Spotlight Interview: TV Script Writer/Screenwriter Jennifer Heath/Part 3 of 3

Jennifer Heath/TV Script Writer/Screenwriter

In 1992, as a staff writer for one of the all-time great TV sit-coms, “Roseanne,” Jennifer Heath was Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing in a Comedy Series.

This was around two years after Heath and fellow 20-something Amy Sherman, whose father was a Catskills comedian, began collaborating on TV scripts after a chance meeting in an improvisational comedy class at the famous Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles.

“We were two short, Jewish, annoying women that no one wanted to deal with, so we dealt with each other," Sherman once told a magazine.

The duo, with no professional writing experience, shockingly landed fulltime-writing gigs on Roseanne soon after the temperamental star suddenly fired her entire staff.

“She needed female writers and we were cheap,” Sherman said in a recent print interview.

Since Roseanne, Heath has co-created two other TV comedy series, “Mr. Rhodes” and “Dave’s World,” sold screenplays to Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal and Miramax, and had a feature film, “Ella Enchanted,” hit theatres in 2004; Sherman (now Sherman-Palladino) went on to write scripts for “Veronica’s Closet” and create the wonderful TV series, the “Gilmore Girls.”

To find out more, check out:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0372659/
Click here

The following is the third and final part of my exclusive newsletter interview with Ms. Heath:

Mike: How often do writers send you stuff?

Heath: All the time. I read a lot. And a lot of them are asking for advice.

The truth is, 90 percent of it is crap. I read a lot of crap. And I hate telling people that their stuff is crap. But, then again, amazingly, a lot of crap gets bought. So who am I to judge? Maybe someone else will love it.

I’m still waiting for that day when someone will send me something and I say to myself, "Oh, my god. I want to produce this."

Mike: What kind of script captures your eye immediately?

Heath: One that keeps moving, is well written, highly creative, and possesses good, interesting dialogue.

Mike: What quickly turns you off to a script?

Heath: If I don’t know what it’s all about in the first 10 minutes, I won’t read anymore.

Mike: What’s the biggest error a novice makes?

Heath: Exclamation points every other sentence.

Mike: What’s some advice you’ve been given?

Heath: Honestly, I never got any advice. I just started by saying to myself one day that I wanted to write a “Seinfeld” episode. I thought, "I’m just going to write this thing and write it for myself. I don’t have to show it to anybody. And if I don’t like it, big deal." It gave me total freedom to do whatever I wanted and not be concerned with what people thought of it.

Mike: When do you write?

Heath: When I feel inspired and only then. That’s why I like collaboration so much. You can inspire each other, feed off the other person. If one isn’t inspired, the other might be.

Mike: What’s your secret to success?

Heath: I happen to be naturally funny. Nothing more complicated than that.

Mike: How would you sum up your writing life?

Heath: It’s a good life, but if you’re having a bad year, it can be a scary life. There are times when you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, my god, I’m done. I’m not talented. I’ve been fooling everybody all this time. I’ll never work again. My luck is over. Oh, my god!”

That’s why I still play the lottery. I buy my ticket every week hoping I can win and just walk away from all this.

Spotlight Interview: TV Script Writer/Screenwriter Jennifer Heath/Part 2

Jennifer Heath/TV Script Writer/Screenwriter

In 1992, as a staff writer for one of the all-time great TV sit-coms, “Roseanne,” Jennifer Heath was Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing in a Comedy Series.

This was around two years after Heath and fellow 20-something Amy Sherman, whose father was a Catskills comedian, began collaborating on TV scripts after a chance meeting in an improvisational comedy class at the famous Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles.

“We were two short, Jewish, annoying women that no one wanted to deal with, so we dealt with each other," Sherman once told a magazine.

The duo, with no professional writing experience, shockingly landed fulltime-writing gigs on Roseanne soon after the temperamental star suddenly fired her entire staff.

“She needed female writers and we were cheap,” Sherman said in a recent print interview.

Since Roseanne, Heath has co-created two other TV comedy series, “Mr. Rhodes” and “Dave’s World,” sold screenplays to Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal and Miramax, and had a feature film, “Ella Enchanted,” hit theatres in 2004; Sherman (now Sherman-Palladino) went on to write scripts for “Veronica’s Closet” and create the wonderful TV series, the “Gilmore Girls.”

To find out more, check out:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0372659/
Click here

The following is the second part of my exclusive newsletter interview with Ms. Heath:

Mike: What do you think you need to be a great writer for a TV show?

Heath: I think you have a good shot as long as you have an ear for dialogue. You have to know how people talk in real life—unless you’re writing some very stylized Mamet type of stuff. And, for comedy, you have to have an inherent sense of humor, and know what’s funny.

Mike: Is there a fine line between stalking people in the business and merely being aggressive?

Heath: Yes, it’s a very fine line. And you better find that line or you’ll turn people off.

Mike: Do you think you would’ve been read without an agent?

Heath: No. You must have an agent.

Mike: How does one find a reputable agent?

Heath: Call the Writers Guild, get a list of all the licensed literary agents, and send your script to all of them saying you’re a new writer and here’s a sample. You probably aren’t going to get read by the big ones.

Mike: What about agents stealing your ideas?

Heath: If you’re worried about that, you can register it with the Writers Guild. I think it’s about $20 to do that. But for someone who’s brand new and doesn’t have representation yet, I think registering your work is a must. If you have an agent and your agent is sending it out, then I don’t think you need to register it. My agent makes those meetings and he’s only going to reputable people, so I never get my work registered.

I’ve had some friends who got screwed on a movie, because they didn’t register their work. My friends submitted material to a company for a movie. And there were no computer records, no records of sending it.

Mike: What was Roseanne like?

Heath: She’s a very talented woman. She’s hysterical. She knew her job. And she was very likeable on the show.

Mike: What were the challenges working for that show?

Heath: The hours, the hours, the hours. We worked from 10 in the morning to 2, 3, 4 in the morning, seven days a week. Very, very hard hours. It was exhausting. After awhile, you simply get used to not getting any sleep. You just have to plough through it.

Mike: What movie genres are hot right now?

Heath: Comedies and horror movies. Comedies always make money and horror is cheap to make.

Mike: What advice could you offer to an aspiring writer?

Heath: I would say that if you want to write for this business, you have to first write two specs, submit them people, and get them read. Amy and I found a unique avenue for someone to see our stuff. For us, it came through traffic school. Sometimes it’s through a friend of a friend who’s in the business. Just keep writing material and push hard to get it read. That’s all you can do.

I’d also suggest that before you show your work to an agent, give it to some people you respect, people who will be honest with you. You don’t want to send something really bad to an agent. It’ll be harder to get them to read the next thing. You’ll have tainted your rep. And make sure to not have typos. I know this sounds crazy, but I can’t tell you how pissed off I am when I get a script that has a lot of typos. I won’t read it, as I won’t read one that has a lot of grammatical errors. If a writer doesn’t know the difference between "your" and "you’re," I will literally throw the script in the trash. I can’t stand it.

And when you send it to an agent or someone else of influence in the business, write a good cover letter that’s not funny or cute or pushy. And be patient. Things take a long time to read. I’ve given my own agent things to read and three months later he hasn’t read it. It’s not acceptable to send something to an agent and call a week later to ask if it’s been read.

Another thing you can do, if you don’t want to waste your time and postage and the cost of the printing the material, call an agency and ask if they will read unsolicited material.

For young or inexperienced writers, they need to get some sample scripts, see how they’re structured, how the first act works, how the second act works, where the middle of the movie is.

In fact, no matter what experience you have, you need to read, read, and read.

If you want to write thrillers, read Silence of the Lambs—that’s a beautifully written script, well plotted with terrific tension and pacing. If you want to write sit-coms, read the scripts from “Friends” and “Frazier.”

Look at what’s really successful, what’s really good, and try to duplicate it. (By the way, you have to pick up the screenplay for “The Sting,” written by David Ward. It is pure genius, with absolutely brilliant plotting.)

And read screenwriting books, such as Syd Field’s, which teaches you the basic rules and that something needs to happen in the first 10 minutes.

Because, until you are Quentin Tarantino and have the genius to write “Pulp Fiction,” which breaks all the rules by having this weird back-and-forth-in-time construction, stick to conventional storytelling.

It’s also always a good idea to have a screenwriting software program, so your formatting is correct.

And be persistent—but be honest with yourself.

It’s like I watch American Idol and I say to myself, “Do these people really think they could sing?” You have to be realistic. If you’re not a good writer, if you don’t think you have talent, don’t bother. It’s too hard a business if you’re not good.

The Spotlight Interview: TV Script Writer/Screenwriter Jennifer Heath/Part 1

The Spotlight InterviewJennifer Heath/TV Script Writer/Screenwriter

In 1992, as a staff writer for one of the all-time great TV sit-coms, “Roseanne,” Jennifer Heath was Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing in a Comedy Series.

This was around two years after Heath and fellow 20-something Amy Sherman, whose father was a Catskills comedian, began collaborating on TV scripts after a chance meeting in an improvisational comedy class at the famous Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles.

“We were two short, Jewish, annoying women that no one wanted to deal with, so we dealt with each other," Sherman once told a magazine.

The duo, with no professional writing experience, shockingly landed fulltime-writing gigs on Roseanne soon after the temperamental star suddenly fired her entire staff.

“She needed female writers and we were cheap,” Sherman said in a recent print interview.

Since Roseanne, Heath has co-created two other TV comedy series, “Mr. Rhodes” and “Dave’s World,” sold screenplays to Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal and Miramax, and had a feature film, “Ella Enchanted,” hit theatres in 2004; Sherman (now Sherman-Palladino) went on to write scripts for “Veronica’s Closet” and create the wonderful TV series, the “Gilmore Girls.”

To find out more, check out:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0372659/
Click here

The following is the first part of my exclusive newsletter interview with Ms. Heath:

Mike: How did you get your start writing professionally?

Heath: Actually, it was pretty much by accident. My goal was never to be a writer, but an actress. But I needed to make money and I partnered up with another actress I met, Amy, to start writing a two-woman play for ourselves, because we weren’t getting hired. It didn’t go very well, and we finally said, “To hell with it,” and began writing a little spec script together for a “Roseanne” episode.

At the time, I was, strangely enough, teaching something called “Comedy Traffic School” in L.A. on the weekends (which simply was a funny version of traffic school for people who got tickets but didn’t want to lose points off their license) and also working as a waitress. Well, as luck would have it, it just so happens that a guy in my class was a major development executive in the TV business, which I found out when I’d go around the room asking people what they did for a living.

I eventually said to the guy, “Ok, I have your home address and I’m going to come to your house unless you read my Roseanne script.” I was being aggressive but I was kidding, of course.

The thing is, it’s very difficult to get people in the business to read stuff, and they don’t want to read stuff, because most of the stuff is crap.

But, believe it or not, one day after class, he told me he would read it. And he really did! And he said it was great and needed another one, written for another popular half-hour sit-com, that one could be a fluke and he wanted another sample.

So my friend and I wrote another script, this time for another popular show at the time called “Anything But Love,” which starred Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis.

We both liked Richard very much.

It ended up that TV executive said he knew a lot of top agents and we could use his name at the biggest agencies in town, like the William Morris Agency and CAA and ICM.

Then I met another guy in traffic school, a producer on another TV show, and he let us write a freelance episode.

The truth is, before that one play and that one spec script, I’d never written anything in my life—that is, other than for the school newspaper. I mean, really nothing. And I never studied writing either, to this day. I learned by looking at other scripts.

Call it beginner’s luck, my innate talent for being funny, who knows what it was. But with those two specs, we got an agent at William Morris and in a matter of months got on Roseanne as staff writers—which was a miracle, since we were completely brand new to the business.

There were 15 guys and us two girls on the staff. We were referred to as the “Go-Gos,” had an office with a pinball machine and everything. It was a dream come true.

I was there for two years before they didn’t renew me.

Mike: Talking about that, what about the high rejection rate in your business?

Heath: You have to deal with it almost every day and have to adopt an attitude of not caring about it. It’s part of the deal. It’s like dating. It doesn’t work, so you move on. I’ve gone up for many jobs and didn’t get them. It’s never fun. It’s never nice to be rejected. And it’s especially disappointing when it’s a job you really wanted. You have to just say to yourself, "Ok, what’s next?”

There are always ups and downs, and freelance work is especially hard. It’s feast or famine. You make a lot of money one year and none the rest. And I have no answer for the difficulty of getting read.

Since Roseanne, I haven’t had a regular job, but I’ve written a lot of screenplays. I sold one to Warner, two to Miramax, one to Paramount, one to Universal, and two to Disney. We’re still hoping to have them made into movies.

But the fact is the percentage of having your work made into a movie is very low. It’s very frustrating. Sometimes a director wants to do it, but the studio that owns it won’t let it go.

You can wait years and years and years for something to happen, and sometimes the writer tries to buy the thing back.

Still, a lot of people make a very good living just selling screenplays that never get made into movies. The minimum is around $70,000 for a screenplay, but you could make as much as a million dollars. It depends on your reputation and how strong the material is and how many studios want it.

You can also make money doing re-write work and script doctoring of existing material (which is quite lucrative, though you won’t get a screen credit; Carrie Fisher has made a ton of money script doctoring).