Kate Montgomery: Writing for the Small Screen – Craft Original and Engaging Content for TV and the Web

5 Tuesdays, February 21 – March 21, 7-9:30pm
$275 members/$295 non-members   
Testimonials for Kate

Some of the best storytelling these days can be found on the “small screen”.

Award-winning dramas like Game of Thrones, House of Cards, and Breaking Bad feature complex characters in multi-layered stories and the production quality is truly cinematic. Comedies like Modern Family, Veep, and High Maintenance not only make us laugh. They successfully challenge some of our more counterproductive political traditions and cultural stereotypes.

“There’s never been a better time to break into the industry,” says instructor Kate Montgomery. “The traditional gatekeepers are no longer calling all the shots. Some of our best new sitcoms have started out as low budget indies on YouTube, and social media has created a solid market for storytelling that genuinely engages us.”

In this course, through a combination of lectures, hand-outs, screenings, discussions, writing exercises, and other class activities, you’ll discover the difference between an A story and a B story, find out who a “show runner” is, and experience how a writer’s room works. We’ll also explore a creature that inhabits one of the web’s hottest new spawning grounds: the artful and elusive sketch comedy.

We’ll read and study successful pilots in various genres and formats, and analyze what makes them each so entertaining. You’ll learn how to craft a set of characters who are familiar yet original, how to weave their storyline into an engaging and compelling arc, and how to package all this into a professional Series Bible and Season Outline.

Kate Montgomery wrote, directed and produced the Sundance indie feature Christmas in the Clouds, which won top honors at festivals in Austin, Santa Fe, Vancouver, Philadelphia and Ft. Lauderdale, and endorsements from Oprah Winfrey & Roger Ebert. She executive produced the micro-indie, Ever Since the World Ended, which won at the SF Indie Fest and the London Sci-Fi Film Festival. She has optioned & sold screenplays to producers and studios in the US, Canada and UK, and works for hire as a script editor and production consultant. Her current feature projects include the Italian romantic comedy Pane Vine, and the western Stealing Lily, for which she also wrote the adaptation.