Continuing On For One Final Year at SFUAD

Sadly, Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD) has announced its closure in 2018. With the academic year having recently concluded, I’ve been asked to stay on as a full-time professor in The Film School (where I’ve been teaching since 2009) for one final year — to ensure that seniors finish their BFA degree program.

I’m tremendously proud of the initiatives we launched and cultivated during my time at SFUAD: Outdoor Vision Fest® (OVF) and Shoot the Stars!®. OVF, of course, spun off into an astonishing number of directions, and had a real, long-lasting impact in Santa Fe and beyond.

Shoot the Stars!® Season 4

As a screenwriting professor, my first priority is providing undergraduates a taste of the process of story development and screenwriting. If all goes well, at least some of those students will find a path into the world of media creation and will always know about some of the challenges and hurdles of screenwriting (rather than thinking any idiot can write a screenplay); a much smaller number may be involved in the development process or even be writing scripts themselves.

“Writing for Television” class

The Jackalope is  the official student-run online newspaper/magazine at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Once in awhile I show up in an article. Here’s a glimpse of what I do when in the classroom, which is a surprisingly secret little world when you think about it.

TV Drama Writing Panel Debrief

The December 5 panel about TV Drama Writing at the Santa Fe Film Festival had a nearly full house at the Jean Cocteau Cinema. Great stories shared about how our panelists got into the business of writing for dramatic television; great insights into why television has truly become the dominant storytelling medium of our time; and interesting walkthroughs of the development process for both limited event series and weekly episodic series.

Moderating TV Drama Writing Panel Sat., Dec.5

I’ll be moderating possibly the most high-powered panel about professional screenwriting in the history of Santa Fe, and certainly at the Santa Fe Film Festival — this Saturday, December 5, from 2:30-4pm at the Jean Cocteau Cinema. (You can hear me speak about the panel on KSFR-FM‘s “Cinema Scope” broadcast this Friday, 6:30pm MST. Stream it here.)

The panel is under the banner of Black Shirt Reads, an organization that has undertaken a series of unproduced screenplay table readings here in Santa Fe, employing some of the City Different’s best local talent. (They undertake their latest, Enchantment, at 1pm at the Cocteau — just prior to the panel.)

Back to (Film) School

When you’re a college professor, the summers go by in a blur — particularly when almost half the summer still pertains to all of the various Outdoor Vision Fest® extensions and permutations that have evolved, including OVF@Currents, OVF@ArtFeast, OVF@Hobbs and OVF@FantaseFest.

The rest of the summer was dedicated to a couple of under-wraps script projects — and here we are in the Fall already, halfway through the semester’s multiple screenwriting courses that I teach, and deep into Season 4 of The Film School‘s Shoot the Stars!® initiative.

From London With Love

Americans in London: writing partner Frank De Palma on the far left, and Terry Borst (in plaid shirt) third from the left. Producer Stuart Doughty immediately to the right of Borst, along with the other UK staffers. Bugs writing staff, Fall 1997, London.

From the vaults on #tbt: a photo of me in the Bugs writers’ room in the offices of Carnival Films: London, Fall 1997. (it’s amazing what you stumble across in cleaning out the garage.)

Bugs was something of a cross between the old TV series Mission Impossible and The Avengers. You can get the full story on my participation in Bugs here.

Clearly, diversity in the writers’ room wasn’t the highest priority on Bugs, but hey! — at least we were multi-national. I’m very proud of the work we did on the show: within its genre confines, it was known for being witty and brainy. (Those are adjectives I can live with.)

Though airing only briefly in the States in the early days of the Starz channel, the show was a BBC staple in the late ’90s and was syndicated in dozens of countries: it continues to play to this day…