To celebrate turning 40, alumna Kellen Hertz applied for The Writers Lab. She decided not to be afraid that her age can often be linked with unemployment in the film industry, she said.
Funded by Meryl Streep, The Writers Lab is a program that attempts to combat the sexism and ageism issues in Hollywood. The lab gives 12 female screenwriters over 40 years old the opportunity to improve their submitted scripts on a narrative and commercial level by working with eight mentors, including a UCLA alumna and former administrator.
After the program was revealed last April at the Tribeca Film Festival, applicants submitted their screenplays. The 12 winners, including Hertz, were announced on August 10.
“I think they were really surprised by how much interest there was – something like over 3,500 scripts were submitted,” Hertz said. “It’s harder to get into one of these things than it is to get into Harvard.”
The mentors, who are a mix of female screenwriters and producers, will meet one-on-one with Hertz and the other selected screenwriters at the lab, which will be held from Sept. 18 to 20 in New York. The program is a collaborative effort between the New York Women in Film and Television, or NYWIFT, the IRIS film collective and the Writers Guild of America East.
For the lab, Hertz submitted her film script “Ashburn,” a romantic thriller set in Mexico that was inspired by Henry James’ “The Aspern Papers.” Because she wrote the script within a span of a few months, Hertz said she partly applied to see how far it would go and gauge how good it was.
“It’s very difficult to get your work read by people that can make something happen for you by either giving you a job, or taking your script and trying to get it made,” Hertz said. “For me (applying) was about having the opportunity to do that.”
In addition to getting feedback from mentors at the lab, Hertz said she also hopes to get some leads that will eventually turn into “Ashburn” being produced.
“I’m hoping that a producer will read it and say ‘Michael Fassbender would love to play this part,'” Hertz said. “I hope they can get it to talent, the people who will really respond to the material, and we can get it together and go to Mexico for three weeks to make the movie.”
While the lab is a step towards opening more doors for this older generation of female screenwriters, Hertz said she thinks there needs to be more publicity around the lack of opportunity women face when it comes to writing.
In graduate school, when she wrote a dark comedy featuring women using foul language and performing sexual acts as bribes, Hertz said her classmates commented that women wouldn’t be as dirty or aggressive as the way she had written them in her story.
“We’re often put in genre boxes,” Hertz said. “There were all these judgments and I think that continues in terms of employment like ‘Women can only write romantic comedies or weepy dramas with female leads,’ and that’s actually not true.”
Richard Walter, head of the MFA in Screenwriting program, said he often hears certain scripts can only be written by a woman.
“I encourage people who place a high value in diversity to ask them, ‘Tell me what script a woman is not suited to write,'” Walter said.
In addition to sexism, writer and School of Theater, Film and Television lecturer Linda Voorhees said she sees many students middle-aged and older in the Professional Program in Screenwriting at UCLA, struggling with ageism in Hollywood.
“These students have the same ability as the 20-something-year-old sitting next to them, but because of the category of generation and decade that they are in, the doors aren’t open for them,” Voorhees said.
Generational tells such as names, clothing and features like wrinkles or grey hair all create obstacles for these older writers that can trigger a rejection from potential employers in Hollywood, Voorhees said.
“When your manager sends you to a meeting and you show up wearing Dockers instead of skinny jeans, that’s something that can force the bias to surface,” Voorhees said.
When it comes to writers, Voorhees said while any office in Hollywood will claim to be pro-female or pro-diversity, the same can’t be said for accepting the older generation. She said The Writers Lab is an unprecedented move to focus on the issue of age.
“The day (the lab) came out, I had so many women call me,” Voorhees said. “It told me how hungry we are for a chance to showcase our talents and to say, ‘We still have stories, scripts, shows and movies we want to get made – we’re not done.’”