Film Courage: How do you follow a character’s journey through their emotion and not through plot points?
Kelly Edwards, Staff Writer, Author, Producer: A lot of that has to do with when you’re figuring out what you want to say. I think it depends on if you’re doing TV or film. With a film you obviously have a major dramatic question they’re going to answer by the end. Either they’re going to get what they want or they don’t get what they want. In television you’re obviously doing it over a longer stretch of time and there may be mechanisms if you’re doing streaming versus broadcast. Either way, you want that person to have to learn that lesson over and over and over again on the comedy side.
On the drama side, it’s going to be week-to-week, you’re going to keep doing the same thing essentially. On the streaming side sometimes there is an endpoint. Look at Queen’s Gambit, there’s a feature structure underneath that and so she gets to the end of her want. When you’re figuring the character, you need to figure out who your character is. What I do as a practice is I do a character aria which I think other people have different ways of talking about this…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
SEE THE BOOK ON AMAZON – The Executive Chair: A Writer’s Guide to TV Series Development by Kelly Edwards
BIO:
As HBO and WarnerMedia’s SVP of Talent Development for seven years, Kelly Edwards oversaw all of the emerging artists programs for HBO, HBOMax, and Turner, both domestic and abroad. Edwards’s career spans both television and film, having served as a key corporate diversity executive at Comcast/NBCUniversal and a creative executive for both film director Garry Marshall and producer Laura Ziskin. After moving to television, she spent six years as a senior executive at Fox, where she developed Living Single, Clueless, and The Wild Thornberrys. As SVP of Comedy Development at UPN, she developed Girlfriends, The Parkers, and Malcolm in the Middle. Edwards also produced the movie of the week A Christmas Detour for Hallmark, and the one-hour drama series Sex, Love, and Secrets. She holds a BA in Theater from Vassar and an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson. Edwards has served on the Annenberg Inclusion Board, the UNCF Leadership Council, the ATAS Diversity committee, as a Trustee for NALIP, and is a 2019 Sundance Episodic Lab fellow. Kelly’s book The Executive Chair: A Writer’s Guide to TV Series Development is now available (via Michael Wiese Productions).
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