can inspire us to become our best
selves, tales that explore the darkest
aspects of humanity can help us better
understand the totality of our shared
experience. “I think we have to look
under the rocks and look at the ugly
stuff,” says Scafaria. “We need to have
more nuanced conversations. Empathy
has to apply to everyone. You have to
cast light on the darkness, and that’s
what a lot of the films did last year.”
“What we look for in stories are ex-
plorations of the human condition,”
offers Zaillian. “This can be done by
showing its positive or negative aspects.
Either way, it helps us understand our-
selves. But since we can never com-
pletely understand ourselves, we never
tire of them.”
Barry
 “THE BEST FILM
OF THE YEAR.
A MOVIE THAT CAN, AND WILL,
STAND THE TEST OF TIME.”
OWEN GLEIBERMAN

WINNER
TOP 10
MOTION PICTURES OF THE YEAR

F O R YO U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N I N A L L C AT E G O R I E S I N C LU D I N G

BEST PICTURE
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
WRITTEN BY
TODD PHILLIPS & SCOTT SILVER

INT. HA-HA’S TALENT

BOOKING, LOCKER ROOM - DAY
Arthur is putting on his make-
up, using the small mirror in
his locker. Behind him a
couple other clowns are eating
their lunch at a small table,
not paying Arthur any
attention.

Arthur pauses, half-finished,

and stares at himself for a
beat. Hooks the corners of his
mouth down with his index
fingers, turning his mouth into
the “tragedy mask” frown--

And then he pulls his fingers

up, pulling them up wider and
wider, stretching his smile
into a grotesque parody of the
“comedy mask,” trying to make
himself look happy, pulling
his mouth so wide tears come
Paul Chitlik to his eyes--

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W

WWG
W .AWW
B A WW
A RR
D SI . TC OTME N BY • 21
2020 WGAW HONOREES
WRITTEN BY F.X. FEENEY
PADDY CHAYEFSKY LAUREL AWARD FOR
TELEVISION WRITING ACHIEVEMENT
Merrill Markoe
If you want a snapshot of Merrill Markoe in the particulars of her brilliance, let us skip (for the
moment) her four decades of writing for television and consider just three of her acclaimed book
titles: Cool, Calm & Contentious; Walking in Circles Before Lying Down; and her most recent, an
audiobook, The Indignities of Being a Woman (co-written with Megan Koester). Time and again
Markoe has dealt with life—her own, that of her
creative partners, and above all, ours—with the
warmest and sharpest of energies and insight.
These qualities have served her Emmy-winning
work with David Letterman, and as a writer-per-
former on HBO’s Not Necessarily the News, which
won her a Writers Guild Award in 1990. She has
worked on shows as diverse and abidingly popular as Newhart, Moonlighting, Sex and the City,
and The Garry Shandling Show. Paddy Chayevsky once wrote, with the contagious frustration
that was his trademark: “Television is democracy at its ugliest.” He transformed that democracy
with life-loving integrity—democracy at its most beautiful. So does Markoe. “In Praise of Crazy
Mommies,” a moving essay about her late mother, a merciless perfectionist, perfectly distills her
own creative credo: “I turned into someone who not only reveled in my own imperfections but
underlined them and paraded them like assets.”
The Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement is presented to a
Guild member who has “advanced the literature of television and made outstanding contribu-
tions to the profession of the television writer.”
LAUREL AWARD FOR SCREENWRITING
ACHIEVEMENT
Nancy Meyers
“I don’t see a lot of movies about complicated women with real problems,” writer-director
Nancy Meyers told the London Guardian in 2015. To aspiring filmmakers at the British Film In-
stitute, she added: “I write from my own experience. When I got divorced I wrote about di-
vorced women. I often think that some of my movies,
if I just described them to you, would be tragedies. It’s
my take that makes them comedic.” Time and again
Nancy Meyers is both intensely personal yet strikes a
deep chord with mass audiences in such original hits
as Private Benjamin, Baby Boom, Something’s Gotta
Give, The Holiday, and It’s Complicated. She has given
fresh life to proven themes in such whip-smart reviv-
als as Father of the Bride and The Parent Trap. Actors
welcome her scripts because she doesn’t write “types,” she writes individuals. She is firm in
her belief that good comedies must resist the temptation to go for every laugh. As she once told
students at The British Film Institute, “The funniest things are the most real, or what’s based in
something that everybody can relate to, right? And nobody can relate to five jokes on a page.
Do what feels natural to you.” Her body of work sets an inspiring example.
The Guild’s lifetime achievement award is presented to members who have “advanced the
literature of motion pictures and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the
screenwriter.”
22 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
ANIMATION WRITERS CAUCUS (AWC)
ANIMATION WRITING AWARD
David N. Weiss
“Hey,” growls Charlie B. Barkin, the tough-guy mongrel hero of All Dogs Go to Heaven. “I
know we’re all dead up here, but so’s the music. How about heating it up?” That 1989 film, with
screenplay by David Nathan Weiss (who co-wrote the story), launched his abundantly productive
career. It also expressed his core theme: the search for Life’s Meaning. He became a born-again
Christian at age 18, only to rediscover his native Ju-
daism while scripting All Dogs. He traded Church for
Shul, found love with his wife Eliana and, in love,
found the theme that landed him and writing partner
J. David Stem (“my second wife”) the plum assign-
ment of Shrek 2. Emphasizing that opportunity as a
love story was one success among many of Weiss and
Stem’s career, others including Jimmy Neutron: Boy
Genius, Rugrats, The Smurfs (2011), and The Smurfs 2.
Weiss’ journey in more secular spheres has included
two terms of meaningful service from 2005 to 2009 as
vice president of the Writers Guild of America West. A
line of Talmudic wisdom in Smurfs 2, spoken by Papa
Smurf, encapsulates just why we are honoring David
N. Weiss: “It doesn’t matter where you came from. What matters is who you choose to be.”
The WGAW’s AWC Animation Writing Award is given to members of the Animation Writers
Caucus or Writers Guild who have advanced the literature of animation in film and television
throughout the years and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the animation
writer.
VALENTINE DAVIES AWARD
Brad Falchuk
“I know what it’s like to be afraid of failure, and it’s worse than failing,” says writer-creator-
director-producer Brad Falchuk. You or I would be hard-pressed to find failure in his career. He
and writing partner Ryan Murphy first teamed on Nip/Tuck in 2003 and broke through with their
own groundbreaking series Glee in 2009 (co-created with Ian Brennan). Falchuk’s co-creator credits
include American Horror Story, Scream Queens, Pose, The Politician, and two iterations of 9-1-1.
Falchuk has also produced the Emmy-winning Ameri-
can Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson and The
Assassination of Gianni Versace. Adversity for Falchuk
has been private. For most of his early life he lived
with dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until his sec-
ond year of college. As he has movingly shared in the
online video Thriving With Dyslexia, once discovered,
he turned this problem around, but prior to that he
suffered to a degree which, he is certain, taught him
everything a good storyteller needs to know about
frustration, fear, and compassion. “Success feels good,
but you only learn from messing up,” he says. “It’s
an opportunity. You can try things that do work, with more knowledge, intelligence, wisdom and
strength, and less fear of failing.”
The WGAW’s Valentine Davies Award honors Guild members whose humanitarian efforts and
service have brought dignity and honor to writers everywhere.
 WRITTEN BY LISA ROSEN
PORTRAITS BY JILLY WENDELL

Lostand
Found
With Dead to Me, Liz Feldman leaps forward
by working through her past.

24 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

H
er career path was clear. Comedy all
the way. Sketch, improv, joke-writ-
ing, multi-cam sitcoms. So how the
hell did Liz Feldman come up with Dead to
Me (2020 Writers Guild Award nominee for
New Series and Episodic Comedy)? The Net-
flix series centers on the relationship between
Jen (Christina Applegate), a recent widow, and
Judy (Linda Cardellini), whom she meets at
a bereavement group. While threaded with
humor, the show navigates grief, loss, anger,
mystery, and whiplashing plot twists in its
study of female friendship and forgiveness.
It’s a dark and heady mix, unexpected from
a writer known for her work on shows like 2
Broke Girls and Hot in Cleveland—until she
explains how she got here. Sitting on a couch
in her office, gearing up for production on
their second season, her look back reveals both
professional and personal moments that led,
inexorably, to Dead to Me.
Feldman started in the industry with a
bang, getting a job three weeks out of high
school in 1995 as both a performer and
writer on the Nickelodeon sketch comedy
show All That (created by Brian Robbins
and Michael Tollin). At 18, and the only
woman in the writers’ room, she found
herself trapped in a culture of sexual ha-
rassment. If that was what a TV writer’s life
was like, she thought, she was out. “I don’t
want to work until 2:00 in the morning for
a boss who is on speed and telling me to
take my bra off in the writers’ room.”
Though she left television, Feldman kept
writing sketches, primarily at the Ground-
lings. She also continued acting, working in
standup and on the occasional show. “I’ve
always loved performing, but it is incredibly
difficult to make a steady income as a charac-
ter actress. ‘I’m living the dream! I can’t even
make health insurance!’”
In her mid-20s, she decided to try writing
for TV again. Within a month, she landed a
job on the sketch comedy Blue Collar TV (cre-
ated by Jeff Foxworthy, Fax Bahr, and Adam
Small), “which was honestly just lucky timing.
They were looking for a female writer; they
didn’t have any.” The room was better this
time—“still boys’-clubby, but they respected
me.” While she gained confidence in her abil-
ity to make a living as a writer, “I didn’t want
to write fat jokes, and I didn’t want to make
fun of poor people. I don’t think it was done
maliciously. I just think it’s maybe least com-
mon denominator humor.”
She wanted her next job to align with her
own sensibilities. “I had always, always wor-
shiped Ellen DeGeneres. As a young lesbian
standup, you can imagine that she was my
idol.” Unemployed when the talk show El-
len debuted, “I would sit at home and watch
her opening monologue, and then I would
practice writing monologues for her. This is
before I even decided I was going to be a
writer again. Then, coming off of Blue Col-
lar TV, I hear that they’re looking for writers
on Ellen, and I literally took those mono-
logues I had practiced with, brushed them
off, punched them up and submitted them,
and I got the job.”
Ellen was a turning point for the writer. “I
learned from her that excellence is something
you have to work at. I think there’s a lot of
mediocrity in television because it’s really hard
work, and it’s tiring. You can sometimes get by
with good enough. And Ellen does not want
to get by with good enough. I would write a
monologue for her, and there would always be
a couple of jokes where she was like, ‘You can
do better than that.’ I’d literally go running
back to my office and write six more jokes. It
was like basic training almost. The reason why
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 “I realized I had always thought of ideas that were
dark in nature, but I never had the courage to follow
through on them, because I’m a comedy writer. We
get so boxed into our genres.” —Liz Feldman

she’s better than everybody else is because she works harder
than everybody else. Those were lessons that imprinted on me,
and defined my ethic to this day.”
Watching Ellen in her element, Feldman realized one more
thing. She wanted to do more than write jokes; she wanted to
tell her own stories. So she quit. And then the writers’ strike hit.
Sitting in the Guild headquarters, answering phones next to gi-
ants of television Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) and Ann Marcus
(Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), reignited her desire to write
sitcoms. “That was my first love. So coming off the writers’
strike, I wrote my first spec, and it got some traction.”
Her first sitcom staff job was on Hot in Cleveland’s first
season. That writers’ room was full of more sitcom vets whom
she held in awe. Thanks to them, the room ran smoothly, and
everyone was kind to the newbie. “In many ways, I’m sure I
was a disappointment to [creator] Suzanne Martin. I was a
good joke writer, but I didn’t really know how to tell a story in
21 minutes yet.”
From there she jumped onto 2 Broke Girls, which she also
attributes to luck, having met creators Whitney Cummings
and Michael Patrick King through standup and the Ground-
lings, respectively. “I learned a lot from Michael about how to
keep an audience interested, and how to keep characters devel-
oping but the same.”
King saw something in Feldman that she didn’t recognize
yet. “We were shooting the show one day and I was like, ‘Uch,
I don’t know about that.’ I was so out of turn—maybe I was
a supervising producer or something—and Michael looked at
me and said, ‘What, you think you can do this better than me?’
And I looked at him and I said, ‘Maybe.’ And after that, he

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was like, ‘You’re a showrunner,’ and he took me under his wing
and, in his way, mentored me.”
After four seasons, she took her newly acquired showrun-
ning skills to her own series, One Big Happy, a sitcom about
a straight man and his lesbian best friend who decide to have
a child together, until the plan goes awry when he falls in love
and marries another woman in a whirlwind romance.
“I’m interested in stories about unorthodox relationships
because I’ve had many in my life, and that particular show
was based off of my relationship with my straight male best
friend. A gay woman being best friends with a straight guy is
not something you see every day. He and I really did plan to
have a baby together,” if they didn’t find partners by a certain
time. But she did find a partner; in 2013 she married singer/
songwriter Rachael Cantu.
Left to right: Kelly Hutchinson, Liz Feldman, Liz Benjamin,
Madie Dhaliwal, Emma Rathbone, Celeste Hughey
Not pictured: Co-EPs Cara DiPaolo, Jessi Klein, and Dan Dietz
“That show, in many ways, was a little bit of a harbinger of
the kind of storytelling I’m doing now. For a multi-cam, there
were some twists and turns. It was really hard to pack it into 21
minutes. I wished I’d had more time to tell that story, it would
have felt different,” she says. The storyteller in her was already
yearning to do more. The show was cancelled after one season,
and then a torrent of twists in her own life took her work to a
darker place.
THE DEEP END
On Feldman’s 40th birthday, her cousin died suddenly of
a heart attack. The day after that, her best friend told her she
was pregnant. Feldman had been trying to get pregnant for
five years. “For the first time in my life, I had this very weird
feeling that I didn’t like having about my own friend.” She
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“I’d started as a standup, I then became a joke writ-
er, then I became a sketch writer, and I went through
this very obvious comedy writer trajectory, but I re-
alized that my soul was really longing to tell a more
interesting, complex, dramatic story.” —Liz Feldman
flew to New York for her cousin’s funeral, and the next day
her other best friend told her she was pregnant as well. “The
day after that, I found out I was not pregnant, for what felt
like the one-millionth time. So it was a dark night of the soul,
if you will.”
A week later, she was set up on a pitch meeting to develop
a TV show for two actresses. “The producers weren’t asking
me to pitch, they were going to pitch ideas to me and see if
anything sparked.” She had just flown back from the funeral,
and was ill. “I went only because they were like, ‘You don’t
need to know anything. You just show up, and if something
sparks it does; if it doesn’t, ok.’ It was really clear that I was
the last writer there because there were no good La Croix fla-
vors left, and all the good fruit had been picked over.”
As soon as she sat down, the producers said they were tired
of their ideas, and asked if she had any. “And I was like, Oh,
fuck me. I didn’t. It’s not like I didn’t have anything in the way
that you have something in your back pocket. Those jeans had
no pockets. There was nothing. I just was stalling and asking
them what kind of shows they like and what they’re into. And
I only realized later that, because I was in this raw emotional
place, this idea came to me from, I can only say the ether,
because I don’t know where the hell else it came from. I said,
‘One of them is a widow, and she meets the other one at a grief
group. They become friends, but by then the widow learns the
other woman’s partner didn’t die, he just broke up with her.’”
That was all she gave them, but it was enough. “I went home
and had a 100-degree fever. So I called it my fever pitch.” Her
improv background had saved the day. “There was a muscle
there, luckily, that was going to work even though I wasn’t feel-
ing well, and truly had no actual good ideas prepared.”
She couldn’t stop thinking about the pitch. “I realized I had
always thought of ideas that were dark in nature, but I never
had the courage to follow through on them, because I’m a
comedy writer. We get so boxed into our genres. I’d started as
a standup, I then became a joke writer, then I became a sketch
writer, and I went through this very obvious comedy writer
trajectory, but I realized that my soul was really longing to tell
a more interesting, complex, dramatic story.”
For years, she had written pilots that she knew would
sell. This time she was writing exactly what she wanted,
“which is a really nice place to create from.” She tried to
come up with the ultimate act of forgiveness. “It came to
28 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
me, what if you fell in love with this person, platonically,
and then you find out they’re the person that put you in
this place in the first place? Honestly, any good idea I’ve
ever had, it just came. It’s more of a channeling, not to be
super woo-woo about it.”
She fleshed it out further. Jen’s husband had been
killed by a hit-and-run driver. Judy’s fiancé, Steve, broke
up with her after she’d suffered five miscarriages. Their
lives were entwined before they met, and were, in fact,
the reason they met.
The producers eventually passed, so she took the pitch to
CBS, where she had an overall deal. “They hired me to write
multi-camera comedies for the network, let’s not pretend they
had other expectations of me. Then I bring in this idea, with
the twists and the turns and the reveals and all of that. I will
never forget it because I sat there thinking, They’re going to
think I’m fucking crazy. Kate Adler, the head of comedy, was
writing notes, and when I told her the end of the pilot, she
threw her notepad across the room.” That (SPOILER) mo-
ment: Judy is hiding the car that killed Jen’s husband. CBS
agreed to take the series out, and Netflix came on board.
After working in multi-cam for a decade, she was eager to
break away from formula, “and see if I could make a story
that didn’t follow the conventions of a traditional conflict and
resolution.” The show is loaded with reversals. Anyone can be
guilty of anything at any time—as long as it makes sense with-
in that world. The challenge was, and remains, balancing the
grounded nature of the characters with the heightened aspects
of the storytelling and plotting. Feldman notes that much of
the writing on the show is rewriting, as they keep adding layer
upon layer to each episode.
Putting together the first season’s writers’ room, she looked
for people with experience with hour-long format, even
though the show is a half hour, “because I knew I was bor-
rowing some of that. I specifically chose people who had more
experience in cable and streaming than I did, because I had
none. And I chose people who I really admired and I thought
were good writers—in many cases, better writers than me.
That’s how I grow; that’s how the show grows.”
She does her best to run the writers’ room with the kind-
ness that she was shown on some previous shows. A ringer in
the room helps with that: Kelly Hutchinson, one of her best
friends. (See sidebar on page 30.) Feldman hired her for her
writing, but Hutchinson also serves as something of a mirror,
“to remind me who I am and who I’ve always been. It is a re-
ally difficult, stressful job that pulls at you from every angle,
and it would be so much easier to be an asshole half the time.”
The best idea wins, always. “There were often things said
in the room that diverged from what my original plan was,
but I would rather be wrong and it be good,” she says. That
includes the first season finale. “One of my writers was like, ‘I
think you gotta even the score. I think Jen has to kill [Judy’s
ex] Steve. It has to be justified, but she’s got to do it.’ You just
feel a certain swell of energy in the room when an idea is good,
 DEAD TO ME "Pilot"

1.15 INT. JEN’S HOUSE - NIGHT

Jen’s at the door. KAREN,
her a casserole. an uptight Orange County
mom, hands

KAREN
So, you just heat it up at
and leave it in for thirty three hundred
-five minutes.
JEN
Thanks, Karen. But you rea
to keep -- lly don’t have

KAREN
It’s my take on Mexican las
agna.
JEN
(curt)
Great.

KAREN
It’s nothing. We just don
think you’re alone. Jeff ’t want you to
for you. If you ever wantand I are here
to talk.
JEN
Thanks.

KAREN
Just can’t imagine what you
through. ’re going

JEN
Well, it’s like if Jeff was
and died. Suddenly. And vio hit by a car
that. lently. Like

KAREN
Right.
(then, re: casserole)
Well, you get that dish bac
whenever you can. No rush k to me
--
Jen shuts the door in her
face.

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 29

Besties Talking like Besties and you cannot deny it. So I leaned into
WRITTEN BY LISA ROSEN
that, and I’m glad I did, because some of
Liz Feldman calls writer Kelly Hutchinson “basically a sister in the room.” The these bigger, darker twists and turns were
two have been friends for 25 years, ever since they met in Hutchinson’s college not necessarily what I had planned, but it’s
what the show became, and I’m sitting in
dorm room. “I was sitting in my twin bed, smoking a bajillion cigarettes while
my Season Two office because of that.”
ashing into a Diet Coke bottle, and Liz was like, ‘Yeah, I’m down to clown with Last season, the writers completed most
this one,’” Hutchinson says. The two are talking on a conference call, Hutchin- of the episodes before production began;
son from New York and Feldman from Los Angeles. they don’t have the same luxury now. Feld-
man had barely a week to assemble her
According to Feldman, Hutchinson was an impressive writer even back then.
writers’ room this season—the show was
But Hutchinson pursued a different career, working for years as an actor before picked up on May 28th and the room
heading back to graduate school for writing. “I wrote some movies, none of opened on June 4th.
which have ever gotten made,” she notes. “So this is my first time in a room, but Even with the truncated schedule, her
instincts guide the story. “Does an idea
I’ve been writing for a bunch of years.”
feel right? So much of what we had to do
Feldman asks if she can tell the story of how Hutchinson ended up on the this season was put ourselves in the char-
show. Hutchinson gives her the go-ahead. “The truth is, I was staffing the show acters’ place, which was actually really dif-
when it first got picked up. Kelly called me and said, ‘Look I want to throw my ficult. There’s a dead body floating in the
pool at the end of the season. So we spent
hat in the ring. If it’s not awkward, I’d love for you to consider me for a slot in
days on end wondering, what would we
your room.’ I was like, ‘Send me a script.’” do? As me, as this person right now, what
She read the script, “and I was like, this is fucking great, this is as good as would I do? What kind of conversations
anything else from people I know I want to sit down with. And I had to think would I have about it? We really put our-
selves in their shoes, and developed story
to myself, am I just being biased? Is it just because I know her and I can
from there.”
hear her voice on the page, and it’s so fun to hear her? So then I sent to my Though she knows how she wants the
producers, and they were like, ‘This is good.’” That was that. “She definitely series to end, “from season to season you’re
earned her spot. And also it’s a thing that I think people sometimes just need serving two masters,” she notes. “You’re
like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to have
to do, which is stand up for themselves and put themselves out there and ask
another season, so I’m going to write the
for what they want.” end that feels the fucking best for this mo-
The friends’ repartee has heavily influenced the way Jen and Judy interact on ment.’” If it gets picked up again, “that’s
Dead to Me. “The way they talk, the banter and sort of making words their own for future me to worry about.”
Dead to Me’s love story by-way-of-man-
and abbreviating things, that kind of stuff is definitely based on how we talk to
slaughter is so compelling that when Jen
each other and how we talk to some of our other friends as well,” Feldman says. does discover Judy’s previously hidden role
Says Hutchinson, “They make each other laugh for real, the way we actually in her husband’s death, the viewer wants
make each other laugh. They have a good time when they’re talking,” something nothing more than for Jen to forgive Judy,
somehow, so they can restore their friend-
common among friends but seen all too rarely on television.
ship. Now we’ll have to hope that Judy can
Feldman also cites the characters’ “unconditional love of each other, and forgive Jen as well.
lack of snark or competition, or any kind of negativity or—” That was Feldman’s goal, “to create this
Hutchinson adds: “Agenda—” friendship and make it so real and aspi-
rational and touching that you want the
Feldman: “Yeah. I think so often on TV you see female friendships that are
unforgivable to be forgiven. Because in a
wrought with these kinds of trope-y conflicts that get between them. In our weird way—though I didn’t really mean it
experience, Kelly and I have never been in a fight in 25 years.” to be—it does become a bit of a morality
Hutchinson: “And we’re always like, ‘Oh I love you so much, you’re the best,’ tale about what is good, what is bad, and
don’t we all deserve to be forgiven? Obvi-
all the time, just very validating and sweet. So we hope that Judy and Jen’s
ously, in my own life, I had some forgiving
friendship has that in it too. They get a real kick out of each other.” to do as well. As we all do. That is the way
you get through pain.”

30 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

 During the Written By photo shoot on the set of Dead to Me,
news of President Trump’s impeachment broke. This is Liz Feldman’s
reaction, captured moments after the announcement.
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 31
 WRITTEN BY LOUISE FARR

Outfoxintheg
PORTRAITS BY TOM KELLER

L
ike Kayla, the young Fox News staffer he created
for his Bombshell script, Charles Randolph re-
Charles Randolph
members the network’s presence on his parents’
television when he was a young man. uncovers a
“I come from a Fox family,” he says. “I
couldn’t watch a Cowboys game without the Fox
bombshell.

System
logo remaining: a shadow forming, burned into
the screen. In those days, it would just retain an
outline of the image. If you changed the chan-
nel it would just be a shadow version. It’s funny
that Fox haunted my family’s experience. What a
metaphor, right?”
A fire alarm has just chased Randolph—recipient of
the WGAW’s 2020 Paul Selvin Award for Bombshell—
out of the Guild’s 3rd Street offices, where his interview
was supposed to happen. The alarm was false, it turned
out—not set by fire but by toast burning somewhere in
the building. Another metaphor, perhaps? (The hon-
orary award is given each year to the WGA member
whose script best embodies the spirit of the constitu-
tional civil rights and liberties that are indispensable to
the survival of free writers everywhere).
In any event, Randolph is now settled across the
street in a booth at Du-Par’s. Taking a fork to his first- A month and a half after Ailes’ resignation, in the
ever platter of the restaurant’s famous Frisbee-sized fall of 2016, Randolph began shopping his idea for the
hotcakes, Randolph—who looks like a writer, with film. This was well before the long-rumored accusa-
floppy hair, black turtleneck, and jeans—goes on to tions of sexual misconduct had gathered steam against
discuss the origins of his fast-moving film about the producer Harvey Weinstein, and prior to the birth of
scandal that ended the reign of Roger Ailes. The top- the #MeToo movement. But the infamous Donald
pling of the licentious Fox News chief provides Bomb- Trump Access Hollywood “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape
shell’s storyline. Ailes’ predatory behavior catches up to surfaced the week meetings were happening, adding
him thanks to Fox host Gretchen Carlson’s decision to clout to a timely idea.
sue the well-known “leg man” for sexual harassment His pitching style, Randolph says, is to just go in
(which he denied). and talk. “Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly” might have

32
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FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 33
“Getting an agent, getting

some attention, couldn’t

have been easier. And

then getting things made,

and getting good things

made, and getting them

made through the studio

process, with quality and

integrity, is hard,” Charles

Randolph says. “Be careful what

you wish for. A lot of us think:

If I could just become a

working writer. Then you

get there, but it’s

only part of the

journey.”

34 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

been the first line of this pitch, he thinks, though at that point
Theron was only a wish. “You share the natural enthusiasm
for the subject matter, and the details and stories around that
world that interest you. Give a very short sense of what the
plot will be, literally two minutes, and then just talk about the
characters. Give the person you’re getting into business with
the feeling that there’s such depth of character that you literal-
ly could do a movie, you could do a miniseries. It doesn’t mat-
ter, because the inherent internal conflicts are so interesting.”
Kelly, who had passed up a law partnership to work for
Fox, had to decide whether to support Carlson by admitting
that the powerful Ailes had harassed her, too—during con-
tract negotiations, no less.
The word “harass,” though, barely touches on the degrada-
tion Fox women were subjected to during the late Ailes’ re-
gime. (He died in 2017.) “Give me a little twirl” was a mere
preliminary maneuver among the escalating sexual demands
that he expected women to fulfill, to prove that their bodies
were on-air worthy, and as an expression of loyalty to him.
LUCKY EIGHT
“We pitched it at eight places. Eight were interested. Even
in the pitch you could see that it could transcend partisan-
ship; that even though it’s about Fox, it was not going to be
a liberal hit job. It was going to embrace the issue in all its
complexity,” says Randolph, who went with Megan Ellison’s
Annapurna Pictures.
It took until after the 2016 election to close the deal. The
following spring, Randolph wrote his first draft, based
largely on affidavits and published accounts—and
hampered initially by victims’ non-disclosure
agreements. Eventually, he would speak to
about 20 current or former Fox women, he
says, many of whom broke their NDAs.
He took notes from Annapurna, con-
ferred with lawyers, and then the
script went off to Theron, who came
on as star and hands-on producer
through her Denver and Deli-
lah Productions. Two weeks
before filming was to start,
financing from Anna-
purna fell through.
Within 24 hours,
Theron ob-
tained new funding from Canadian BRON Studios.
But back to Kayla: In Randolph’s original script, he included
six key female characters before whittling them down to Kelly,
former Miss America Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and the com-
posite character of Kayla, an ambitious young staffer. Played by
Margot Robbie, Kayla is manipulated into compliance by the
powerful Ailes. Then, like so many women, she is tormented,
wondering what she did, said, or wore to encourage her abuser.
“Kayla’s is the story we never hear, which is the story of
the woman who gets trapped in a quid pro quo sexual rela-
tionship,” says Randolph. “She had some measure of…” He
pauses. “Got to be careful here,” he continues. “Some measure
of volition in getting there, right? Not saying it’s her fault, not
saying she had a choice, but because she had some measure
of volition—maybe it’s only two percent—but getting in that
door just wracks her with guilt.”
Which was what he needed, as a writer, to avoid the earnest
tone that so often accompanies the stories of victims. “You don’t
want earnest, passive people, you want volition and agency.”
If Kayla describes herself as “an influencer in the Jesus
space,” Randolph says he was once a “James Bond for Jesus.”
Son of a Tennessee preacher, he attended Abilene Chris-
tian University before spending a couple of years in Eastern
Europe printing Bibles—forbidden under Communism—
for tough guys to smuggle behind the Iron Curtain. After
Yale Divinity School, he taught cultural studies in Vienna for
a decade. He was visiting USC to lecture when a screenwriter
who had worked for the Farrelly brothers suggested he try
writing a script.
Nothing happened with the Farrellys, but his screenplay
landed him an agent, and a new, unexpected career.
“Getting an agent, getting some attention, couldn’t have
been easier. And then getting things made, and getting good
things made, and getting them made through the studio pro-
cess, with quality and integrity, is hard,” Randolph says. “Be
careful what you wish for. A lot of us think: If I could just
become a working writer. Then you get there, but it’s only part
of the journey.”
He pulled it off, though, with The Life of David Gale; Love
and Other Drugs (screenplay by Randolph and Edward Zwick
& Marshall Herskovitz, based on the book by Jamie Reidy);
and The Big Short (based on Michael Lewis’ book), for which
he shared a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, a BAFTA, and a
Writers Guild Award with Adam McKay.
The Big Short’s energy and wit suffuses Bombshell, with an
added poignancy over the indignities foisted on the women
who, at personal cost, brought Ailes down.
While the film is certainly dramatic, director Jay Roach
calls attention to what he calls its “graveyard humor.” Among
his influences, Randolph cites Czech New Wave cinema
and the films of Miloš Forman, particularly the bittersweet
1960s’ Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen’s Ball, which
he came across while living abroad.
“It was one of those first moments in
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 35
film history where there was “I like the experience of reading to feel like an studio notes, too.”
an underlying sense of irony Other directors have also
without breaking into overt experience of film. So I would use spacing, add praised Randolph for his collabor-
comedy,” he says of the era. ative spirit. Though he doesn’t see
“That really informs that tone more air for a scene that should move quickly, many benefits to having won his
I love. Even with a serious Big Short Oscar, he points out that
subject matter like sexual ha- then three or four description blocks in scenes gaining a reputation led him to
rassment, earn the audience’s care less about getting his words
emotional engagement with where I want you to slow down. I’m trying to or thoughts on screen, and more
comedic, ironic moments.” about what works for the film as
Another Bombshell composite mimic form and content on the page. I try to a whole. “It can be the best writ-
character, Jess (Kate McKin- ten line of all time, but if an actor
non), a closeted lesbian and stop it, but I catch myself literally working can’t deliver it, or a director can’t
Hillary supporter, does ex- direct it, you’re not doing yourself
actly that: “Frighten, titillate. on lines so the margins work out. I get very any favors” by arguing on its be-
Frighten, titillate,” she advises half, he says.
newbie Kayla about Fox’s news
obsessive that way.” —Charles Randolph Writing the scene in which
formula. If Kayla can’t source Kayla raises her skirt to show her
a story, Jess advises, go with legs (and more) to Ailes wasn’t dif-
“some are saying.” ficult, says Randolph. But filming
it was. Roach sees John Lithgow’s
HARD DRIVE Ailes as a horror film predator who
Going to coffee shops in makes audiences scream inwardly
upstate New York, where he to Kayla, “Don’t go in,” before she
lives, eases him into the mood steps into Ailes’ office, with disas-
for writing, Randolph told trous results. In theaters, the ten-
the audience at a WGA West sion during that scene is palpable.
Bombshell screening. Today, at “It was very emotional,” Ran-
Du-Par’s, he says, “You can’t always make your way into art. dolph says, quick to admit that had he pitched the film
You have to discover it sometimes.” post-revelations about Harvey Weinstein, and the birth of
After creating a treatment, noting key scenes as he works, #MeToo, he could have faced resistance over not being a
he always starts a script at the beginning. And he fusses inor- woman telling the story.
dinately about the layout of his words on the page. “I like the “As a man I think there’s a limited amount I can do to ad-
experience of reading to feel like an experience of film,” he ex- dress, sometimes, sexual harassment.” But as a writer, he can
plains. “So I would use spacing, add more air for a scene that touch audiences. “I can put other men in that room. Not just
should move quickly, then three or four description blocks in in that room, but inside Kayla’s head and her heart.”
scenes where I want you to slow down. I’m trying to mimic Maybe “some weird Darwinian echo” leads men to
form and content on the page. I try to stop it, but I catch my- downplay women’s emotional connection to their sexuality,
self literally working on lines so the margins work out. I get and to being sexually victimized, he wonders. “That scene
very obsessive that way.” confronts men with a moment that, on paper, they could
The first half of writing a screenplay is “a dark night of the easily dismiss. She had to show her legs; what’s the big deal,
soul” for him, and the second half is pleasure, he says, because right? But once you’re in her heart and see how utterly life-
he’s improving the work. On the other hand, rewriting is “like changing that moment can be, you cannot have the same
weeding an endless field. You can never get all the weeds, but relationship to these things as you had before. I feel like
you can get them lower, and lower, and lower. At some point: if we’ve done anything well in this film, in that one scene
‘Ok, this is good enough.’” we’ve achieved that, and that’s great. What we’re putting out
Bombshell’s script was never really locked, according to in the world helps.
Roach, one of those rare directors who likes a writer by his “As screenwriters, our job is to add nuance, complexity,
side during filming. “His script was so good, and so well re- change a little bit your expectations,” he continues. “Film is
searched,” he says about Randolph’s groundwork, and inter- about complicating your expectations, frustrating your judg-
views with Fox employees, which continued through editing. ments, right? And so if your response to this film is, Oh, why
“Having him around all the time, he could take in new in- did you make me identify with the women of Fox?…I’m do-
formation and rewrite things into scenes, taking actor notes, ing that on purpose. That’s all part of the process of making
taking producer notes, and in a couple of cases, really good art. It’s not a mirror. It’s a canvas.”

36 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

 CONTINUED: 36.

KAYLA
O-kay.

JESS
Steal from Drudge, Breitbart, nev
talk radio. Stop worrying if the er
story’s legit. If you can’t source
it, go with “Some are saying...”
Kayla’s surprised to hear this sai
d so casually, so clearly.

INT. “O’REILLY FACTOR” POD - FOX

- NEWSROOM - DAY
Jess leads Kayla into the pod, kee
ping her voice down.
JESS
You gotta adopt the Irish Street
Cop mentality: the world’s a bad
place, people are lazy morons,
minorities are criminals, and sex
is sick but interesting.
At Kayla’s desk, she hands Jess a
“D Block” folder.
JESS
Just ask yourself: what would sca
my Grandmother...or piss off my re
Grandfather? That’s a Fox story.
(going)
Frighten. Titillate. Frighten.
Titillate. Frighten.

INT. LANGAN’S PUB & RESTAURANT -

MANHATTAN - NIGHT
Jess and Kayla eat dinner, intima
te, one wine bottle down.
JESS
Start with a clear villain: libera
judge, pinhead mayor, Hollywood, l
Vermont. Conservatives want to
conserve. You’re the last defense
against Jesus-hating, trans-loving
Clinton-controlled Armageddon. ,

KAYLA
You believe some of that, right?
An awkward beat. Over the bar, a
TV plays “On the Record”.
JESS
Oh, well, yeah.

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 37

 WRITTEN BY PAUL BROWNFIELD

AMOTIVE TO THE MADNESS:

THEBRAINSBEHIND MINDHUNTER
I
n the 1970s, FBI agents John Douglas and Robert less cast of characters. “It wasn’t that she wanted somebody
Ressler began the somewhat off-the-books practice of to adapt it,” Penhall says, “she just wanted somebody who
interviewing notorious mass killers serving life sentences had an idea of what to do with it.” Penhall, a London-based
in prison. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s first screenwriter and playwright, had never written a US cop
director, had been dead for just a few years. The idea of show before. “My idea was to completely fictionalize it, to
gleaning insights into the criminal mind—via sit-down, create new characters derived from characters in that book,
after-the-fact interviews with psycho-sexual killers oth- and try to create a new narrative. That seemed to free it com-
erwise locked up for life—was not pletely.” As he dug into Mindhunt-
atop anyone’s priority list. er, he found himself listening to
The phrase “serial killer” was the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
not yet in the lexicon when Doug- album “Murder Ballads.”
las and Ressler began interviewing “When you’re immersed in
the likes of Edmund Kemper, the writing a whole season of TV, it’s
so-called “Co-ed Killer”; Rich- a long slog and you’ve got to soak
ard Speck, who over one night in up your inspiration from wherever
1966 tortured, raped, and killed you can,” Penhall says. “It just hit
eight nursing students in a town- me with a jolt that this music had
house dormitory; David Berkow- the same brutal atmosphere and the
itz, known as the “Son of Sam,” same conflation of dry wit and hor-
who shot and killed eight people ror and flat blunt viciousness that
in NYC in the summer of ’76; and helped me think about all this and
Charles Manson. The Tate–LaBi- find the voice and tempo for it.”
anca murders were still in America’s Executive produced by director
rear view—aberrational and yet re- David Fincher, the Netflix series—
flective, somehow, of a decade-long which debuted in 2017 and cur-
counter-cultural hangover. rently has two seasons of 19 collec-
Mindhunter, the book, came tive episodes—is based on said FBI
to Joe Penhall via actress-producer profiler John Douglas and Mark
Charlize Theron, with whom Pen- Olshaker’s book Mindhunter: Inside
hall had worked on the 2009 film the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,
The Road, adapted from the Cor- originally published in 1995. If the
mac McCarthy novel. The film, title sounds like something ready-
written by Penhall, starred Theron made for a procedural, the Penhall-
as “Woman” in a small and name- created Netflix series Mindhunter

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(nominated for a 2020 Writers Guild Award for Drama Series)
is far closer to a previous Fincher-directed big swing at serial-
killer psychopathy: the 2007 film Zodiac (screenplay by James
Vanderbilt, based on the book by Robert Graysmith), about
the unsolved murders that terrorized the San Francisco Bay
area in the late ’60s into the ’70s.
Like Zodiac, Mindhunter is distinctly period, perhaps more
so: The pilot begins in the year 1977, although you’d swear
it was earlier, based on some of the haircuts and clothes. The
color palette of the series feels washed out, even dark. This is
intentional, a metaphor for an FBI at a loss to square modern-
day killers with their own institutionalized worldview. “The
FBI in the ’70s was still in the dark ages,” Penhall says. “They
didn’t have any women working at the FBI—only stenog-
raphers. They had one black field agent in 1974.” He adds:
“The fascination with David was how on earth were they go-
ing to come to grips with criminality as sophisticated as the
Manson family—you know, psychologically strange and out
there and complex and messed up. Or how were they going
to infiltrate the Black Panthers, who they were obsessed with.
It seemed to be a kind of grandiloquent fantasy of the conser-
vative establishment that they could control all the different
elements of society just because they were morally superior.”
But how to distinguish the pilot from the more general at-
mosphere of true crime mania? By the time Penhall arrived at
the material, the show’s putative heroes, Douglas and Ressler,
Joe Penhall
had authored other books, from The Killer Across the Table
(Douglas and Olshaker) and Inside the Mind of BTK (Doug-
las and Johnny Dodd) to Whoever Fights Monsters and the
later I Have Lived in the Monster (both by Ressler).
The fictionalized heroes of Mindhunter are agents
Holden Ford and Bill Tench. They are soon joined in the
fledgling Behavioral Science Unit by Dr. Wendy Carr, an
academic criminologist tasked with translating the raw data
from interviews into a coherent orthodoxy.
As the centerpiece characters of the show, Tench, a sub-
urban husband and father who teaches “road school,” and
Ford—single, rootless, and trained in hostage negotia-
tion—personify wider gulfs in the culture. Tench, with his
crew cut, doesn’t seem to have quite come to terms with
the fact that the 1950s are over. “You are what they call a
blue flamer,” is his assessment of Ford when they first meet.
“You’re so eager to do good that you have a big blue flame
shooting out of your asshole.”
But Tench’s profiling is off: Holden Ford, it turns out, isn’t
purely apple-pie good, he’s also arrogant and heedless. Bored
with teaching hostage negotiation, he joins Tench on the
road, and is meanwhile drawn to a trend that’s beyond the
FBI’s ken: killers who kill for no discernible reason.
He gave Agent Ford his first name deliberately. Penhall
was thinking of another Holden when he created the charac-
ter. To wit: “If Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye grew
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up, straightened out, and became an FBI profiler, then he
would be Holden Ford.”
That includes a miscreant streak.
On a day off in California, Agent Tench golfs; Ford, pur-
suing his off-the-record muse, goes to California Medical Fa-
cility in Vacaville, where Ed Kemper is serving eight consecu-
tive life sentences. The Co-ed Killer not only murdered six
young women in the Santa Cruz area but killed his mother
and had intercourse with her severed head. (All after killing
his grandparents at age 15 and being institutionalized until
he was 21.)
On Mindhunter, Fincher and Penhall don’t give you flash-
backs to Kemper’s carnage—the show is almost entirely ab-
sent of crime scenes at all—but they do show Ford primping
with nervous energy in his motel room before going to inter-
view Kemper for the first time, getting dropped off outside
the prison by a skeptical Tench, and Kemper’s arrival in the
prison common room. The Co-ed Killer is a bear of a man
with a high IQ, a blank face, and an even tone; his loosened
shackles clang as he moves to shake Ford’s hand (when Kem-
per puts a second hand atop Ford’s, the effect is chilling).
And thus, in Episode Two, does Mindhunter arrive at its true
calling card: the re-imagining of prison interviews with no-
torious mass murderers, in the era before pop culture’s my-
thologizing machine got to them.
Over two seasons, these interviews have included the
aforementioned Kemper, Speck, Berkowitz, and Manson.
That first scene between Kemper and Ford runs to some 11
pages. Penhall credits Fincher with giving him early creative
latitude—his pilot script became a two-episode and then
40 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
three-episode spec, the Kemper interview not rushed or in-
terrupted. “What I’d written went through a process of be-
ing extruded and stretched and made bigger and slower and
longer. It became a lot more detailed,” Penhall says. “I did
the reverse of what you normally do with screenplay writing,
which is constantly compressing and editing.”
Kemper talks initially about the surprising quality of the
prison’s egg salad. Ford, meanwhile, would probably like to
ask Kemper why he had sex with his mother’s severed head.
The dialogue isn’t based on Douglas and Ressler’s transcripts;
they didn’t record their Kemper interviews. “It was a bit like
making an algorithm,” Penhall says of writing those scenes.
That algorithm came from “a few bits and pieces on the Inter-
net” and his experience as a young crime reporter in London.
“It was part of my experiment to try to create these voices,
and these cadences, and this vernacular,” he says. “And then,
even more kind of existentially, I was interested in learning
and playing with the vernacular of killers and of psychopathy.
Because it’s fairly clear that psychopathy is a big part of the
modern world.”
GOOD COP, BAD COP
In a recent interview on the podcast The Watch, Groff
said that Fincher told him early on: “This whole show is
people in rooms talking. And the question is, can we make
that interesting?”
That quip functions as a description of playwriting,
which is where Penhall’s creative writing career began.
Mindhunter was an amalgamation of his interests as a
writer: crime, psychology, and the ways in which “the hu-
man experience interfaces
with institutional notions
“The FBI in the ’70s was still in the dark ages. They didn’t have
of how to behave and how
to think.” As a crime re-
any women working at the FBI—only stenographers. They had one
porter in the early 1990s for
the Hammersmith Guard-
black field agent in 1974. The fascination with David Fincher was
ian, Penhall was allowed to
glimpse portions of police how on earth were they going to come to grips with criminality
interrogations of Colin Ire-
land, a then-notorious serial as sophisticated as the Manson family—you know, psychologically
killer who trolled for victims
in gay pubs and was nick- strange and out there and complex and messed up. Or how were
named the “Gay Slayer.” In
his early play “Some Voic- they going to infiltrate the Black Panthers.” —Joe Penhall
es,” which Penhall adapted
to the screen for a 2000 film starring Daniel Craig, a man hall says. “He’s not the kind of director that goes, ‘This isn’t
with schizophrenia is released from a psychiatric hospital working, I don’t know why, start again.’ He’s unique amongst
into the “community care” of his brother. Similarly, Pen- directors in that he knows exactly what it needs.”
hall’s play “Blue/Orange,” which won a London Critics’ In the two-and-a-half-year gap between the debuts of
Circle Award, has two white doctors at a psych hospital seasons one and two, Penhall stepped away. In addition to
butting egos over a young black patient who thinks he’s writing King of Thieves, a true-crime heist film with Michael
the son of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Caine, he had a new play debuting in London, as well as a
“Because the theater is all about human behavior, it was national tour of Sunny Afternoon, the biographical musical
fascinating to put psychologically focused plays onstage,” about The Kinks, for which he wrote the book. Courtenay
says Penhall, who grew up in Australia and England. “Men- Miles, a former stage manager and longtime first assistant di-
tal illness, and otherness, and outsider-dom. It’s always been rector in features, took over as Mindhunter Season Two head
a good subject for playwrights.” Before The Road, Penhall writer. Deep into the making of Season One, Miles says,
wrote the adapted screenplay for 2004’s Enduring Love, based Fincher and executive producer Ceán Chaffin asked if she
on the Ian McEwan novel about a man dealing with post- would like to try her hand at a Season Two script. Though
traumatic stress after witnessing a fatal ballooning accident. her credits as a first AD run to the dozens (including the
Meanwhile, years of research in Uganda for what became the Fincher-directed 2014 film Gone Girl, screenplay by Gillian
2006 Idi Amin biopic The Last King of Scotland had ended Flynn, based on her novel), she has been writing her entire
with Penhall walking away from the project. life. “The bottom line of it is, David gave me an extraordinary
Mindhunter was set up at
HBO for years but came to frui-
tion at Netflix, after HBO es-
tablished its own road-tripping
detective series, True Detective.
Penhall wrote a bible of Mind-
hunter, and seven of the first sea-
son’s ten episodes; Jennifer Hal-
ey, Erin Levy, Ruby Rae Spiegel,
Dominic Orlando, Tobias Lind-
holm, and Carly Wray were his
other Season One writers.
The show is shot in Pitts-
burgh, without a formal writ-
ers’ room. The Fincher way is
to allow space for rehearsals and
takes, yielding on-set script revi-
sions. A lot of the changes had
to do with making vernacular
more accurate, or adjusting the
cadence of the language, Pen-

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 41

opportunity,” Miles says.
Elaborating on Fincher’s methods, she notes, “We always That first scene between Edmund Kemper
had table reads, table rehearsals, rehearsals in advance of the
shooting day. And we would start our shooting day with a and Agent Ford runs to some 11 pages. Joe
big rehearsal before the rest of the crew comes in. That gives
the actors, the writer, and the director time to make sure we Penhall credits David Fincher with giving him
have everything the way we want it before we bring in all the
elements of chaos.” early creative latitude—his pilot script be-
With executive producer Joshua Donen, Miles out-
lined the entire second season—nine episodes in which came a two-episode and then three-episode
the Behavioral Science Unit, under a new director, goes
from subterranean underdog to fully funded, greenlit ini- spec, the Kemper interview not rushed or in-
tiative. Agents Ford and Tench interview Berkowitz and
then Manson in a Season Two episode (teleplay by Pamela
Cederquist and Liz Hannah, story by Cederquist). “We
terrupted. “What I’d written went through a
were under revision with that interview all the way up un-
til we shot it,” Miles says. Taking center stage in Season
process of being extruded and stretched and
Two are the Atlanta child murders, a racially charged kill-
ing spree in which at least 28 victims, mostly young boys,
made bigger and slower and longer. It be-
disappeared from the city’s black neighborhoods between
1979 and 1981.
came a lot more detailed. I did the reverse of
Putting Ford and Tench in the middle of that investiga-
tion “was about taking this notion of behavioral profiling that what you normally do with screenplay writ-
these two agents and this researcher have put together in a
basement on a shoestring budget, and seeing it vaulted onto ing, which is constantly compressing and
the national stage and shoved into—sometimes in conflict
and sometimes in concert with—investigative tactics that editing.” —Joe Penhall
were tried and true.”
Netflix has yet to announce a third season, and Fincher is that, watching the first two seasons. They’ve intuited that
reportedly at work on a biopic about Herman Mankiewicz, there’s something dicey here, that there’s something fragile
the screenwriter of Citizen Kane (with Orson Welles). Pen- and not wildly reliable about Holden and Bill, and it’s a
hall, for one, sees where Mindhunter is going, thematically. very slow train that’s coming. Ultimately, by the time we
“Part of the fun of Mindhunter was that it wasn’t a get to the 21st century people are saying, ‘It’s snake oil.’
traditional origin story about this fabulous creation that It’s not in any way scientific; it’s hunches upon hunches.
changed the world for the better,” he says of the behavioral Good ones, educated guesses—there’s a degree of insight
profiling being developed by Ford and Tench. “It’s built but it’s not by any means a fool-proof system. And it’s
on really shaky foundations. And people have intuited been proven wrong many times, tragically.”

42 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 43
19
17
44 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
 WRITTEN BY TOBIAS GREY
PHOTO BY AMY SUSSMAN

TRIAL BY FIRE
KRYSTY WILSON-CAIRNS DREAMS OF 1917.

I
t is one of the unwritten rules of cinema that women
do not write big-budget war movies—or at least they
didn’t until the Scottish screenwriter Krysty Wilson-
Cairns came along. The self-confessed “history nerd”
bucked this unedifying trend with 1917 (2020 Writers
Guild Award nominee for Original Screenplay), a pulsat-
ing World War I drama she co-wrote with its British direc-
tor Sam Mendes.
Wilson-Cairns had already written two other screenplays
for Mendes before he asked her to work on 1917. One of
these—an adaptation of Gay Talese’s nonfiction book The
Voyeur’s Motel—Mendes had intended to direct. But Wilson-
Cairns says it got derailed because of “rights issues.”
There was no such risk of that happening with 1917,
which was sparked by stories Mendes’ paternal grandfather
had told him about his time as a soldier fighting on the
Western Front. Wilson-Cairns says that when she joined
the project, Mendes had already
established that it would be “a
story told in real time and in one
single shot.”
The film begins with two
lowly lance corporals, Schofield
and Blake, being ordered to cross
No Man’s Land to deliver a mes-
sage that could save the lives of
1,600 British soldiers. Wilson-
Cairns did part of her research
by travelling to northern France
where the Battle of the Somme
was fought.
“It helped me to understand
the scale in a literal sense of the
journey the characters would
have to take,” she says. “But
also, in a far greater sense, it
afforded me the chance to un-
derstand the cost, the thou-
sands of young men who died Sam Mendes on set of 1917
for inches of land.”
It was a dream project for the 32-year-old screenwriter
who grew up watching war movies and devouring novels like
All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms. “It
rains a lot in Glasgow so you spend a lot of time indoors,”
she says with a laugh.
Wilson-Cairns, who attended the National Film and
Television School in Buckinghamshire, England, made
her breakthrough in 2014 as a staff writer on the third
season of Penny Dreadful. She describes 1917, the first
screenplay she has either written or co-written to be pro-
duced, as “a trial by fire.”
Tobias Grey: Had you ever envisaged writing a war movie
before Sam Mendes approached you?
Krysty Wilson-Cairns: It was my dream to write a war
movie. I grew up loving war movies. I remain obsessed by
the First and Second World Wars.
There’s such a wealth of informa-
tion out there of humans being
pushed to their absolute limits.
The fact that I’m a woman con-
fuses some people. They think,
“Why would a woman want to
write a war movie?” I, as a writ-
er, was desperate to write a war
movie, and I think I, as a wom-
an, would have rarely been given
the chance if it wasn’t for Sam
Mendes. I believe it would have
been impossible to have got this
made on my own if I could have
conceived of it on my own.
Why did you decide to write the
script for 1917 on spec?
Sam would have paid me if I
had asked him to. It wasn’t really
a question of that. I suppose one

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•• 45
“It was my dream to write a war movie. I grew up loving war movies. I remain obsessed by
the First and Second World Wars. There’s such a wealth of information out there of humans
being pushed to their absolute limits. The fact that I’m a woman confuses some people.
They think, ‘Why would a woman want to write a war movie?’” —Krysty Wilson-Cairns

of the reasons I wanted to write it on spec was because I
wasn’t 100% sure it was going to work until I had got into
the first draft. When every single shot is in real time it
completely affects the way you write the script. It changes
the DNA of every single word you have on the page. I didn’t
know if it was going to work on an emotional level or if it
would be interesting enough. The other reason was that Sam
knew he wanted to direct it. He knew that the best way to
set something up like this, which we knew from the very start
was not going to have two A-list movie stars in the leads, was
to own the script to retain all the creative control.
Unlike WWI movies such as All Quiet on the Western
Front and Paths of Glory, 1917 is not agenda driven. It’s
not super critical of the military high command, for ex-
ample. Can you explain your approach?
There are suggestions of criticism of the generals in 1917
but ultimately this film exists in real time. You require hind-
sight to have these kinds of evolved opinions of the leader-
ship. None of these men have the benefit of hindsight. They
are living minute-to-minute the way we are watching it.
What Sam and I were trying to do as the authors of this story
was disappear. The minute you feel the author’s hand at work,
it’s another thing that detaches you from the characters.
Tell me about the two lance corporals who are tasked with
delivering the message. What kind of characters were you
looking to create?

46 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

 We were looking to create characters with a universal ap-
peal in the sense that everyone could feel that they were ei-
ther them or their sons, or their fathers, or their brothers. We
wanted the audience to feel like these men could have really ex-
isted, but at the same time we were trying to give a window into
the wider war and through the micro see the macro. So we chose
two very different characters. Blake is very young and green. He
is obsessed by the Lone Ranger. He wants to be a hero and is
desperate to go to war to prove himself. Whereas Schofield, who
is slightly older and far quieter, has been through the Somme.
He holds himself in a different way. He thinks that the war is a
big mistake, a waste of anyone’s life, and he wants to go home.
We had contrasting characters so the audience could read the
differences between them.
Do you like working with a director on a screenplay?
Yes, for several reasons. There’s no middleman when you’re
working with a director. It becomes all about understand-
ing a director’s vision and the director understanding your
vision. I work with Edgar Wright as well. I co-wrote his next
film called Last Night in Soho, which comes out [in the fall of
2020]. In a way it makes my life much easier, and also it’s the
key to getting films made. Over the last five years I’ve written
probably ten screenplays and 1917 is the first one that’s got
made. It’s really, really hard to make a film. Even when I write
on my own, I still collaborate. It’s usually with other writers
that I know. You’re always asking other people to read your
work. I think if you don’t want to collaborate you shouldn’t
be a screenwriter. You should go and be an author.
How did you and Sam Mendes complement each other on
1917?
We both have quite similar outlooks and similar tastes,
but we both come from different places, different genera-
tions, different genders. So we are not an echo chamber
for each other. We are both tough on each other’s ideas.
We both respect each other. Ultimately, he respects me
enough to listen to my opinions when I don’t think some-
thing is working. I write very quickly which helps him a
lot. I sometimes can write a draft in three weeks or less. I
think I did the first draft for 1917 in five weeks and I was
in constant contact with him.
Were there any WWI-themed books or films that you re-
ferred to?
No films actually. We were worried about the concept of
echo chambers and how you actually know what World War
I looks like because you know what World War I films look
like. First-hand accounts were the most important thing re-
ally. Then there was the poetry of Wilfred Owen, particularly
his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which I would read every
morning before I started writing. I thought it really summed
up Schofield’s character.
Did you feel like you got everything into 1917 that you
wanted to get in?
Yes, I’m incredibly proud of the film. I really am. I was on
the set every day and the film’s reality surpassed my dream.
Would I write another World War I movie? Yes, in a heart-
beat. I think there’s more stories to tell. One of the reasons
I was drawn to this was a chance to write a story that was so
cinematic for the big screen. But really the only thing that
matters to me when writing anything is do I care about the
characters and do I want to see them go through the world? I
wouldn’t have done it if Sam hadn’t wanted to tell it from a
character-driven point of view.
It’s a film that could almost have been silent. Do you agree?
Yes. And as a writer I know you’re meant to love dialogue.
And I do, I love it when it works and when it’s in the right
place. But I find it’s a form of artifice. This particular film
required throwing as much artifice as you could away. It’s
scary at first but so fun. I completely believe that a screenplay
should be, more than anything, an incredibly visual experi-
ence. I honed my skills to a different level with 1917 because
it was a trial by fire. So I think it made me a better writer and
changed the kind of writer that I am.
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 47
 45.
CONTINUED:

Blake has followed him, a

apologise, but unsure how little guiltily. Wanting to
. He takes in the orchard.
BLAKE
Cherries.
Blake looks at one of the
blossom, holds it up. trees. He reaches down, pic
ks a

BLAKE (CONT'D)
Lamberts.
They begin to walk throug
h the felled trees.
BLAKE (CONT'D)
They might be Dukes, hard
when they aren’t in fruit.to tell

SCHOFIELD
What’s the difference?
Blake is a little wry, sen
sing Schofield so ftening.
BLAKE
Well people think there’s
but there’s lots of them one type,
Cuthberts, Queen Annes, -
Montmorencys. Sweet ones,
ones... sour

SCHOFIELD
Why on earth would you kno
w this?
BLAKE
Mum’s got an orchard, bac
k home.
Only a few trees. This tim
e of year
it looks like it’s been sno
blossom everywhere. And thewing,
May, we have to pick them. n in
Joe. Takes the whole day. Me and
A pang of homesickn ess cre
clamber over a downed tre eps into Blake as he and Schofield
other. e. They are now alongside
each
Schofield registers this.

SCHOFIELD
So, these ones all gonner
s?

(CONTINUED)

48 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

Dulce et Decorum Est
BYWILFRED OWEN
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 49

 WRITTEN BY LOUISE FARR

POETIC
PHOTO BY GARY CORONADO

JUSTICE
T
he opening shot of Just Mercy wasn’t in the script. While Stevenson would go on to become a MacArthur
In the film, written by Destin Daniel Cretton & Fellowship recipient, at the time he was a young Harvard
Andrew Lanham (based on human rights attorney Law graduate who spent years toiling to get McMillian’s
Bryan Stevenson’s memoir of the same name), Ja- conviction overturned. His 2014 best-selling book Just
mie Foxx plays pulpwood worker Walter McMil- Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption detailed that saga,
lian, who was wrongfully convicted in 1988 Ala- as well as his decades-long fight for broader criminal justice
bama in the 1986 murder of a young white woman. reform through his non-profit Montgomery-based Equal
As Cretton (who also directed the film) shot a scene of Justice Initiative (EJI).
McMillian at work, an actual tree pulper demonstrated sling- Clearly, Stevenson’s story had all the markings of a mov-
ing a weighted line over the top of a pine, where it hung, ing biopic. But when Cretton first learned of the memoir, he
ominously reflective of a noose. wasn’t looking for another project. Known for writing and di-
“We saw that and then captured it on camera,” says Cret- recting the affecting Short Term 12, a fictionalized version of his
ton. “It wasn’t until the editing room
that we saw the connection.” That
connection is to America’s shameful
history of lynching, with its legacy
of capital punishment and rampant
incarceration of African-Americans.
Even before McMillian was con-
victed, the local sheriff sent him to
death row to await trial. The trial it-
self was then moved from the town
of Monroeville to a wealthier, whiter,
neighboring county, where a panel
that included a sole black juror con-
victed McMillian, based on the lying
testimony of one man.

Andrew Lanham, Bryan Stevenson, Destin Daniel Cretton

50 • W G AW W R I T T E N B Y FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020

50 • W G AW W R I T T E N B Y FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020
Destin Daniel Cretton
and Andrew Lanham
keep their voices out
of the story in Just Mercy.

FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 51

time working in a group home for teenagers, he was immersed
in The Glass Castle, based on Jeannette Walls’ memoir of her
troubled childhood. Cretton wrote the script with Lanham,
and was directing. But when Gil Netter, a Glass Castle pro-
ducer, sent him Just Mercy, Cretton found himself unexpect-
edly hooked by the depth Stevenson brought to portraits of
prisoners on whose behalf he had fought. “To get to the end of
a book about the history of slavery, and how it relates to mass
incarceration today, and feel a sense of inspiration, and hope,
and connection to humanity,” he says, “was also very unex-
pected, and made me really want to be a part of that.”
Before Cretton and Lanham even began working on the
script, Black Panther’s Michael B. Jordan signed on to star
as Stevenson and executive produce. Then Cretton traveled
to Montgomery and drove with Stevenson to Monroeville,
where they walked through cotton fields and the rundown
rural communities near the home McMillian had lived in
with his wife and children. The next day, Lanham joined
them to meet with formerly imprisoned EJI staffers.
“A huge part of the process is breaking the book down,
figuring out what the narrative will be, what other details we
can fit into that. And then, where are the holes that we need
to fill that can’t be found in the book,” Cretton says. “In this
scenario, we were lucky to have Bryan Stevenson to help us
fill in those holes with things that are truthful. So a lot of that
is really great to do with a partner, because it’s just a lot of
brainstorming and putting index cards up on a wall.”
Since every other chapter focused on McMillian and the
legal battle that led to his exoneration, he was the obvious
character around which to build the movie. But who else to
include posed a dilemma, since Stevenson’s book covered any
number of powerful histories.
“Bryan’s book is so full of amazing characters that start
out as stereotypes,” says Cretton. “He very smartly plays with
your expectations of who you think a person is, based off of
the information you might have gotten from a quick news
blurb and a mugshot. And then he starts peeling off the lay-
ers, and the layers, and the layers, until you see them as a
whole human being.”
For their B-stories, the writers decided to follow two pris-
oners who were on death row at the same time as McMil-
52 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020
“The first thing as a screenwriter you think
of is, how can I condense all of this informa-
tion in the adaptation to fit into the movie.
So, our goal in a lot of ways was the oppo-
site of that. We knew we had to condense
things, but it was always on our minds to
condense in a way that still remains true to
the reality of the law.” —Andrew Lanham
lian. One was now-EJI educator Anthony Ray Hinton, who
served nearly 30 years for a double murder he didn’t commit.
The other was Herbert Richardson, a Vietnam veteran suffer-
ing from PTSD. Richardson had planted a bomb that killed
an 11-year-old girl.
“He was the first person that Bryan actually witnessed go
through an execution. And we thought it was important to
include him in the story,” Cretton says.
Even when justice ultimately prevails, it can be tortuous,
and Stevenson impressed on the writers the importance of re-
flecting that. “The first thing as a screenwriter you think of is,
how can I condense all of this information in the adaptation
to fit into the movie,” Lanham says. “So, our goal in a lot of
ways was the opposite of that. We knew we had to condense
things, but it was always on our minds to condense in a way
that still remains true to the reality of the law.”
GOODFELLAS
Though Cretton and Lanham have written together often,
they don’t consider themselves true writing partners, as both
have solo credits to their names. Lanham’s include The Kid,
and he and Cretton wrote The Shack with John Fusco. But
they’ve been friends since 2010 when both won Academy
Nicholl Fellowships: Lanham for The Jumper of Maine, about
a paramedic with Tourette Syndrome, and Cretton for Short
Term 12, a script based on his San Diego State University
MFA thesis film that had won multiple awards, including a
2009 Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize.
Growing up on Maui, Cretton grabbed his grandmother’s
VHS camera when he was 11 or 12 and began making “silly
movies” about his five brothers and sisters. For several years
he was home-schooled, like his siblings, by their Japanese-
American mother—and he kept filming, with no thought of
it becoming a career.
To an Asian-American kid living on a Pacific island, the
mainland television programs and movies he watched seemed
foreign. Back then he simply thought, “Oh, that’s how white
FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 53
WGA statistics showed increased employment for Asian-American writ-
ers between 2008 and 2014, but only four Asian directors worked on
the top 100 films in 2018, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Ini-
tiative. More historically underrepresented directors and writers means
more roles for historically underrepresented actors, which increases the
number of role models.
people are.” Only later did he realize how few role models
were available for him onscreen.
WGA statistics showed increased employment for Asian-
American writers between 2008 and 2014, but only four
Asian directors worked on the top 100 films in 2018, accord-
ing to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. More his-
torically underrepresented directors and writers means more
roles for historically underrepresented actors, which increases
the number of role models.
Cretton himself could help change the stats. He’s speaking
to Written By during pre-production on the first Asian super-
hero movie, which he is set to direct: Marvel Films’ Shang-
Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (written by David Cal-
laham, based on characters created by Steve Englehart and
Jim Starlin). The film’s kung fu action theme contrasts with
the quiet, character-driven work Cretton has helmed to date.
Andrew Lanham, Destin Daniel Cretton
“It probably couldn’t be much more different,” he says.
“Every movie feels like I’m going back to film school. This
movie feels like I’m going back to a very big film school.”
Just Mercy could change stats, too. At Jordan’s sugges-
tion, contracts added an inclusion rider—a concept made
famous by Frances McDormand during her 2018 Oscar
acceptance speech—that encourages the hiring of under-
54 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020
represented groups behind
the scenes as well as in front
of the camera. For Just Mer-
cy, the result was that some
crew members had an op-
portunity, for the first time,
to head their departments.
By the time Cretton and
the Maine-raised Lanham
met during Nicholl Fellow-
ship week, Cretton was liv-
ing in LA. When Lanham
ultimately moved west, he crashed on Cretton’s couch until
he found a place.
“Instantly, I was brought into a family,” Lanham says,
crediting Cretton’s Hawaiian upbringing for his low-key per-
sonality. “I feel like it’s a rarity to find a director who naturally
creates that warmth on a set.”
Despite their friendship, and their co-writing credits, the
two don’t write in the same room. “We both take a section,
and as soon as we’re done, pass it to the other person,” says
Cretton. “They either give notes, or just rewrite it, and then
pass it back, until we find something we’re both happy with.”
The temptation to bring one’s own voice into the script
is a given for a writer tackling an adaptation, Lanham says.
“With this one, obviously, I’m white, and I grew up in New
England, and the experiences of Bryan Stevenson and the
people that he represents, they’re not my experience. But I
really felt like Destin has a uniquely
empathetic vision and ability to dra-
matically portray the lives of charac-
ters who are often forgotten or not
heard in our society. Because of my
working relationship with him, and
my friendship with him, I felt like
I knew how to help assist him in
bringing that vision to the screen.
And I also felt like it matched Bryan
Stevenson’s vision.”
For Cretton’s part, in an era sen-
sitive to cultural appropriation, the
only resistance he experienced over
not being black was his own, early
on. “It all came down to the first
meeting with Bryan Stevenson, who
had seen Short Term 12, and saw
some of the similarities in taking
characters who are vulnerable, or outsiders, and revealing
who they really are over the course of a movie,” Cretton says.
“Him feeling comfortable with me was the only way that I
would step into a project like this.”
Just Mercy was Cretton’s second memoir adaptation. But
he sees differences in tone between his two latest films. “Glass
Castle is about a woman in her 20s who is filtering through
the memories of her past and trying to make sense of them. So Jacqueline Feather Ph.D.
there’s more of a heightened quality to it, versus for Just Mercy
we really wanted to tell a fairly straightforward story and keep
Jungian Analyst
ourselves out of it as much as we could, to allow the actors and Depth Psychotherapist, MFT
performers and characters to do their thing.” That meant no
flashy camera moves or moody lighting. “We were trying not (vested member WGA)
to Hollywood-ize anything.”

TRUE GRIT
A low point in the fight to gain McMillian’s freedom hap-
pens, onscreen as in real life, when his appeal is denied, despite
the exonerating evidence Stevenson has uncovered. Cretton
knew McMillian tended to lift Stevenson’s mood when he was
down. To illustrate that, he wanted to create a conversation
between attorney and client after their hopes were shattered.
But he had trouble writing the scene.
“Bryan Stevenson shows up, kind of humbled, to meet with
him. And it was a hard thing to figure out, like, what do you say
in that moment?” says Cretton, who found the answer when he
suddenly recalled an EJI event at which someone spoke about
authorities, from slavery onward, consistently denying the truth
of African-Americans’ experiences. “That’s the core of what has
happened to Walter McMillian. He knew for a fact he was with
his family, with 20, 30 of his friends, on the day of this mur-
der. Everybody in that community knew for a fact that was their
truth. But slowly, slowly, that truth was ripped away from him
until even for him, the truth became very cloudy.”
That remembered revelation from the EJI speaker allowed
Cretton to create a monologue in which McMillian’s words Specializing in
apply not only to his life, but to the broader issue of a racist
society’s denial of African-Americans’ reality.
“Walter says, ‘If they take me to that chair tonight, I’m go-
personal and creative
ing to go out smiling, because you gave me my truth back,’”
says Cretton. “In front of his community, and the whole com-
munity, Bryan Stevenson got the one guy who put him in
challenges.
prison to tell the truth. And now Walter doesn’t feel like a
crazy person anymore. He knows that he is who he is.”
The same week that the writers are interviewed for this Available for sessions via Skype,
piece, three innocent black men have been released from pris- phone and in-ooce.
on after 30 years. Little wonder that screening audiences ask
about the film’s timeliness.
“It’s more like the movie is timeless,” Lanham says he tells
them. “The justice system in our country, it’s this beautiful
creation, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, or that it hasn’t
been corrupted in a multitude of different ways. So, regardless
of being moved by the film, I think everyone involved hopes it
drives more and more people toward Bryan Stevenson and his
work with the Equal Justice Initiative.”
Cretton puts it more personally: “Bryan Stevenson’s life and 805 338 4875
work opened my eyes to the injustice in our country through
the lives of those who are most affected by it. Living with this www.jacquelinefeather.com
story the past two years really showed me that despite our race Ojai, CA
or status, we are all connected. And I hope the film does that
for others, too.”

FEBRUARY | MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 55

 WRITTEN BY
JACQUELINE PRIMO

Creating Dissolution
Noah Baumbach on breaking Marriage Story.

M
arriage Story, written and directed by Noah Baumbach
and nominated for a 2020 Writers Guild Award for
Original Screenplay, tells a modern tale of divorce while
feeling timeless. Both specific and relatable, the film is
at once heartwarming, agonizing, and tragic. Nicole and Charlie are
the perfect couple, until they aren’t anymore—or maybe they never
were. The audience watches as Nicole comes into her own and real-
izes that, during their marriage, she often failed to speak up about
things that were important to her. Charlie wrestles with the realiza-
tion that he may not have been open to compromise. Their young
son, Henry, becomes caught in a tug-of-war as they try to stake their
claim on him from opposite coasts. Baumbach manages to write
the trauma without vilifying either member of the shattered couple,
though the audience is at times frustrated with each of them. Via
email, he tells Written By how the story took shape, and about his
process in creating some of the film’s most powerful moments.

Jacqueline Primo: Where did you start when you began writing
this script? Was it an image that came to you that you had to
pursue, a concept, a character, a plot twist, a feeling you had to
put down on paper?
Noah Baumbach: It’s all of those things. When something
strikes me, I write it down in a notebook. I’ll often find I write ver-
sions of the same idea over and over with slight variation. Almost

56
56 •• W
WGG AAW
W W
W RR II TT TT EE NN BB YY FF EE BB RR UU AA RR YY I I M
M AA RR CC HH 22 00 22 00
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 57
like I’m trying to figure out what’s in-
teresting to me about it. And then it’s
“I didn’t look at the scene didn’t look at the scene as comic with
serious undercurrents or vice versa, I
the accumulation of these fragments,
scenes, images, whatever, that start to
as comic with serious under- saw these different tones as living side
by side, always. My job as a writer was
suggest story or character. Early drafts
are wider ranging, of course, but once
currents or vice versa, I saw to be aware of them.

the story takes shape, all work is in ser-
vice of the narrative. these different tones as living
From there, how did the script evolve? side by side, always. My job
Did you outline first?
I don’t outline. But I had ideas about as a writer was to be aware of
the basic structure. That there would be
sections of the film where we’d be more them.” —Noah Baumbach
with Nicole and others where we’d be
more with Charlie. I didn’t yet know how these would all play
out, but it was a general game plan.
The opening conceit, with the voiceovers “What I love about
___,” served to show the tenderness between Charlie and
Nicole, after it was over. How did you hit upon that series
of montages to show, perfectly efficiently, what this marriage
used to be, and what it isn’t anymore?
I wrote those sequences as a way to introduce myself to
Charlie and Nicole. It was during the construction that I
realized it could also be a way to introduce the audience
to the characters. These montages
depict everyday life in a marriage,
for a family. And what we discover
as the movie develops is that these
everyday, ordinary moments don’t
go away even when the relationship
is coming apart.
The script is written with such pre-
cise choreography that it is easy to
forget you are watching a movie
and not looking in through a neigh-
bor’s window. How did you find
your way to such true-to-life, organ-
ic scenes such as (spoiler!) the one in
which Charlie accidentally notices
the divorce papers he is to be served
with in the kitchen?
I discovered many hidden genres
in the material. That scene where Ni-
Were there elements of Nicole and
Charlie’s marriage in earlier drafts
that did not make it to the final cut?
There were scenes with Henry at
school and scenes with friends. Many
things that I liked. But I found that
anything that took us away from the
general thrust of the story, the process of
divorce, felt extraneous. This goes back
to that notion that ordinary life doesn’t stop, no matter what
is happening. So these intimate moments, like Nicole ordering
lunch for Charlie or closing the gate, or cutting hair, could all
happen in service of the narrative.
Can you talk about the scene in Charlie’s new (and bare,
and sad) LA apartment between him and Nicole? It was im-
possible to look away, quite the feat in a scene that is purely
dialogue. How many pages of dialogue is it? How did you
create the arc of it? Did you revise it after you rehearsed it—
assuming you rehearsed it—or was there any feedback from
the actors that you incorporated?
I’m assuming there was no improv,
but you can correct me on that.
(Also, was the juice box symbolic or
just a juice box?)
The scene was 11 pages in the
script. We rehearsed and blocked it
extensively (as we did every scene
in the movie). And it was shot over
two days. There is no improv, but
the actors are very much part of the
choreography, along with Robbie
Ryan, my DP, and Jennifer Lame,
my editor. Where this scene ap-
pears in the script is also very im-
portant. It follows the courtroom
where the lawyers have taken over
and, in effect, stripped Charlie and
Nicole of their voices. I thought of
the scene in the apartment as partly
PHOTO BY ANDREW H. WALKER

cole and her family are planning to about two people grappling to get
serve Charlie acted as both screwball their voices back. Almost like in-
comedy and thriller. The choreogra- fants learning to speak. (Or Henry
phy and overlapping dialogue was es- learning to read.) Language is in-
sentially comic, whereas the presence termittently out of their control.
of the envelope acted like a bomb of But there remains an intimacy
sorts that the audience and Nicole throughout.
know about but Charlie doesn’t. I The juice box is just a juice box.

58 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020

SPONSORSP AD

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 59

 IN MEMORIAM

Peer J. Oppenheimer David Beaird Mark Medoff

5/23/20 - 11/10/2018 8/19/1952 - 2/6/2019 3/18/1940 - 4/23/2019

Michael Lieber Larry Brand John D. Singleton

7/28/1945 - 12/23/2018 12/16/1949 - 2/9/2019 1/6/1968 - 4/29/2019

Robert L. Ruth Christopher Knopf Dawn Aldredge Cohan

1/1/1936 - 12/29/2018 12/20/1927 - 2/13/2019 3/29/1936 - 5/8/2019
Al Reinert Harold Nebenzal Alvin Sargent
10/18/1947 -12/31/2018 3/31/1922 - 2/14/2019 4/12/1927 - 5/9/2019
Bob Einstein Patrick Caddell Shawn Boxe
11/20/1942 - 1/2/2019 5/19/1950 - 2/16/2019 6/9/1974 - 5/10/2019
Jim Pond Linda Morris Lee Hale
11/19/1958 - 1/3/2019 11/28/1947 - 2/18/2019 3/25/1923 - 5/10/2019
John Falsey Seanne Kemp-Kovach Alex Ayres
11/6/1951 - 1/4/2019 12/6/1966 - 3/1/2019 12/23/1953 - 5/14/2019
Norman Snider John Boni Tim Conway
11/14/1945 - 1/4/2019 7/3/1937 - 3/8/2019 12/15/1933 - 5/14/2019
Kenneth W. Harrison Robie Robinson Tim Tori
8/6/1942 - 1/5/2019 6/22/1931 - 3/8/2019 1/20/1971 - 5/23/2019
Henry E. Sharp Tom J. Hatten Michael Moody
6/25/1912 - 1/9/2019 11/14/1926 - 3/16/2019 12/29/1944 - 5/27/2019
Daron J. Thomas Steven Aspis Dennis Etchison
11/13/1950 - 1/11/2019 3/13/1957 - 3/18/2019 3/30/1943 - 5/29/2019
Alex Gregory Stanley F. Glass Brian Taggert
4/10/1947 - 1/12/2019 6/27/1928 - 3/19/2019 1/29/1938 - 6/1/2019
Tina Karapatian Eunetta Boone Dallas Gaultois
7/22/1955 - 1/13/2019 5/16/1955 - 3/20/2019 10/30/1923 - 6/6/2019
Avery Duff Leonard Wolf Robert B. Hutchison
6/12/1950 - 1/21/2019 3/1/1923 - 3/20/2019 1/12/1931 - 6/6/2019
Steven J. Levy Lawrence G. Cohen Kurt A. Schindler
4/27/1960 - 1/21/2019 7/15/1941 - 3/23/2019 3/13/1967 - 6/8/2019
Russell P. Marleau David M. Wolf William D. Wittliff
11/30/1965 - 1/22/2019 2/8/1943 - 3/28/2019 1/21/1940 - 6/9/2019
Stan Cutler Allan G. Cole William M. Angelos
3/5/1925 - 1/25/2019 11/19/1943 - 3/29/2019 11/16/1933 - 6/11/2019
Ken Welch Ronald S. Dunas Roger M. Shulman
2/4/1926 - 1/26/2019 5/16/1926 - 3/29/2019 9/1/1943 - 6/13/2019
Joe Wiesenfeld Joan Laine Alan Cassidy
5/12/1947 - 1/27/2019 1/11/1945 - 3/29/2019 12/12/1942 - 6/19/2019
Laurie Dillon Roberta Haynes Peter Allan Fields
9/25/1940 - 1/28/2019 8/19/1927 - 4/4/2019 5/12/1935 - 6/19/2019
Paul Max Rubenstein Warren Adler Dennis Snee
12/5/1939 - 2/1/2019 12/16/1927 - 4/15/2019 4/11/1951 - 7/1/2019
Emily B. Levine Henry L. Howard Peggy Nicoll
10/20/1944 - 2/3/2019 3/1/1958 - 4/23/2019 12/20/1958 - 7/5/2019

60 ••
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N BB YY F F
EEBB
RRUU
AARR
Y Y 2 I0 1M8 A R C H 2020
 IN MEMORIAM

Stephen F. Verona Eric Warner

9/11/1940 - 7/13/2019 7/26/1952 - 10/24/2019

Paul Krassner Bernard Slade

4/9/1932 - 7/21/2019 5/2/1930 - 10/30/2019

Scott Ian Rubenstein James O’Keefe

9/28/1947 - 7/25/2019 1/11/1943 - 10/31/2019

Edward Lewis Richard Gollance

12/16/1919 - 7/27/2019 3/11/1950 - 11/3/2019

Marc Stirdivant David Levinson

12/6/1948 -7/30/2019 8/4/1939 - 11/4/2019

Stu Rosen Mark Solomon

6/26/1939 - 8/4/2019 11/1/1947 – 11/6/2019
Patricia Louisianna Knop Christopher N. Ferrence
10/24/1940 - 8/7/2019 1/7/1971 - 11/12/2019

Norman Barasch Arthur Marks

2/18/1922 - 8/13/2019 8/2/1927 - 11/13/2019

John Alan Schwartz Phil Hahn

11/7/1952 - 8/13/2019 08/21/1932 - 11/17/2019

Brian Cox D.C. Fontana

1/7/1958 - 8/14/2019 3/25/1939 – 12/2/2019

Larry Siegel Will Aldis

10/29/1925 - 8/21/2019 1/19/1947 – 12/3/2019

Rocci Chatfield Joni Rhodes

4/30/1926 - 8/24/2019 3/19/1940 - 12/4/2019

Chester Aaron T. Smith III

5/9/1923 - 8/30/2019 10/24/1958 - 12/4/2019

Gordon Bressack Ron Leibman

5/28/1951 - 8/30/2019 10/11/1937 - 12/6/2019

Walter Halsey Davis William Luce

9/15/1942 - 8/31/2019 10/16/1931 - 12/9/2019

William H. Harris John Briley

8/9/1944 - 9/5/2019 6/25/1925 – 12/14/2019

Mardik Martin Michael Burton

9/16/1934 - 9/11/2019 3/15/1944 - 12/19/2019

Caliope Brattlestreet Robert Di Pietro

6/7/1944 - 9/21/2019 2/20/1948 - 12/20/2019

James Schmerer Lee Mendelson

6/14/1938 - 10/4/2019 3/24/1933 - 12/25/2019

Sam Bobrick Tom Dunsmuir

7/24/1932 - 10/11/2019 4/23/1938 - 12/30/2019

Steven McKay Silvio Horta

12/31/1949 - 10/12/2019 8/14/1974 - 01/7/2020

Al Burton Buck Henry

4/9/1928 - 10/22/2019 12/9/1930 – 1/8/2020

FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 61

TRIBUTE
By Jane Espenson
DC FONTANA 3/25/1939 – 12/2/2019
T
here was DC Fontana, and there was Dorothy. I’d known
DC forever, from the show that eventually changed my
life, and especially from the novels that were my intro-
duction to the world of that show. I didn’t meet Dorothy
until, perhaps, ten years ago. I think, actually, that I’ve never
fully integrated the two. How doubly terrible to realize both
of them are gone.
Dorothy and I would meet for a lunch, run into each oth-
er at a writers’ get-together, or she’d invite me to come speak
to one of her AFI classes. She was unfailingly welcoming,
frank, and kind. But I think her most defining quality was
curiosity. I’m talking about the kind of eager-to-know-every-
thing curiosity usually associated with youth. I wanted to ask
her questions, and I did; she was generous with her memo-
ries. But somehow, I’d always find that she’d twisted things
around when I wasn’t looking, so that she was the one asking
me. She wanted to know about writing online content, about
the dynamics of working in a writers’ room, about how best
to guide her students, about everything. She’d lean forward,
face serious, watching me sharply, really listening.
More than once, she asked me to read something. It was
never by her, although she remained active, developing and
pitching new content. It was always something written by
one of her students. She was excited by new talent and would
go to wonderful lengths to promote it. She also, as I under-
stand it, pushed for the creation of a class on online content
at AFI. Imagine that. In her seventies, she was leading the
charge to serve the most up-to-date and useful information
to students. That was Dorothy.
And there was also, of course, DC. We all owe a separate
debt to the writing, as apart from the woman. In fact, grow-
62 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
ing up, I didn’t know DC was a woman. I suspected that
might be the case, since I was hip to the trick of using initials
to level the playing field, but I didn’t know.
I didn’t actually watch Star Trek until college. Perhaps our
local market didn’t carry the syndicated episodes, or aired
them when I was at school? So I bought every Star Trek novel
instead. For many, many years, my Star Trek was the one from
her books. It had history and conversations and spectacle and
philosophy and all the things that are too time consuming
or expensive or internal to put on TV. The Spock she wrote
about became my Spock. And it was very literally that Spock
who made me want to write in the Trek universe. When I
think, even today, of the world of Trek, it’s the thoughtful
world of her novels that I think of first.
I finally got a chance, a few years back, to ask Dorothy/
DC all the questions I wanted, without her being able to turn
things around. I interviewed her for an event at the Guild.
For my first question, determined to start at the beginning,
I asked her about when her family had first got a television
set. She told me I wouldn’t like the answer, and I didn’t. She
said that her father had abandoned the family, and on his way
out, had bought them a television set as compensation. It was
a stunner of an answer and one of the saddest things I’d ever
heard. I have to admit, it threw me off my game, but I also re-
member thinking I was glad I’d elicited the answer, because it
made clear what a positive, transcendent, and generous soul
Dorothy was. Life gave her a television set instead of a father.
And she went on to use television, and novels spawned by
television, to nurture all of us.
I respected the heck out of Dorothy Fontana. And DC
Fontana. I will miss her.
WE’VE GOT ENTERTAINMENT COVERED.

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FOLLOW US / VARIETY 63
FEBRUARY I W
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 By Catherine Clinch
The first time Dorothy Fontana touched
my life, I was 12 years old. My girlfriends and
I went to Susan’s house to watch a new show
called Star Trek. Susan’s family had the best
TV in the neighborhood and Susan knew
everything about the shows we loved. When
the screen credit announced, “Written by
D.C. Fontana,” Susan shouted out: “She’s a
girl!” I don’t know how she knew that and it
doesn’t matter. I was immediately intrigued
by the idea that a girl could write something
cool and exciting because in the 1960s girls
weren’t supposed to do much of anything
that was interesting.
Flash forward to 1980. Dorothy Fontana
was one of the first writers I met when I joined
the Guild. She was enthused about meeting
the new girl who was writing cop shows while
earning writing credits under
a female first name. I spent an
entire evening talking to Doro-
thy, mesmerized by the stories of
her experiences, learning about
how she pushed the boundaries
in westerns and science fiction
while forced to write under her
initials or male pseudonyms.
Twelve years later, Dorothy
and I were both elected to the
Board of Directors, where we
spent the next two years trying
64 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
to make sense of the most tumultuous years
in the history of the Guild. Throughout it all,
Dorothy was a calm in the storm—a source
of wisdom and insight. She never raised her
voice, yet her words often rose in power above
all others in the room.
Each year since then, I have looked for-
ward to Dorothy’s annual Christmas card. We
would chat at Guild screenings or wherever we
ran into each other. A few years ago, at my
suggestion, the Committee of Women Writ-
ers honored Dorothy during Women’s History
Month. Dorothy received three Writers Guild
Awards and was nominated for others, includ-
ing the prestigious Hugo Award. Still, some-
how all that just doesn’t seem to be enough.
Dorothy was a pioneer who paved the way
for every woman writer who came after her.
For those who were blessed to
meet her, to know her, to call
her a friend, there is a hole in
the universe that will not be eas-
ily filled. For the women writers
who didn’t have the opportu-
nity to know her, rest assured
that in the days before you ever
picked up a pencil, Dorothy
Fontana was paving the roads
that brought you to where you
are today. RIP Dorothy, who
boldly went.
 By Rantz Hoseley
When I was growing up in the rural North-
west, Dorothy “DC” Fontana was one of the first
television writers I knew by name. I knew noth-
ing about her, other than that the episodes of Star
Trek written by this person were my favorites.
Decades later, living in Los Angeles, I found
myself serving as the creative director for a Star
Trek videogame set in the Wrath of Khan era.
When it came time to assign the writer for the
project, I suggested, “We should try and get
DC Fontana to do it.” While everyone on the
team was a fan, there was doubt…even skep-
ticism…that a writer of her talent and stature
would want to work on a videogame. After all,
this was the early 2000s, and videogames, like
comic books, were still seen as second-tier en-
tertainment. I insisted we at least try, because
in a worst-case scenario all that would happen
was she’d say no.
Instead, she enthusiastically said yes.
The three months developing the story and
scripts for Star Trek: Tactical Assault were delight-
ful. Asking Dorothy random questions about
Kirk, or Vulcan culture, or Federation history (so
we could ensure design accuracy) would lead to
long discussions and anecdotes about how the
original series was made. Every day during that
project my 11-year-old self would, at some point,
mutter in joyous disbelief: “Dude… You’re work-
ing with DC Fontana on Star Trek!”
She was kind and giving and incredibly funny,
and the world is dimmer without her star in it.
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 65
66 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020
FEBRUARY I MARCH 2020 W G AW WRITTEN BY • 67
FADE OUT

A BEAUTIFUL He sighs, content. Then his fingers play across

DAY IN THE the keys, morphing into something brighter,
NEIGHBORHOOD more hopeful – The closing theme of Mister Rog-
ers’ Neighborhood. As Fred plays us off, we –

FRANK (CONT’D)
THE IRISHMAN Father, could you do me a favor? Don’t
close the door all the way. I don’t like
it like that. Leave it open a little.

JOJO
JOJO RABBIT Yes… we made it.
Elsa turns to Jojo and stares at him. She
slaps Jojo.

JOJO (CONT’D)
(nodding) Yep. Probably deserved that.

HOSPITAL DOCTOR
JOKER Great. Have you been writing about what
happened? About your episode?

JOKER
How I remember it.

JO
LITTLE WOMEN If I’m going to sell my heroine into
marriage for money, I might as well
get some of it.
DASHWOOD
Six point six percent.

JO
Done
DASHWOOD
And you don’t need to decide about the
copyright now.

JO
I’ve decided I want to own my own book.

2020 WRITERS GUILD AWARDS

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68 • W G AW WRITTEN BY FEBRUARY | MARCH 2019

 G O L D E N G L O B E
®

N O M I N A T I O N S C R I T I C S’ C H O I C E A W A R D N O M I N A T I O N S

BEST PICTURE
INCLUDING

BB E SET SSC R TE E N P LPA Y I S TCE V TE N UZ A IRL L IEA N

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WINNER • BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY USC LIBRARIES

SCRIPTER AWARDS
STEVEN ZAILLIAN
NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW TORONTO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION ST. LOUIS FILM CRITICS CIRCLE
N O M I N E E
NEW MEXICO FILM CRITICS SOUTHEASTERN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION OKLAHOMA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE STEVEN ZAILLIAN

BUFALINO
I didn’t want to do this in front
of everybody.

He hands Frank a small jewelry box. Inside it, Frank

finds a gold ring with a gold coin on top.

BUFALINO
Only three people in the world
have one of these, and only one
of them is Irish. I have one.
Angelo. And now you.
(pause)
You know what this means.

Frank does. It’s as close to a made-man any

non-Italian will ever get.

FRANK
I don’t know what to say.

BUFALINO
Put it on. Let’s see if it fits.

Frank slips the ring on. It fits. Jerry Vale starts another song.

BUFALINO
There’s something else. It just
got out of hand with your friend.
Some people have a serious problem

“ ★★★★★
with him. Talk to your friend.
Tell him, it’s what it is.

THE FILM IS ELEGANTLY ADAPTED

Frank isn’t sure he heard right.

FRANK
It’s what it is?
BY STEVEN ZAILLIAN.
BUFALINO
Yeah. Talk to him.
It is about history’s unfailing knack for catching up.
FRANK
A weighty, contemplative work, but one that moves like lightning
I’ll do my best. You know and sporadically shakes with darkly comic amusement.”
yourself, Russ; he’s tough to talk to.

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