This week, True Blood’s Writer/Executive Producer Alexander Woo is highlighted by LA Weekly where they talk about his screenwriting and TV writing history. Last year, I interviewed Alex extensively where I learned all about his life and career. He was a delight to interview and he talked extensively about the filming of the True Blood and some things that he personally came up with for the show, i.e., the “wheel” in the basement of Fangtasia. As I learned while talking to him, his first love was to be a playwright, but he now has become a fan of writing for television and we’re so glad that HBO has captured those talents since he is one of our favorite writers on the show.
Below is a excerpt from the La Weekly article with Alex.
Achieving an entirely plausible yet unorthodox version of “success” — at least for a playwright — Alexander Woo has settled comfortably into TV as a writer-producer. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama and Princeton University, the Chinese-American scribe has been a staff writer on the Fox drama Wonderfalls and now is a writer-producer on HBO’s True Blood. (He was married in 2011 to Whitney Friedlander, who writes frequently for L.A. Weekly.)
Woo’s stage comedies and farces were produced at North Carolina’s Triad Stage (Debunked, 2004), at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Forbidden City Blues, 1999), and in L.A. by Circle X Theatre Company (In the Sherman Family Wax Museum, 1999), but he hasn’t had any plays done lately, and that doesn’t bother him one bit.
Since Woo entered TV’s environs in 2003, he has become an advocate for TV writing, and not just because it provides a living wage. He believes TV provides writers with opportunities that are shrinking in theater — or at least in commercial theater.
“Commercial theater has moved more and more toward ‘museum theater’ — finding the most famous play you can by the most famous playwright you can, by the most famous actors you can,” he says. “TV still feels like a writer’s medium.”
That’s especially true compared with film, where the director is king. Alexander Woo is not a household name, yet he says, “I’m the writer on the set — that would be unusual in film. The cast and the directors and the production staff all turn to you [the writer], just like in theater, because you know where the story has been and where it’s going.”
If you want to learn lots more about Alexander Woo, please go to the Vault’s interview by clicking here.
To read this entire LA Weekly article, go to: laweekly.com
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