Success Stories: Laura Brennan
Success Story: Laura Brennan
Award-winning writer Laura Brennan gives the Scriptwriters Network high praise. "The Scriptwriters Network launched my career," she writes. "Winning the Carl Sautter opened doors and convinced me to move out here. Even my first day job in Los Angeles came from a Network referral. I wouldn't have a career today if not for the Scriptwriters Network."
Laura Brennan has written extensively for stage, screen and television. After graduating cum laude from Yale University, she decided to become a starving artist as a founding member of The Open Door Theater Company. There, she wrote and directed numerous plays, helped launch the company's ground-breaking educational program, and lived in everything from a former brothel to a current convent. The highlight of her years with Open Door was when she met her husband while auditioning him for the role of her lover in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Laura has worked on a variety of television series, including a PBS news and current affairs show where she won several national awards for political journalism. After winning the Scriptwriters Network's Carl Sautter Memorial Screenwriting Competition, Laura began writing for action-adventure television and worked steadily on such shows as Highlander: The Raven, The Lost World (where she held an executive position with the Action Adventure Network), and the Sci-Fi Channel production, The Invisible Man. Her original murder mystery series, Whodunit, was developed by PAX-TV, and she has had half a dozen other series concepts optioned, including the medical drama, The Clinic, and the children's series, Queen Augusta's Heroes.
In the feature world, she adapted a series of vampire novels for NY-based Gotham Beach Entertainment and has just finished a quirky horror film for Windchill Films. Optioned and as-yet-unmade features range from the indie thriller Lost to the romantic comedy First Kiss -- in which, surprisingly, no one was eaten by a dinosaur or had their head lopped off with a broadsword.
In addition to the Carl Sautter, Laura has won over a dozen other writing awards, including the Writer's Digest Screenwriting Competition, the American Women in Radio and Television Commendation Awards, the Clarion Awards and the Scriptwriters Network Producers Outreach Program, which she was later asked to judge and ultimately to run. Her scripts have also been top-ten finishers out of thousands of entries in the prestigious Disney Fellowship, the Moondance Film Festival, and several other national competitions.
Laura's nonfiction has been published in a variety of magazines, newspapers and webzines, and her short story "The Star of Athena," a mystery/caper, was published in the anthology, "An Evening at Joe's." She lectures as a featured speaker at screenwriting seminars, consults on scripts for individuals and production companies, and teaches television writing to both beginning and advanced students. Laura has served on the boards of Women in Film (Maryland chapter) and The Scriptwriters Network. She is, of course, working on a novel.