ABC/Disney Television Writing Fellowship

Thank you to all who came out last night and the really awesome words and support for HWAS. YOU GUYS ROCK.

FYI...
Frank Gonzalez and Ollie Ashtari-Larki from ABC will speak to the HWAS folks on 5/17 Mon. Email hollywoodwritersoffice@gmail.com if you haven't already gotten an invite.

As always, if you would like to approach a writer for a blog interview please let us know and keep an eye out here for notes posted from the ABC/Disney Television Writing Fellowship event in the event you're totally uncool and decide to miss the event! Repeated "event" three times. But anyways, just sayin', don't be uncool..

Next Mixer...

is May 6th @ Formosa Cafe. Email hollywoodwritersoffice@gmail.com for invite.

Just Checking In...

Watch your inbox for a new mixer should be coming up soon. As for the blog, let us know about any interviews that you would like to write for the blog. Email us at hollywoodwritersoff@gmail.com. In the meantime, we're also on twitter: http://twitter.com/hwoodwritersoff.

Videogames to Staffed Writer: Interview with Kira Snyder By Jeane Wong

Kira has been writing her whole life, in different forms. From working in the videogame industry and theatre world, Kira explains how she made the jump into her current form of writing-- on a staff of a television series. Currently Staff Writer on Eureka, Kira previously was Staff Writer on Moonlight and sold a pilot to Cartoon Network as part of their new live-action initiative.


JW: I see you started off in the theatre world. Did you want to act?


KS: I was a drama major in college. I started off wanting to be a stage actor but then I discovered writing. After graduating I worked in theatre doing a little bit of everything, writing and producing, teaching, directing, even backstage work like costumes and lighting. All that has been very helpful background for screenwriting, both as it informs my writing and during production.

Playwriting is a lot of fun and very rewarding. Developing a piece with a director and actors and hearing a live audience’s reaction to your work is a fantastic experience. In a city like Los Angeles with so many talented actors and a thriving theater community, it’s easier than you might think to get your work produced.


JW: Then later you worked in the gaming world, how does one apply and break into that industry as a writer?


KS: My main focus in games has been design -- I still do a little game consulting off and on -- but I’ve done a fair amount of writing as well. Like screenwriting, there isn’t one single path to becoming a game writer. Mine was ridiculously straightforward: I answered an ad on the Electronic Arts jobs site. The WGA has a Videogame Caucus and the International Game Developers Association has a Writing subgroup, both of which are great resources on how to break in. In general, game companies looking for writers want to see if you have credits, good samples, and an understanding of writing for interactive media.


JW: Do you need to be technical or have a technical background to write for games?


KS: Not necessarily, although it can help, just like understanding physical production can make you a better screenwriter. Some companies like BioWare may ask as part of the application process that you use their tools in submitting a writing sample.


JW: I know for all the people reading the HWAS blog here, they may have the writing samples but not the credentials but want to write everywhere they can. On a game, there are jobs that can be a stepping stone to being a writer? Like there are PAs in TV or movies?


KS: Not so much for writers. The videogame business is very competitive, like TV or film. It’s hard to find a way to break in. Game companies tend to hire writers on an as-needed basis for each specific project, and sometimes only from within, say there’s an artist or engineer who also writes and asks to try their hand at it. But if you have a good sample and love games, you can do your homework on a company and its projects and just apply, whether they have a listed opening for a writer or not. You never know.

More broadly speaking in games, though, there are entry-level jobs such as quality assurance tester and customer service. Being a game tester is not as glamorous or fun as it sounds, getting paid to play games all day, because you’re often playing the same small piece over and over and over looking for a particular glitch, but it’s a great way to learn the business and see firsthand what makes for good game design and an engaging player experience. I know a lot of people who started out as testers and worked their way up to producers and designers. A lot of companies hire interns too, and like TV and film there are schools where you can study game design and production. Many companies hire out of those programs.


JW: So I saw that you’re from the Bay area, what is your background growing up?


KS: Well, my Dad was in the Navy so we moved around a lot, but I mainly grew up in Virginia. I came out west to Stanford for undergrad, and got my Masters from NYU-Tisch in Interactive Telecommunications. Then I came back to Northern California for work. The Bay Area’s a major center of the videogame industry.


JW: Eventually when you moved down to LA, what was your break?


KS: I was writing TV specs on the side while working at Yahoo Games. I was familiar with the Warner Bros. TV Drama Writers Workshop but had never applied as I was not down here. When my job moved me down to LA, I applied to the Workshop with a Cold Case spec. I had a really great mentor during the program, Chris Mack, who’s an executive at WBTV and who now runs the Workshop. They sent my material to Moonlight, the executive producers met with me, and I was staffed. That was my first job in the industry.


JW: When you started writing TV, what from your background influenced your writing?


KS: From playwriting, I love rich characters and dialogue, and from games, I love action and other genre elements. Moonlight was a fun show to work on because we were able to tell a lot of different type of stories. The show had a detective mystery element, vampire lore and action, and this epic paranormal romance at its heart. It was not always the same story. It was a lot of fun to play around with those different themes.

It’s why I love Eureka as well. It tells cool sci fi stories, contains quirky comedy, and has deep and relatable character relationships at the center of the show. There are a lot of tools in our toolbox.


JW: When you were working on Moonlight, did you have any idea that vampires was going to be something as huge as it is now? Did you have any inkling that vampires were going to be this trendy?


KS: Vampires never really go out of style. But I think that when I was on Moonlight, we were ahead of the vampire curve. We had a really dedicated fan base. So that was a clue as to how many people out there respond to these types of stories.


JW: So what do you think of the vampire shows on the air?


KS: I like them a lot. I love True Blood. And Vampire Diaries is fun. And all of them are different, that’s one of the cool things with vampires, you can change up the mythology to create something that’s familiar but also your own.


JW: Going back to your writing, what does your writing portfolio look like?


KS: I have a Dexter spec. I have a couple of original drama pilots, a feature, a comic book script, my plays, and even a short story. My Veronica Mars is past its expiration date but depending on the show is still a good sample. At least that’s what my agent tells me... One thing I feel that I’m missing is a solid comedy sample, and I want to try a half-hour. Maybe a pilot, or a single-camera spec like Modern Family.


JW: A lot of people talk about high concept pilots now such like Dexter with its twist. What do you think of that in terms of building your portfolio?


KS: Writing a pilot is your chance to create something that is uniquely yours, and yes, sometimes the key is finding that high concept hook to stand out. One way to go for that is to explore a premise that is familiar but different: Dexter is about a guy who hunts serial killers... and is a serial killer himself. The X-Files is about FBI agents solving crimes... of a paranormal nature. But you shouldn’t feel limited in a pilot to some catchy high concept. Damages, Sons of Anarchy, and Breaking Bad are fantastic shows, but while their premises are great I’m not sure you’d call them high concept. With the growth of the scripted market in cable, there are so many places looking for shows that fit their specific voice, so you should feel free in a pilot to write what you want, even kooky, complicated, uncategorizable stuff. You can do anything.


JW: But some still find it difficult to create a world.


KS: It’s challenging, all the things you need to set up in a pilot. The world of the show, the characters and their relationships, and the story engine, because that is where all your episodes will come from. The engine’s easy to determine in some genres: on a doctor show, new stories come in the door every day. On a lawyer show, there are new cases. On a cop show, new crimes. In a sci fi show it might be the new planet you visit or adventure you embark on every week. The characters and their relationships are themselves an engine, and sometimes the only engine in character-driven shows. On Mad Men, the business of the ad agency and its clients is the source of many stories, but even more so are the relationships and politics between the people who inhabit that world. Every show needs that engine, or it’ll run out of stories.


At the end of the day your show’s really about the characters you create, and their relationships. I heard a panelist at a WGA seminar on pitching for TV say that essentially every show is a family show, which I think is a great insight. They’re all family shows! Whether it’s a metaphorical family of cops on The Shield or ad execs on Mad Men or a literal family as on Brother and Sisters or Modern Family.


JW: In terms of writers, who do you want to work with?


KS: That is a long list. Ron Moore. Jane Espenson. Shawn Ryan. Josh Schwartz. J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse. John Wells. Joss Whedon. I could go on…


JW: Any advice for writers applying to the WBTV Workshop, the ABC/Disney Fellowship, or similar programs?


KS: Well, first of all write and submit the best script you can, of course. In the interview stage, that old cliché “be yourself” applies. By that I mean not just avoiding being schmoozy or false, or putting on a personality that’s not yours. I’ve found that the people you’re meeting with are interested to hear what’s unique about you, what about your writing is coming from you and you alone. For me, people were intrigued with my theatre and videogaming background, and how I brought those experiences into my writing. Even the fact that I was a Navy kid and grew up all over the world was something people were interested in hearing about. So heading into these interviews it’s worth thinking about how you’ll bring fresh perspective to their program and the industry. It can be professional or life experiences -- in my year at the WBTV Workshop, there were a few people who had been lawyers, or had an unusual family -- or just your outlook.


JW: To wrap things up, once the writing is theoretically done, what did you do to put yourself out there? How did you go about and cultivate relationships as a writer?


KS: Well, I’m not the best at going out to big networking mixers. Some people get a lot out of those situations, but that kind of thing is really hard for me. I think the most effective networking is the kind you’re not even consciously doing. You get to know people naturally, through UCLA Extension classes or writing groups or jobs or side projects, and just stay in touch. The industry feels very big, but it really is a community. You’ll see the same people again and again as you move through your career, and people at your level will progress as you do, I’ve found. I’m still friends with my WBTV Workshop group, and over half of us are working screenwriters now.



Disney Fellowship Application

They just started calling Disney Fellowship applicants who have advanced to the next level this week. Good luck everyone!

CAA Mailroom to Staff Writer: An Interview with Kirill Baru

by Diana Peterson

I met Kirill when I was working as an assistant to a TV Packaging Agent at CAA. He was working in the mailroom. Kirill told me he graduated from UCLA. I felt an instant sense of alumni camaraderie. Later, he would tell me that he hadn’t attended UCLA. He’d been telling people that he went to different prestigious schools...USC, NYU...to prove a point: “If it’s a good story, it doesn’t matter. If it’s a good story, it doesn’t matter where you graduated.”

Kirill Baru and his writing partner Eric Zimmerman recently completed their first Staff Writing job on Comedy Central’s “Secret Girlfriend.”

DIANA PETERSON: How did you first get started in Hollywood?

KIRILL BARU: I was born in the Ukraine, but grew up in Chicago. When I was eighteen I moved out to LA to study screenwriting at Chapman University. It was a good school, but I wasn’t challenged at the time. I really wanted to be in the thick of things. I dropped out of Chapman after freshman year and started taking classes at Santa Monica College. I applied to USC, but didn’t get in. So I started moonlighting, going to SMC for classes during the day, and going to USC at night to take film classes, pretending to be a screenwriting student.

DP: Was this USC extension, or were you literally pretending to be a USC Screenwriting student?

KB: I was literally going to classes pretending to be a student. The teachers were asking for my ID number and I was making one up. They would say the ID number didn’t go through and I was like I’ll look into it. I met a lot of the friends that I have now from the screenwriting program. There were twelve people in the program and I was lucky number 13. So I did that for a year, going to USC and SMC...not paying for tuition but getting the education, and after that I decided to go to U of I and graduate for real before going back out to LA.

DP: How did your parents feel about all that?

KB: They’ve been very supportive of everything that I’ve done from day one and I don’t know what else I could ask for. So they let me go back to U of I and I was there for a year and a half. One of my best friends from high school was Eric Zimmerman and we decided that we were going to graduate U of I, come back to CA, me for the second time and him for the first, and try writing something together.

DP: From what I see now, it has worked out. How did your break happen?

KB: We were in love with the show “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.” The show covers every taboo and we thought, man, they really haven’t touched on AIDS. So we wrote the AIDS script and sent out query letters to managers and agents, getting back no response. Then one day, our third roommate at the time, Jake, got an email that the “It’s Always Sunny...” guys were doing a panel at USC. At this time I was working in the CAA mailroom. That day I was supposed to give our spec to my coworker Spencer. Only Spencer was sick that day, so I went to the USC panel with our script in my bag. At the panel, someone asked them if they were looking for new writers for season five and they said, “Yeah we are. We’re sick of writing everything ourselves. We’re overwhelmed by how much content we have to write.” So Eric and I turn to each other and we think, okay this is it. So we did what we’ve been told from day one at Chapman, USC...everywhere: “Do not just go up to a celebrity and give him a script.”

We put it in a manila envelope and walked up to Rob McElhenney. I said, “Hi Rob, we have a gift for you.” The teacher yelled at us. [We were going to get reprimanded, he thought we were USC students.] We thought Rob was going to throw it out, but either way the most that we’ve lost is thirty pages. The day that the writers’ strike ended I got a call from Rob. He said “We looked at your script and we loved it.” I had kind of a heart attack at this point. This is our favorite show on TV and we’re going in to interview.

So we went in for the “Sunny” interview, walked out and immediately got the call that they wanted another spec from us. Eric and I didn’t have another spec, but we said had an “Office” spec. “We have to go back to work right now, but can we email you something in six hours?” So we called in sick to work, and we did the best six hour office spec that you can think of. It’s not very good, but we sent it in to 3 Arts. And we got the call a week later. Rob said, Look guys, how old are you? And we say, we’re twenty-two. Look guys, you are young, you don’t have any experience and you’re funny, but we can’t hire you to be writers on the show. We already have a writers’ assistant, but if you want to just come in and be executive assistants to us, it’s a one man job but both of you can have it. We’ll pay you guys double what we’re willing to pay to have you guys around, learning how to run a show, and in the meantime all you’re going to do is get lunch for us. Other than that you’re going to write eight hours a day. So Eric and I were thought, “Hell yeah.” We got our own office and we started writing our own stuff and working on “Sunny.” We were on that for about a year and we were coming up with pilots. At the time, they were looking to get us to stay another year as their assistants, but we were hoping to get a show. At this point we had gotten an agent because someone at FX had given it to someone at Paradigm. At our one year mark, we got a call from Comedy Central, and so Eric and I weighed our options. Stay another year working on our favorite show with our favorite people, or go to this comedy central show where we would be staff writers. So we decided for the second time, to just dive into it, go for it and we went onto this comedy central show – “Secret Girlfriend,” which premieres in October.

DP: Did you get a script in at “Secret Girlfriend”?

KB: Yes. We even got a cameo in an episode. It was a great first job.

DP: I’m really impressed with your ability to put yourself out there. It’s something that I’ve struggled with a lot with in the past. How did you gain that skill?

KB: First time I ever put myself out there, I was interning at Adam Herz’s Universal shingle, Terra Firma Films. While I was there they started an emerging writers program. The way that you got into the program was you submit the first fifteen pages of the script and they decide if they like it or not. They even put up an ad in Variety that they were looking for script submissions. I was nervous about submitting, so I submitted under a fake name. A couple of weeks later, I asked the main assistant, “Have you made any decisions about the emerging writers program?” She said, “You know, everything we got sucks, except we got this one script by Michael Bloom.” Michael Bloom was my fake name. So Adam throws the script on my desk and says read this, tell me what you think. He put my own script on my desk and I’m sitting there sweating bullets. I went up to Adam’s office and admitted that I was the one who had submitted under the fake name. And he said, “That’s what you’ve got to do. Congratulations you’re in the writers program.” That was my first attempt. Doing stuff that could get you fired is really the stuff that helps you succeed. And if you get fired, they weren’t going to promote you to writer anyway.

It’s a matter of being assertive and knowing that you’re either valuable or expendable. There really is no grey area. It’s about gauging which you are, and if you’re expendable, it’s time to move on. And if you’re valuable, make the most of your situation.

DP: You have a background in improv and stand up comedy. How does this help you when working in a comedy writers’ room?

KB: One of the rules in improv is no matter what idea someone brings to the table, you must say yes and keep adding on top of that idea. I think there’s a lot of that there in television writing. In terms of standup, I feel I haven’t really conquered it yet. The difficulty in stand up is this – standup is really about finding your own voice. For me it’s been much easier to find my voice in other characters, than my own voice in myself. I think that has to do with conviction. If you’re a standup comic you have to be very confident in your persona, and what your view of the world is. I don’t know if it’s my age or my maturity, but I’m still questioning way too many things to have any concrete opinion on life.

DP: What’s it like working with a writing partner?

KB: I’ve known Eric since I was fourteen years old. We have a level of trust that is unparalleled. Anything can be said. No hard feelings. In terms of process, we sit down and start with: what kind of stories do we want to tell, where are we at in our lives? Eric and I are 24-year-olds. The big thing in our lives is that we chose a creative path in our lives. A lot of our friends that we grew up with did not. Who made the right choice? Trying to figure out world ideas. Do we believe in love? Do we believe in relationships? We have a big whiteboard. We write everything down and do an outline. When it comes to writing we write together. Most writing partners split everything up. I own a projector so I project onto the wall in my bedroom and one of us sits at the keyboard while the other paces. Every single word is discussed.

DP: What advice do you have for aspiring writers thinking about moving to Los Angeles?

KB: It’s hard, but the prospect of succeeding is exciting. If that overwhelms your fear then you should be here. There’s always fear. There’s fear now. We’re not professors. We don’t have tenure. My best advice is to just come out here. Taking classes is always a good idea. Go to UCLA extension, UCB, Groundlings. Surround yourself with people who you think you can learn from, like-minded people, not people that are going to drag you down.

DP: What final words do you have for your career so far?

KB: I should have listened to my mom and just become a doctor.