Film Courage: I think you’ve said 20 percent of all writers are really good and 10 percent are great?
Kelly Edwards, Staff Writer, Author, Producer: That’s what I saw when I was doing the HBO Access Program. Every year we had about 3,500 submissions to our writers program and when we did the math we found that 20 percent of those writers were all good, they were good. 80 percent of them were probably just not ready but 20 percent were good. Any of those 20 percent could or should be working in the business and they came from everywhere, all demographics. Ten percent were really good, ten percent were all people who were very worthy of being in the program. It’s not that the talent’s not there, the talent’s there and I wonder, and I’ve actually had conversations with people before about this, you just wonder if again the access is the barrier to entry. If there’s going to be some part of that, some piece of that that’s going to be a fraction of those people who won’t work in a writer’s room. They’re probably feature writers or their interest is someplace different or they want to do animation (we didn’t do animation at the time) or they wanted to do children’s and we need to do children. There may be other factors that count them out or they’re emotionally not ready to take that next step which is a very valid thing and I applaud anybody who understands that about themselves. But of that 10 percent, those people again come from everywhere. They come in all ages and all genders and you just wonder how many of those people are out there in the world who just don’t have…(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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