Good morning! Time for TVWriter™’s Monday look at our 5 most popular blog posts of the week ending yesterday. They are, in order:
Indie Video: Who Says a Public Service Announcement Can’t Pull Your Heartstrings?
Category: By TVWriter.Com
Working At What We Love Department:
We’re playing with tweets this week because why not?
“Is #TVwriting as hard as TV writers say? Or as easy as it looks?” Let’s put it this way: Nothing’s ever as easy as it looks #showbiz pic.twitter.com/97ZjroaJ8U
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We don’t accept ads here on TVWriter™ but we do like,
respect, and recommend InkTip as a place to get your spec scripts, including pilots, out to the public. So, yeah, what follows is not an ad. We mean, like absolutely not:
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TVWriter™ Don’t-Miss Posts of the Week – September 11, 2017
Good morning! Time for TVWriter™’s Monday look at our 5 most popular blog posts of the week ending yesterday. They are, in order:
Jenji Kohan’s Hot Provocations
Jenji Kohan, creator of Orange is the New Black and Weeds, plus a ton of other (mostly) TV comedy hits, has a lot to say about TV, the TV biz, and the place of women in that particular workplace. Her story is one we should all know, regardless of gender and all those other diversity, um divergences:
by Emily Nussbaum
Devon Shepard met Jenji Kohan, the creator of “Orange Is the New Black” and “Weeds,” twenty-four years ago, when they were writers for the NBC sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Shepard, a former standup comedian, got into the business serendipitously, after he clowned on a square producer at a black barbershop in Los Angeles. Kohan, who had recently graduated from Columbia, was a rung down from Shepard—a “baby writer,” in Hollywood lingo. But “she was fun, a whole lot of energy, a sponge,” he said. Kohan wanted to learn dominoes—the “loud and outrageous” street version—and they began playing bones in an office they shared, trading stories about growing up black in South Central and Jewish in Beverly Hills. “I made the room cool,” Shepard said. “People were, like, ‘What’s going on in there?’ ”
This was in 1993, a year after the L.A. riots, and at “Fresh Prince,” which starred Will Smith as a Philly street kid sent to live with rich relatives, the writers’ room was a toxic mess. The staff—which included Smith’s bodyguard and his cousin—kept crazy hours and fought non-stop. There were cruel pranks: someone peed in a colleague’s bottle of tequila. Kohan was one of two female writers, and the only white woman. Her nickname was White Devil Jew Bitch. Shepard was one of her few allies.