Return to Your Roots with Gordon Farrell (The Lifespan of a Fact, Girls Who Smoke)

How I Got Greenlit

In our season finale, the importance of reinvention is never clearer than in the stories from playwright Gordon Farrell's career, where he had to keep coming back to what drew him to writing in the first place in order to continue moving forward.

Gordon Farrell's play, "The Lifespan Of A Fact," starring Daniel Radcliffe, Tony-Award winner Cherry Jones, and Emmy Award winner Bobby Cannavale performed on Broadway from 2018 to 2019. It was co-written with Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell, directed by Leigh Silverman, and produced by eight-time Tony Award winner Jeffrey Richards. Gordon was trained as a playwright at the Yale School of Drama and went from there to work with major Hollywood studios, initially as a story analyst for Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures, and eventually as a screenwriter. He has written for hire and sold screenplays to Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, MGM and ITC. He has worked with Robert Simonds (producer of Big Daddy, The Wedding Singer); Neil Moritz (producer of XXX, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Fast and Furious) and Bruce Berman (producer of Matrix, Three Kings, Mad Max: Fury Road). Working in independent film, Gordon has written for and sold projects to NYC indie producer Norman Twain (producer of Lean on Me, Boycott, Scar, My Dog Tulip). Gordon's first independent screenplay, Girls Who Smoke, premiered in 2011. It went to be an official selection at over a dozen film festivals, ultimately winning the Audience Choice Award in Seattle at the Post Alley Film Festival. As a playwright, Gordon developed a trilogy of monologue plays for women, The Red Anthology, on New York's Lower East Side from 2009 to 2014. He developed it into an immersive walk through theater experience which ran Off-Broadway in 2024. His plays have also been produced in San Francisco, at the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo, at the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, and at Primary Stages in New York. He authored the book for a series of award-winning musicals based on the life and death of Sherlock Holmes, which ran for three seasons in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of The Power of the Playwright's Vision, published by Heinemann Press in 2001 which has been translated internationally and is now a standard playwriting text on four continents.

Gordon Farrell

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Alex Keledjian

Alex Keledjian is the creator of Project Greenlight, a documentary television series where executive producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck gave first-time filmmakers a chance to direct their first feature film. In 2018, Alex wrote and directed the film High Voltage starring David Arquette and Luke Wilson. MAX launched the latest season of the Emmy-nominated TV series Project Greenlight from executive producer Issa Rae and Miramax Television in July 2023.

How I Got Greenlit

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Alex Keledjian, Host

Pete Musto, Producer/Editor

Jeremiah Tittle, Producer

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