Well, we finally did it! From 2:30PM-6:30PM yesterday my friend and co-organizer, Noah Rosen, and I hosted a series of entertainment industry panels geared towards assistants who want to work in television and transition to writing full time. Per the previous posts, we had a panel with execs, a manager, and an agent —- “Navigating Your Writing Career” which I moderated. Next we had Noah’s panel, “Writers’ Room Support Staff” with script coordinators, writers’ assistants, and showrunner’s assistants. Finally, we had “Running the Show” aka the showrunner’s panel moderated by writer Julia Prescott.
I’ll be working on the recordings of the panels to share here and elsewhere. But in the meantime, I wanted to get my thoughts down fresh from the event. Things I learned… Showrunners have a total love-hate relationship with their job. There are so many challenges and difficulties and philosophical dilemmas (creatively driven) for them day in and day out. Our audience Q&A finally pulled out of them what they loved about their jobs, and once they got talking about it, it was like a whole new side of them opened up. Clearly they have thick personal shields and years of cynic-making experience though.
Nuggets of wisdom: (Courtney Kemp - Showrunner of Power) there are three things that come into play in this industry if you want to succeed, and you need at least two of them. First, great personality. Second, talent. Third, insane work ethic. If you have great work ethic and talent but a terrible personality, you will be successful enough that people will want to collaborate with you regardless. If you are a pleasure to work with and work extremely hard and reliably, but aren’t inherently a massively talented writer, they will want to help get you there, and so on.
From Henry Luehrmann, a drama executive at Amazon, he said at every meeting RE: a submitted project, they ask a certain set of questions. Why this story? Why are you the best writer for this story? And is this the best time in your career as a writer to tell this story?
From the writers’ room support staff: be bold. Find creative ways to get jobs. Then, find bold ways to pitch your stuff to the writers, and if the showrunner doesn’t want to hear your pitch - wait till he or she is out of the room and make it known to the writers that you want to help them. And make it known that you’re always writing. This was totally supported by the showrunners panel too. Also, always be asking questions — good creative questions that make you a better writer and make it clear that you are eager.
Personal lessons, it’s fun to moderate! Moderate every panel that you can. Also, the universe works in mysterious ways. We originally had three showrunners lined up, when it turned out that Courtney Kemp was working in her office across the street and heard about the panel from a showrunner buddy, Kelly Souders, (and also that her writers’ assistant Charles was participating on a previous panel) - and she straight up volunteered to join the panel 5 minutes before. And to be honest, she became the soul of the panel. She clearly cares a lot about mentorship and helping those below her to break in. More boring personal lessons: give yourself more time for clean-up, more volunteers is better than less volunteers, always have snacks for security and building managers the day-of as a thank you, an hour is the perfect max length for a panel (especially with a 10 min audience Q&A included after 50 minutes of conversation).
More to come soon!