Free Fire Zone: A Playwright's Adventures on the Creative Battlefields of Film, TV, and Theater - Softcover

Rebeck, Theresa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1575252406 ISBN 13: 9781575252407

Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc, 2007

Synopsis

Theresa Rebeck s career has hopscotched between the Off-Broadway successes of plays such as Spike Heels, The Family of Mann, and View of the Dome, to award winning work writing and producing network television such as NYPD Blue, to writing screenplays for independent and studio features. This writer s guide is both a discussion of the writer s craft and a no-holds-barred discussion of the politics in the movie, television, and theater worlds. Rebeck writes, Someone once asked me, What advice would you give to young writers who wanted to go into show business? And I answered, almost without thinking, Tell all of them to go back and reread Machiavelli. In a series of hilarious and provocative discussions covering all aspects of dramatic writing, Rebeck attempts to address what she considers both of a writer s primary concerns how to tell a story with truth and vision and how to maneuver as a dramatic writer in a dangerous world.

About this title

About the Author

In television, Ms. Rebeck has written for Dream On, Brooklyn Bridge, L.A. Law, Maximum Bob, First Wave, Third Watch, and NYPD Blue, where she also worked as a producer. In 2004 she wrote and executive produced a television pilot for Warner Bros/CBS, "The Webster Report," directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and starring Stanley Tucci. In film, she has written the screenplay for Kalamazoo, an independent short starring Wallace Shawn and Adrienne Shelley. Other produced features include Harriet the Spy, Gossip, and the independent feature Sunday on the Rocks.

Rebeck’s awards include the Mystery Writer’s of America’s Edgar Award, the Writer’s Guild of America award for Episodic Drama, the Hispanic Images Imagen Award, and the Peabody, all for her work on NYPD Blue. She has been a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn prize twice, won the National Theatre Conference Award (for The Family of Mann), and was awarded the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award in 2003.

Reviews

Many playwrights aspire to big money in TV, while many TV writers covet the artistic satisfaction only the stage seems to afford. Rebeck has worked in both the pressure-cooker world of Law and Order and L.A. Law and the slightly less pressured precincts of non-Broadway theater. Omnium Gatherum, the wise, witty meditation on the post-9/11 world that she wrote with Alexandra Gersten Vassilaros, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Still alive, nevertheless, she tells about it all in a delightful hybrid of soap-box harangue, memoir, and young writers' primer that may satisfy those wanting to learn about the craft of writing and those looking for dirt about life in la-la Land. Rebeck's riffs on the structures of well-made plays and TV episodes and the rewards and difficulties of working for various media should gratify aspiring writers. Meanwhile, as might be expected of the author of the hilarious play The Family of Mann, about off-camera backstabbing on a TV series, her trenchancy about surviving and thriving in L. A. will amuse and enlighten all comers. Helbig, Jack

Edition details

• Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1575252406
• ISBN 13: 9781575252407
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224