October 13, 2012, Saturday - Out of the Box and into Your Head: A Look at Television Writing, Then & Now at The Loft
Tme: 2:00pm
Location: The Loft, Performance Hall, 1011 Washington Avenue South
Out of the Box and into Your Head: A Look at Television Writing, Then & Now
Television writing, from the sublime to the ridiculous, has shaped our experience of America. In the course of its nearly 60 year history, the "cool" medium has acted as both social commentary and comic relief for one of the most heterogeneous societies in history, and this presentation will attempt to come to general terms with its specific effects. From the first Golden Age of Chayefsky, Vidal and Foote to the New Golden Age of Chase and Simon and Milch, TV writers have used the intimacy of this homebound medium to do what Zola and Dickens once did, provoke empathy for "the Other." The medium's great clowns, Kovacs and Berle, Simon and Gelbart kept us laughing, even through the tears of the post-war era, and all of these scribes have taught us more than we might imagine about democracy's heart, mind, body and soul.
Stephen Molton is a professor of television writing and producing at Long Island University's TV Writers Studio MFA program in Brooklyn. An author, screenwriter, producer and former HBO and Showtime executive, Molton has written books (Brave Talk, Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros and the Politics of Murder), created mini-series and movies (Live By the Sword, Weaveworld, Stealth) and produced documentaries (L.A. Homefront: The Fires Within, Generation 9/11) during his 35-year career in the arts.
This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP by emailing Mandy Leung at mleung@loft.org.