Event Details
Wednesday March 29, 2023 7:00 pmSVA Theater
333 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011
Presented by the Austin Film Festival and the Writers Guild of America, East
Crafting entertainment based on true crime can be a tricky path to navigate. How do film and tv writers tell interesting, compelling stories that stay true to real events, while respecting the victims and the human stories that are at the heart of the stories?
Join the Writers Guild of America East and the Austin Film Festival for a discussion on strategies for balancing truth, fact, and fiction while capturing the essence of the real-life subject matter.
Meet the Speakers
Hilary Bettis is a critically-acclaimed playwright, TV writer, and filmmaker. She won the 2019 Writer’s Guild of America Award for her work on the Emmy Award-winning FX series The Americans. She wrote for the Emmy-nominated Hulu miniseries The Dropout. Bettis is currently developing a TV series with Mindy Kaling & David Yates, a true crime limited series with Anonymous Content, and writing a feature for Amazon.
Becky Mode is a New York-based playwright and television writer/producer. She most recently worked as a co-executive producer on Hulu’s Fleishman is in Trouble, Showtime’s George and Tammy, starring Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon and Apple’s Mrs. American Pie, starring Kristen Wiig and Laura Dern. She also worked as a co-executive producer on Nat Geo’s Genius: Aretha, starring Cynthia Erivo. Before that, Mole worked as a co-executive producer on Unbelievable, a limited series for Netflix, which won the PEN Award and was nominated for a WGA Award. She has created/executive produced the pilots of Four Stars (for CBS) and Until the Wedding and Born in Brooklyn (for ABC), and developed pilots for HBO and NBC.
She has also worked as a consulting producer for Smash (NBC), A Gifted Man (CBS), Seal Team (CBS) and Feed the Beast (AMC) and as a writer on Cosby, Little Bill, Out of the Box, and HBO’s A Little Curious. She is currently developing the limited series Finding Fernanda for Lionsgate, from the book by Erin Siegal McIntyre.
Robert Siegel is a New York City-based showrunner and filmmaker. He is the creator of the Hulu limited series Welcome to Chippendales (Kumail Nanjiani, Murray Bartlett), as well as Pam & Tommy (Lily James, Sebastian Stan), which garnered 10 Emmy nominations. On the film side, he is the writer of The Wrestler, for which Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei earned Academy Award nominations, as well as The Founder starring Michael Keaton. His directorial debut Big Fan was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. From 1996 to 2003, Siegel served as editor-in-chief of the satirical publication The Onion, where he won the 1999 Thurber Prize For American Humor and edited the number-one New York Times bestselling book “Our Dumb Century”.