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12November
September 23rd 2019
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23September

Adaptation for Film & TV

September 23rd 2019

Film Fatales held a discussion about Adaptations for Film & Television with Hannah KS Canter (OK Goodnight), Marilyn Fu (Sisterhood of Night), Samantha Dickinson (Secret Machine), Stacy Osei-Kuffour (The Power), and Whit Anderson (Daredevil), facilitated by Film Fatales members Drew Denny and Suzi Yoonessi.

At this event, audience members left with a deeper understanding of the adaptation process: As filmmakers, how do we develop movies and television based on pre-existing ips like books, documentaries, short films, podcasts, news articles, and more? As creators of original IP, what do we need to know about the adaptation process? Our panelists – representing those whose works have been adapted as well as those who’ve developed, sold, and produced content based on pre-existing IP – we walked through the steps of developing adaptations and the roles of production companies and distributors, sharing their experience regarding what makes for a successful adaptation.

Details

Date:
September 23, 2019
Time:
8:00 am - 5:00 pm

Details

Date:
September 23, 2019
Time:
8:00 am - 5:00 pm

Panelists

Hannah KS Canter is a producer on Grace and Frankie and the VP of Current and Development at Marta Kauffman’s shingle Okay Goodnight, where she oversees creative on a number of comedy, drama, mini-series, and documentary projects, including producing Sundance competition selection documentary Seeing Allred. She is also co-writing a feature with Marta Kauffman based on the best-selling Karen Joy Fowler novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Executive Producing a narrative series based on Drew Denny’s documentary Queer Habits for a cable network. Before Okay Goodnight, Canter previously held posts at StudioCanal Paris, the Katahdin Foundation, and Tollin Productions/Mandalay Sports Media. She also directed the documentary short Copenhagen Pastry. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, her son, and their really good dog.v

Marilyn Fu is a Taiwanese-American writer based in Los Angeles. Her feature screenplay, The Honor List, was released in 2018 by Lionsgate. That same year, she headed the writer’s room on the Will Packer/Roma Downey-produced drama series “The Baxters,” based on the bestselling novels by Karen Kingsbury, for MGM. She wrote and co-produced The Sisterhood of Night (2015) and won an award for the screenplay at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her team’s Kickstarter campaign became the second-highest-funded narrative project at the time. Marilyn was a research assistant for T: The New York Times Style Magazine and a writer/reporter for LIFE Books; she has been involved in over forty publications for Time, Inc. She was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was the first recipient of the William Goldman Screenwriting Fellowship.

Samantha Dickinson is a creative producer with experience working across multiple platforms in the entertainment industry — from independent movies (Rubber, Terri, The Future) to Studio blockbusters (White House Down, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Tim Burton’s Dumbo) and everything in-between, including experimental VR/AR content. She is currently working with producer Justin Springer under his production banner, SecretMachine, on Godmothered, an original female comedy for Disney+ that is set to shoot later this year. Before SecretMachine, she worked at Pascal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and Roland Emmerich’s production shingle Centropolis Entertainment. Her main goal in life is to travel through the Stargate with her husband, dog, and an unlimited supply of Choco tacos.

Stacy Osei-Kuffour is an Emmy-nominated television writer and playwright. She is currently serving as a producer on Apple TV’s upcoming comedy-drama “The Morning Show” and was a writer on Phoebe Waller Bridge’s new HBO series “Run.” Additional credits include writing for PEN15 on HULU, Amazon’s Jane Featherstone-produced series “The Power,” and serving as story editor on both “Watchmen,” HBO’s upcoming series from Damon Lindelof, and Jordan Peele’s new Amazon series “The Hunt.” Her play “Hang Man” recently had its world premiere at the Gift Theatre in Chicago.

Originally from the Mid-Atlantic, Whit Anderson has a BS in Communications from Northwestern University with a major in theater and concentrations in music theater and playwriting. She began her entertainment career assisting filmmaker Gary Ross, Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown, and comedy legend Jim Carrey, for whom she also worked in development. Since then, she has written for half a dozen television shows, including Netflix’s Ozark, Marvel’s Daredevil, Jordan Peel’s The Twilight Zone, and, most recently, Amazon’s adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2020). As a creator, Whit has developed content for ABC, NBC International, and Showtime, including Alice in Wonderland and Dante’s Divine Comedy adaptations. She has original projects with Sky UK, Netflix, and HBO, and she’s adapting Elisabeth Thomas’s debut novel Catherine House for Stampede Ventures and Wiip.

Drew Denny’s award-winning first feature earned her a spot in The Advocate’s “40 Under 40” list, where she was named “an auteur to watch.” She went on to direct six documentary episodes for the launch of Vice’s “Broadly” – the most successful launch in Vice history- followed by an interview with Hillary Clinton in 2016, a documentary for CNN following the elite NASA scientists who survey Earth’s polar ice caps, two narrative shorts starring cast from OITNB and BILLIONS, and a documentary following a troupe of drag queen nuns who save a rural homophobic community from ruin – which is now being developed as a narrative television series by Marta Kaufman’s production company OK Goodnight. A Magna Cum Laude graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts Production Program and California Institute of the Arts Aesthetics and Politics Masters Program, Drew was accepted into the 2018 Sundance/Women in Film Financing Intensive, the 2018 IFP Screen Forward Episodic Lab, and the 2019 Roy and Edna Disney Theater’s Studio program. Her most recent film, MOMSTER, premiered in Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival 2019. Her one-woman show enjoyed a sold-out run at the Roy and Edna Disney Theater, and the CBC will release her forthcoming podcast ASKING FOR IT in February 2020.

Suzi Yoonessi most recently directed DAPHNE AND VELMA (2018) for Warner Brother’s Blue Ribbon Content, which is the origins story of two female super sleuths from Scooby Doo. Yoonessi’s second feature UNLOVABLE (2018) premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Prize and rave reviews. The film stars Academy Award nominee John Hawkes, Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, and comedian Charlene deGuzman, and it won the 2017 Sun Valley Film Festival Film Lab. Yoonessi’s feature film DEAR LEMON LIMA (2009) premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The film was released by Phase 4 Films, HBO, Showtime, and The Sundance Channel. In addition to YouTube Red and Amazon episodes, Yoonessi currently directs branded, short, and commercial spots for Funny or Die, Condé Nast, Smart Girls, Portal A, Retrofit, and Super Deluxe. Yoonessi was nominated for a Streamy Award for her International Women’s Day spot #OwnYouVoice. Yoonessi received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Columbia University, where she received the FMI Directing Fellowship.