Shane Brennan to mentor next wave of Aussie showrunners

A new initiative between Playmaker Video and Screen Australia will enable three established writers to become Showrunners on their very own drama projects.

Australian writer Shane Brennan, Executive Producer on NCIS and Creator / Producer of NCIS: Los Angeles, will mentor three writers through the Scribe process.

The participants in the 2011 Scribe Writing Group are: Matt Ford (Panic at Rock Island, SLiDE, Satisfaction), Shelly Birse (Lockie Leonard, Love Is A Four Letter Word, Wildside) and Drew Proffitt (Phryne Fisher, Lockie Leonard, Network TEN Script Editor 2000-2005).

Playmaker Video has produced Wicked Love: The Maria Korp Story and is currently producing SLiDE for Foxtel and the Blood Brothers telemovie for Nine.

Playmaker’s David Maher told TV Tonight that Scribe would foster the next generation of Showrunners in Australia.

“It’s built around trying to develop high quality and commercially viable drama,” he said.

“Playmaker is all about authored drama and Scribe is about putting writers at the centre of that process and developing unbroken authorship.

“Writers will have their hand on the creative tiller of their shows from inception to final delivery.”

Scribe will seek to deveop three 10 x 1 hour drama series.  Maher says these will be character dramas undercut with comedy.

“The writers will develop their ideas to an advanced series outline stage, and once the projects are attached to broadcasters and greenlit those writers will become the creative producers of their project and a writing team will be formed around them for the duration of that production,” he said.

Each of the writers will develop new projects rather than arrive with current projects.

“We didn’t want it to be an ‘open the bottom drawer’ process. We want the writers to come in and get some good industry intelligence and some informal input from buyers, both broadcasters and distributors, and then commence their development for Scribe off the back of that.

“They’ll be together two days a fortnight in our office in Sydney. Shane Brennan is the mentor and once a month he will be linking in via video conference from LA responding to concept pitches and advising of pitching strategies and presentation.”

Maher and his Playmaker partner David Taylor will produce the projects while FremantleMedia Enterprises has a first look at international distribution.

Shane Brennan will speak at the National Screenwriters Conference which begins on Phillip Island today.

“You couldn’t get a better mentor, really,” says Maher.