In this issue:
MESSAGE FROM HARVARDWOOD
NEWS
Summer Membership Sale
Harvardwood Writers Program - LA/NY Group Applications Open
Launching Harvardwood Member Directory!
Harvardwood Merch now on sale
Featured Job: Assistant/Associate Producer for Producer/Director
FEATURES
Alumni Profiles: Lance Oppenheim AB '19 (filmmaker)
Industry News
Welcome New Members
Exclusive Q&A with Alana B. Lytle AB '11 (writer)
CALENDAR & NOTES
Author Talk: Alana Biden Lytle AB '11 in Conversation with Carleton Eastlake JD '72 (LA)
Beach Day
Harvardwood 101 Info Session
Last Month at Harvardwood
Want to submit your success(es) to Harvardwood HIGHLIGHTS? Do so by posting here!
Sale! Sale! Sale! The Summer Membership Sale is here! Get it while it's hot, and check out our merch, our new and fancy Harvardwood Membership Directory, and apply for the Harvardwood Writers Program! So many perks, what will we even do?
This month we will be opening with another one for the literates: an Author Talk with Alana Biden Lytle AB '11 in Conversation with Carleton Eastlake JD '72 (LA)! Then come be smooth brained at the Harvardwood Beach Day in LA and Harvardwood 101 Info Session--something for everyone, and everyone for everything.
It's now been over six months since we unveiled our new website and expanded membership perks. Wow! For those of you who are still on an outdated membership plan, we decided in January to extend the sunsetting process to give everyone the opportunity to transfer over to the new site. If you are still on a $5/month plan, you are only getting very limited membership perks! Come and join us with a new membership lest we leave you behind in the dark age of old membership. If you do not want to upgrade and no longer want to be part of the family, we’ll be so sad! Seriously, don’t go! But, if you really want to take a break from the incredible Harvardwood community (we don’t really understand why anyone would do that, wouldn’t you miss our emails too much?), please email us to cancel your old membership plan.
As always, we want to hear from you, our members — if you have an idea for an event or programming, please tell us about it here. If you have an announcement about your work or someone else's, please share it here (members) and it will appear in our Weekly and/or next HIGHLIGHTS issue.
Best wishes,
Grace Shi
Operations and Communications
Summer Membership Sale
Announcing our Summer Membership Sale! 15% off Standard Annual Membership plan with the code SUMMERSALE. For non-members looking to apply to programming this fall, join now for a discount!
Launching our new Harvardwood Member Directory!
You asked for it, and now it's here! We are so excited to launch our members-only Harvardwood Directory. In order to be included, you must be a full member on one of our new plans and fill out the consent form below!
Harvardwood Merch now on sale
Love bucket hats, notebooks, sweatshirts, and tote bags? We are excited to annouce our merch store is now up and running, in partnership with Alma Mater. Can't wait to see you rocking your HW swag at our next meet up!
Harvardwood Writers Program - LA/NY Group Applications Open
“Way better and cheaper than most MFA screenwriting classes” — A happy HWP participant
The Harvardwood Writers Program (or HWP) supports aspiring and seasoned screenwriters through peer-reviewed writing sessions, professional development workshops, practice pitch events, social gatherings, and more!
We currently have two types of offerings:
1) HWP Groups, which meet monthly from September - May
2) HWP Intensives, which meet weekly for about 10-12 weeks
The Group applications for the 2024-2025 cycle are now open. You can choose from the Virtual Features Group (VFG) or location-specific Features Groups in Boston (TV/Features), LA, or NY.
The Intensive applications open in August/September for the Fall cycle and February/March for the Spring cycle. The Jeff Sagansky HWP TV Writers Intensive offers virtual and LA-based modules. The HWP Feature Writing Intensive offers virtual modules. All genres welcome!
Apply Now! Due August 12th, 2024
Other Groups
Virtual Features Group - At Capacity (email admin@harvardwood.org for more info)
Boston Features Group - sessions will resume in January 2025
Featured Job: Assistant/Associate Producer for Producer/Director
Job Description:
Seeking LA-based Assistant for Emmy-winning, Academy Award nominated documentary director to provide administrative, personal, and production support. Previous executive assistant experience required.
Alumni Profile: Lance Oppenheim AB '19 (filmmaker)
by Laura Frustaci '21
Lance Oppenheim AB '19 is a filmmaker from South Florida. His work blends nonfiction storytelling with heightened, cinematic formalism and flourishes of the surreal. His first feature, Some Kind of Heaven, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released by Magnolia Pictures in 2021. In 2024, he premiered FX/Hulu's Spermworld, his second feature film, and HBO & Elara Pictures' Ren Faire, his first television series, to critical acclaim. Alongside his producing partner, Melissa Oppenheim Lano, Lance is producing a documentary feature about the annual python hunt in Florida with Artists Equity and director Xander Robin. He is in post production on his next film with A24. Oppenheim is a former Sundance Ignite Fellow, and was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” in 2023.
Lance Oppenheim (AB ‘19) credits his success as a filmmaker to being bad at sports as a kid. Well, not really— but that is exactly what started him on the path to becoming the successful filmmaker, director, and producer that he is today.
“I knew an athletic life was never the one for me,” Lance laughs, “And my dad is a lawyer, but he had taken a...film criticism class in college. And my mom, who also is a lawyer, was obsessed with THE TWILIGHT ZONE, and so at a really early age I was exposed to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and my mom showed me all of THE TWILIGHT ZONE episodes.” Rather than running around the soccer field or swinging a baseball bat, young Lance was receiving a varied and thorough film education from his parents. The narrative works he saw onscreen were captivating.
“Seeing how people could basically immerse you in a world and [make] you forget everything you know about yourself—that was the thing that was always interesting to me.” Lance recalls. Growing up in Florida, movie making wasn’t a very common career. Still, Lance found his way to documentary film; in fact, it was the media path of least resistance. “I knew that to make a narrative film you needed an actor, a crew, to help,” Lance shrugs. “And with documentaries, all you really needed was a compelling story or a character.”
While in high school, Lance sourced his stories from somewhere full of all kinds of interesting characters: the Sun Sentinel, his local newspaper. “I would reach out to the people in the articles, and then start to essentially make a film and try and combine the same feelings I had when I was watching all of my favorite movies growing up,” Lance explains. He sought to imbue his work with a sense of subjectivity, not just to be an observer, but to “really immerse an audience into the headspace of somebody… and find ways to just get all the narrative tools and narrative techniques that you'd find in a fiction film and try and bridge them over to a documentary.” And that continues to be Lance’s approach to documentary filmmaking, having now released several works that garnered critical acclaim including SOME KIND OF HEAVEN, SPERMWORLD, and, most recently, REN FAIRE.
As evident throughout his body of work, there is a particular through line in each piece that Lance searches for as he approaches potential new subjects. “I'm interested in these kinds of American fantasy lands,” Lance asserts. “Places where people try to use their resources to just enact a fantasy of some sorts. And inevitably I'm also interested in dreams. Where do dreams end? Where do they die? What happens if the fantasy that you thought you wanted ends up entombing you and suffocating you? … There's also this dimension of just people looking for meaning and purpose and feeling adrift, like they're on the margins of a life that maybe everyone else is living.” He adds, “Those are sort of the things that I'm always looking for.”
Once his documentary’s subject is solidified, the first question Lance will ask himself to start the process is how to visually represent the inner lives of that subject, those people, that the story belongs to. “What do they see themselves to be? What kind of stories do they think they're leading?” Lance expands, “I want to use everything in my cinematic toolkit to reflect that.”
But again, Lance always ensures that the people involved in his documentaries are part of the filmmaking process, not just people being filmed. He affirms, “It’s a question of how willing they are to be a part of an artistic experience…I promise the people that are involved in it that it's going to be fairly invasive. But it's going to be collaborative. And at the end of the day they will hopefully feel seen.”
This approach helped Lance greatly in creating his most recent work, REN FAIRE, now available to stream on HBO Max. “With REN FAIRE, I would show everyone little clips here and there, how they’re being represented in the film,” Lance explains. “And it was sort of this universe of constant stress and pain… so it felt that this project probably had the most sort of investigative journalistic components...out of any of the projects I've worked on so far, just because of needing to know exactly what was going on with three or four people at any given moment. If there was some sort of chess move being made by one person, I knew that I'd have to be with another person to capture their emotions.”
And people certainly grow self-conscious about expressing these emotions in front of a whole camera crew. “I want to capture what's truthful to them,” Lance says. “I never want to make something up that just feels narratively convenient. It has to be emotionally real to them. And there is this other sort of very complicated, strange version of truth and pain in their performances, especially when you're watching something happen that's really painful for any of the people that are part of it… But then by acknowledging it, there's a way to break through it and capture a new kind of reality.”
This guiding principle of collaboration, honesty, and, in a larger sense, ethical filmmaking, came to Lance by way of Harvard film professor Robb Moss, who recommended Lance read the book THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm while he was in school. Malcolm’s book discusses the inherent question of whether there is an ethical way to make documentary, or any form of nonfiction storytelling, that isn’t manipulative and extractive, and, ultimately, unethical. Lance cites this as a book he thinks about all the time as he’s working.
“This is ultimately a very cynical outlook on the whole profession of nonfiction storytelling,” he notes. “But thinking about ways in which you could heed the lessons that Janet Malcolm was saying… How do I do so in a way that feels equitable to the people in the films, not just something that looks artistically pretty… How do I sort of merge the two things? … So that when [the film] is done finally the people in it can stand by it and feel as proud of it as the filmmakers felt.”
Lance continues, “Always remind yourself that these are real people and real people's lives, and you have a responsibility to them if they trust you with telling their story, if they trust you with being vulnerable on camera. You have to be good to them. And if you're not in love with someone that you're making a film about, then it's probably not worth your time… If the people in the film don't like it, then what's the purpose?”
Lance’s work strives to answer the questions he poses to himself as he creates them: “How do I find the things that I personally find relatable in each of these people's stories? How do I put that on screens so that when someone watches it they can connect with something that's profoundly human?” Because at the end of the day, the one commonality across humanity is that we’re all just looking to feel seen.
Industry News
CATS: "THE JELLICLE BALL" directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch AB '84 just announced another extension through September 8th. Andrew Lloyd Webber calls the production's atmosphere "simply electric". Grab tickets while you can at the PAC website. (PAC)
Abigail Hing Wen made a splash in 2020 when her young adult debut, LOVEBOAT, TAIPEI hit bookshelves and became an instant NYT bestseller, and later adapted to a movie, originally on Paramount+ and hits Netflix on August 9th. Now she’s back with her first book outside of the universe, Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies (on-sale August 13, 2024), a highly anticipated, fast-paced YA heist romance that’ll be an instant hit for those who love suspense, humor, and swoony love stories -- and ends with an all-out rooftop showdown above a Barnes & Noble. Abigail really cracks the code with KCC!
Carolyn Huýnh's debut novel, THE FORTUNES OF JADED WOMEN, is being adapted as a TV series. Heyday boss David Heyman AB ’83 partnered with Alan Yang AB ’02 to option the book, and work has begun to set it up for television. (Deadline)
STAR TREK legend Jonathan Frakes MA ’76 to direct new series, ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME. This six-episode sci-fi miniseries adaptation is slated to roll cameras in late 2024. (Space)
Damien Chazelle’s AB ’07 next film set is to start production in October. This film is rumored to take place in prison, described as a “mid-budget” drama with action elements. (World of Reel)
Apple’s global hit drama PRESUMED INNOCENT lands season two renewal. It revolves around a new case to be executive produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Thomason AB ’98, and author Scott Turow JD ’78. (Apple)
Humanitas announced nominations for the 2024 Humanitas Prize in nine juried categories. Erica Lipez’s AB ’05 WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES was nominated in the Limited Series Teleplay category. (MSN)
Act II Playhouse has announced its latest production, AN ACT OF GOD by David Javerbaum AB ’93. Production opens Friday, August 9, running through Sunday, September 1, 2024. (Broadway World)
Lev Grossman’s AB ’91 Arthurian Novel THE BRIGHT SWORD to be developed as series by Lionsgate TV and 3 Arts. THE BRIGHT SWORD is described as “the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium steeped in tradition, full of duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings.” (Deadline)
The long-awaited Season 2 premiere of the Apple TV+ series SEVERANCE has been set for Friday, January 17. It is executive produced by Nicky Weinstock AB ’91, along with other producers. (Deadline)
Jeff Bridges’ FX Show THE OLD MAN has a Season 2 Premiere Date. The thriller, created and executive produced by Jonathan E. Steinberg AB '97 and starring John Lithgow AB ’67 and Amy Brenneman AB '86, will begin its second season on September 12 with the first two episodes. (Deadline)
Zoe Kravitz joins Austin Butler in Crime Thriller CAUGHT STEALING from Darren Aronofsky AB ’91 and Sony Pictures. It is based on the book by Charlie Huston. (Deadline)
Conspiracy thriller ZERO DAY will be starring TV newcomer Robert De Niro as a beloved former U.S. president who returns to combat a global crisis. Noah Oppenheim AB ’00 has co-created this series with Eric Newman and Michael S. Schmidt. (GQ)
FRASIER revival sets Season 2 premiere date at Paramount+. It will premiere on September 19 with its first two episodes. The series stars Jack Cutmore-Scott AB ’10 as Frasier’s son, Freddy. (Variety)
LOOT starring and executive produced by Maya Rudolph renewed for Season 3 at Apple. LOOT was co-created by Alan Yang AB ’02. (Deadline)
Conor Leslie all set to lead horror-thriller ARCHANGEL, about a privately funded organization, which is involved in the research of finding out the possibility of life after death. It was produced by Spooky Pictures’ Roy Lee and Steven Schneider PHD ’06 AM ’06. (The Hindu)
Read Brian Dillon’s New York Times review of Sarah Manguso’s AB ’96 novel LIARS. (NY Times)
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, executive produced by Jeff Schaffer AB ’91, was nominated for multiple Emmys including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Comedy or Drama Series (Half-Hour) and Animation, and Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series. (Emmys)
Nestor Carbonell AB ‘91 was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, as Vasco Rodrigues in SHŌGUN. (Emmys)
Jon Bernthal ART ’02 was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, as Michael Berzatto in THE BEAR. (Emmys)
Geneva Robertson-Dworet AB ‘07 was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, for FALLOUT. (Emmys)
Warner Bros. is embarking on an ambitious journey to bring Harry Potter to the small screen, promising fans a decade of magical storytelling and a deep, faithful exploration of the beloved books. Each season will cover one novel, with a 10-year timeline. David Heyman AB ’83 who produced all of the Harry Potter movies and Fantastic Beasts films, will executive produce. (Mirror)
Concert pianist and Harvardwood Board Member Gerry Bryant has just released the third, long-delayed album of his original music by his jazz group, PocketWatch, entitled “Only Time Will Tell”. Available for listening and downloading on all of the major platforms! For more information about Gerry and his music catalogue, visit www.gerrybryant.com
Welcome New Members
Harvardwood warmly welcomes all members who joined the organization last month (or those who migrated their membership over):
Jennifer Wang
Josie Abugov
Jisung Lee
Steph Brecq
Taylor Valley
Lisa Daria Kennedy
Xavier Taboada
Duaa A
Allison Jones
Exclusive Q&A with Alana B. Lytle AB '11 (writer)
Alana B. Lytle is a screenwriter whose recent credits include Netflix's Brand New Cherry Flavor and Peacock's A Friend of the Family. Her short fiction has been published in Guernica. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sausage-shaped dog. Man's Best Friend is her debut novel.
Q: Congratulations on your debut novel! What inspired you to write MAN'S BEST FRIEND, and how did the idea for this story come about?
So, the whole thing was inspired by this eerie interaction that happened more than a decade ago, when I woke up in my shoebox apartment on the Lower East Side missing my credit card. Before I could even search for it, I got a Facebook message from this guy saying he'd found my card on the street. He asked if he could return it to me "over drinks." The line between meet-cute and meet-creepy can be blurry, so despite the oddness of the message, I, in all my single hopefulness, went to meet this man. Nothing sinister happened in the end, but the encounter was strange, for sure. A few years ago I was telling this story to a friend and realized it could be a good jumping-off point for something fictional. Who would I have had to be and who would he have had to be for a relationship to ensue after such an uncomfortable first encounter?
Q: What was your approach to blending suspense and with a hint of surrealism in the story, and how did you maintain a balance between these elements?
I always wanted Man's Best Friend to feel, maybe not five minutes in the future, but two minutes in the future. Though never explicitly stated in the novel, it’s set in 2026, so I tried to imagine plausible 2026 realities. Perhaps the idea of tame American dogs running away en masse doesn't feel plausible, but who knows? It could happen. I hope it doesn't though. I'm obsessed with my dog.
Q: How did your experience as a screenwriter influence your approach to writing this novel, particularly in terms of pacing, dialogue, and scene construction?
Screenwriting has tamed and focused my writing wholesale. Before I got into film and TV, I hardly ever outlined my prose, and while that improvisational thing works for some brilliant writers I know, it never did for me. Being in writer's rooms taught me the power of charting a course and justifying every scene. That's how I approached the construction of this novel, adding chapters to Scrivener the same way I would card an episode of television. Sometimes the chapter descriptions just said things like, "She questions reality moment #2."
Q: What is your writing process like, and what do you do when you get stumped? Any magic cures for writer’s block?
There are the unhappy days when six hours of work yields two hundred words, maybe fifty of which I'll actually keep, but, in general, as long as I'm not super sick or spending dedicated time with family, I'm writing every day and my own curiosity keeps me going. I want to know what I'm capable of. Constantly I think of that Ira Glass quote about the gap between taste and ability, how a creative person's good taste is why their own work disappoints them, and how fighting through the disappointment is the only productive thing to do. The idea of the gap between where I am and where I might go inspires me more than it intimidates me. I didn't feel this way when I first graduated Harvard, though, because I was so busy dwelling on where my talented classmates already were. I don't have a magic cure for writer's block, per se, but if self-doubt is the devil behind someone's blockage, my advice to them would be to focus on their own gap, not anyone else's.
Q: As this is your first novel, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced during your writing process for a longer, prose-based work (versus writing for television), and how did you overcome them? Was any part of it easier than you expected?
Writing a longer work was easier than I expected. My main issue was actually how quickly Man's Best Friend came together. I suppose I had this idea that you're not a real novelist unless you fret for ten years over the same manuscript. Maybe ten more years would've made for an even better novel, but maybe not. Every book, I imagine, requires something different.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from MAN'S BEST FRIEND, and are there any particular emotions, thoughts, or themes you aim to evoke for your audience through the story?
El, the protagonist of Man's Best Friend, is no Nick Carraway: she doesn't, after exposure to the luxe life of the East Hampton elite, turn her back on it all, jaded and disgusted by the hypocrisy therein. She doesn't do this because, yes, she's selfish, but also because she knows that there is no escape from the hypocrisy of capitalism. I'm certainly no defender of the uber-rich, as evidenced by this book, but I suppose I'd like people to take away that self-righteous judgment is a faulty weapon. Contributing to our ever-polarizing culture by hardening yourself against people who you perceive as being less virtuous than yourself, particularly if they have less privilege to begin with, is repellent to me. Let's return to Gatsby for a second: Why should Nick, who arranged for his married cousin Daisy to have a secret rendez-vous in his house with the neighbor he wants to impress, stand in such harsh judgment of Daisy, ultimately? How easy it is for Nick, a man with the means to forge his own path, to shake his head at a woman running away from the wreckage she's caused. If you're going to cast stones, at least be aware of your own glass house.
Q: What are your personal favorite works or influential pieces, whether from literature, film, the stage, non-fiction? What’s one piece of media you think every creative should read/watch/listen to?
I'd definitely cite Charlie Kaufman as one of my favorite storytellers. Charlie Brooker, Jesse Armstrong, Damon Lindelof, Alan Ball, Dahvi Waller, Michaela Coel---these are all writer-producers I admire so much. My favorite novel is Freedom; I read it at least once a year. I would call my reading taste eclectic, though--in the past few months I loved Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, Eliza Clark's Boy Parts and Holly Mitchell's excellent poetry collection, Mare's Nest. One piece of media every creative should consume? There are too many answers to this, but certain episodes of Mad Men are as good as it gets.
Q: What do you like to do in your free time? And what’s on the horizon, what are you working on next?
I've been writing on a TV show that was recently announced: it's the Duffer Brothers' newest project and the creation of my good friend Haley Z. Boston. The title is Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. I'm not sure how specific I'm allowed to be about the rest of what I'm doing, but I'm mid-stream on some exciting feature development and am working on more fiction with every spare moment I have. My happy place besides my laptop is walking my dog in the pink early morning, before it gets too hot and too bright. I’m an East Coast girl at heart—there’s too much sunshine in L.A.!
Author Talk: Alana Biden Lytle in Conversation with Carleton Eastlake (Santa Monica)
Monday, 8/5 Free for all members
Harvardwood and Zibby's Bookshop are excited to host writer Alana Biden Lytle (AB '11) as she celebrates the launch of her debut novel, MAN'S BEST FRIEND. Alana will be joined in conversation by fellow author-TV writer Carleton Eastlake (JD '72)!
Beach Day (LA)
Saturday, 8/17
Come mix and mingle, swim if you dare!
Harvardwood 101 Info Session (Virtual)
Thursday, 8/26 Free for all members
Students, join us to learn more about applying to January in-person Harvardwood 101!
Last Month at Harvardwood
Last month at Harvardwood, we went to a Comic-Con event, did an All Ivy Mixer, talked to Lauren Mechling about Writing Humor in Prose, and much more!
Want to submit your success(es) to Harvardwood HIGHLIGHTS? Do so by posting here!
Become a Harvardwood member! We work hard to create programming that you, the membership, would like to be engaged with. Please consider joining Harvardwood and becoming an active member of our arts, media, and entertainment community!
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