In “The Future of Filmmaking Is Female” panel presented by Adobe and WrapWomen, the discussion centered on the importance of having more women storytellers. The panelists included Sundance filmmakers Isabel Castro, Maliyamungu Muhande, Shaandiin Tome and Robbie Brenner, who is also executive vice president and executive producer of Mattel Films. Ann Lewnes, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of corporate strategy and development at Adobe, moderated the discussion.

The panel started with introductions of the filmmakers and their respective films, all of which premiered at this year’s Sundance. 

Brenner produced “Call Jane,” a coming-of-age story about a 1960s housewife who has an unwanted pregnancy and joins the Jane Collective to fight for women’s rights and to find help.

Brenner said she worked on this film because of the lack of connection she’s been noticing between others, especially women, on social media.

“I was drawn to [“Call Jane”] because I have two children, and I see where we’re going in the world,” Brenner said. “It’s important for us as women to come together as a community and hold each other’s hands and tell each other’s stories and make each other feel comfortable and seen and heard.”

Maliyamungu Muhande directed her first short film, “Nine Days a Week,” about a 80-year-old Black street photographer, Louis Mendes, who started his career in 1950s Harlem.

Muhande said that like her, she sees other female filmmakers who have a “hunger” to dig deeper and create more intimate pieces.

“We are living in a world where we don’t have a choice but to dig deeper,” Muhande said. “We constantly are fighting for our spaces and our rights. We’re fighting for the real stories and real instances of humanity to come out.”

Castro made her feature documentary debut with “Mija,” a film that centers on 23-year-old music manager Doris Muñoz, who meets Chicana singer Jacks Haupts and connects with her because they are both the first American-born people in their immigrant families. 

The filmmaker said she wanted to tell a immigration story that wasn’t just focused on depicting the trauma of the experience. 

“Female and femininity refers to depictions, roles and imagery that has previously been less than and female filmmakers and filmmaking looks like a destruction of power,” Castro said. 

Tome co-directed “Long Line of Ladies” alongside Rayka Zehtabchi. The short film follows a girl in a Northern California’s Karuk tribe, as she prepares for her Ihuk, a coming of age ceremony. Tome said that the matriarchal nature of her Diné community inspired her to tell this story. 

“There’s something empowering about that, that isn’t necessarily the word power as we know it,” Tome said. “I think it’s a quiet power, and it’s something respectful and intentional, and I really love that about how I’ve grown up.”

“Coming from a place of detriment as a brown woman, it’s difficult to see yourself in the media that isn’t portraying you or isn’t portraying who you know,” she added. 

However, Tome said that more and more films have been challenging stereotypes.

As far as advice to other up-and-coming filmmakers, Castro said to embrace failure, as it’s a “part of the process.” Tome added that she leans on the people she knows, like her mother and sister, for support. Muhande emphasized the importance to knowing one’s voice as well as the need to deconstruct the patriarchal power that is integrated into the industry.

“Understand your worth and your value because from that place of truth, [comes] the courage to bulldoze through these barriers because it’s nonstop,” Muhande said. “Also asking for help and leaning to other women. I think the solidarity with ourselves is all we got.”

Watch the full interview with Brenner, Castro, Muhande and Tome up top.

The post The Future of Female-Driven Films Is Stories That ‘Dig Deeper,’ Women Directors Say (Video) appeared first on TheWrap.

At an online panel moderated by #GALSNGEAR founder Amy DeLouise and presented by NABShow, “You” star Shalita Grant said that she felt lost as she was launching a natural-hair business and realized that she needed a business coach as she approached a pre-launch of her product. “This man has really helped me put my finger on my imposter syndrome,” Grant said — referring to the feeling of self-doubt that many successful women have despite their accomplishments.

KweliTV CEO DeShuna Spencer said just reaching out to other people helped her to find mentors, whether it was at networking events or through LinkedIn messages. “You’re not asking them to be your mentors from day one,” said Spencer, whose platform has found more than 430 filmmakers globally with a focus on Black stories. “You’re just starting the conversation. Those have been the more fruitful mentorships. It just started organically almost like dating … and then all of a sudden they’re giving you this really great insight.”

Sometimes the person you approach is not the best fit, Spencer added, but their friend or colleague could serve as a better mentor. Having started as a radio journalist, Spencer said she started out being her own mentor when trying to transition into the film business — and definitely could relate to feeling imposter syndrome when starting out. “The right people will make the right connections,” she said. “Always (make) sure that you have a group of people around you that care for you that may play different roles in your life.”

For Brit DeLillo, first assistant editor at Marvel, having a mentor enabled her to take ownership and try things on her own. Even as an assistant, she felt empowered by her mentor and got to work on edits on her own, for example, which helped her build more confidence in her career.

Now she has taken her experience as a mentee to give back to others just starting out. “I’m trying to be as open a book as possible, especially for women,” she said. “Breaking into this industry was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, so if I can be that extra cheerleader in somebody’s court I am 100% going to do it.”

Watch the video above.

The post How Women in Entertainment Can Find Mentors and Overcome Imposter Syndrome (Video) appeared first on TheWrap.

“Even with Gloria Steinem’s best-seller, with Julianne Moore attached, with myself, with Gloria being executive producer, it’s perceived as a film for women,” Taymor said at a Tuesday webinar hosted by WrapWomen. “It was still this mentality for projects that are women-oriented that, ‘Eh, I don’t know if I want to spend that kind of money.’

“We got our money not-for-profit from two philanthropists who never give money to movies. … They knew Gloria, she knew them. We went up, we met with them, they gave us the money,” Taymor continued, declining to name the philanthropists because they didn’t want to take credit. “We didn’t get the money out of Hollywood.”

It’s not just Hollywood. On Broadway, though progress has been made, the lack of representation for women creatives continues to be overt.

“I think it’s always been hard for women directors. They’re getting more and more, they’re getting asked to do Broadway. I was the first woman to receive a Tony for a musical on Broadway,” Taymor said. “Has it gotten better? Yeah. But not a lot.”

BroadwayHD founder and producer Bonnie Comley noted that while the majority of Broadway ticket-buyers are women, the creators of the shows on Broadway don’t reflect the same demographic breakdown.

“If we look at the last full season, which was the 2018-2019 season, you had 41 theaters, you had two women directors, three female composers, I think one woman lyricist, and that’s it,” Comley said. “We’re just not there yet with having gender equality, at all.”

Carol Kaplan, an entertainment attorney at Loeb & Loeb, did note that there is a younger generation of producers seeking to bring underrepresented voices to Broadway, as well as not-for-profits that have been backing productions that “don’t fit any of the boxes” for commercial theater and finding a way to bring them to the stage.

“The talent is there,” Comley said. “It’s not a pipeline issue.”

The post Why Julie Taymor’s ‘The Glorias’ Struggled to Get Hollywood Financing | Webinar appeared first on TheWrap.

That massive on-screen transformation is thanks to the hard work of the costume, VFX, production, casting, makeup and hair departments, who came together during the 2019 government shutdown to build up a dystopian version of America’s capital that might be the most terrifying setting the Elisabeth Moss-led Hulu drama has shown us so far. And they had just three weeks to plan for it all and one day to shoot it.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” team broke down the on-location episode during a “Crafts Masterclass” conversation with TheWrap, which included costume designer Natalie Bronfman, production designer Elisabeth Williams, head makeup artist Burton LeBlanc, head hairstylist Paul Elliot, VFX producer Stephen Lebed and casting director Sharon Bialy, who are all nominated for Emmys for their work on Season 3.

“There were a ton of limitations that the [National] Mall put on us as a production,” Lebed said. “We could only have so many people within the monument at a time. We couldn’t shoot on the steps, we couldn’t close down the Mall at all, so while we’re shooting we had tourists and people who work in D.C. walking around the area. And as soon as our handmaid actresses showed up in wardrobe, a crowd started building. So a big part of what you see in the show had hundreds and hundreds of looky-loos in the background there with their cameras watching. And we had to digitally remove all of those people. We had to recreate the backgrounds because obviously when you take somebody out, you have to replace it with something. And we tried to keep as much of Washington, D.C. as possible, as opposed to taking anything away, we just kept adding on top of what was already there.”

“Production had made banners, but we couldn’t hang them,” he added. “We could only have so many flags. All the banners had to be added. We had hundreds of handmaids, but the script called for thousands, so those had to be added digitally to fill out the Mall.”

What did get taken away, rather than added, were pieces of the Lincoln Memorial, as the episode features a ruined version of the iconic statue.

Williams explained that the reason the head and the hand of Abraham Lincoln were removed was because series creator Bruce Miller thought of them as “being a symbol of freedom and liberty for the United States” and taking them away also took away “all possibility of thought and all possibility of action” from the people of Gilead.

“In one quick look, it sends a very clear message of the power of this new regime and what it has done,” she said.

“In the script, and with conversations with Bruce and Elizabeth, the idea was that Gilead had taken jackhammers to the monument,” Lebed said. “So rather than just reduce the whole thing to rubble, they’d used heavy machinery to break apart as much as possible … The National Park Service provided a 3D model of the Lincoln Memorial and we took that and added more details to it, basically built it up to make it match the real monument — and then went back and destroyed it and started chopping away details.”

For Bronfman, the biggest challenge with the D.C. episode, which she says shows “us what it would be like to live in a much more pious society than where the Waterfords were living — if that was even possible,” was walking a “fine line” while coming up with a costume for these new handmaids “without creating offense to anyone.”

Bronfman said, “So essentially what I did is I tried to grab something from all of the different world religions to show that all of us, at some point throughout history, have covered up women, thus removing their voices.”

Because of the shutdown, only a limited number of crew members were able to travel to D.C., meaning LeBlanc and Elliot had to do a lot of prep work in advance to make sure that the local staff brought on would know how to re-create their work.

“For me in makeup, it was just getting all the information passed to the person there,” LeBlanc said. “We had to get the wiring on the women’s mouths just right, make sure it was all lined up to come down properly with the costume.”

Elliot says that Moss, or “Lizzie” to him, “has a specific way of her hair being done under her caps,” so he had to take photos to help the D.C. team replicate it.

As for casting, Bialy’s focus for this episode was the introductions of Christopher Meloni’s High Commander Winslow and his wife Olivia (played by Elizabeth Reaser), two important figures in-universe.

“We really needed an actor who already exuded some power and strength without saying anything and Chris Meloni’s name came up sort of just as the creative juices started flowing,” Bialy said. “And it was very different from anything he’d done and we were looking for an actor who would also add value and do something different with the role.”

Season 3 of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is driven by June’s (Moss) resistance to the dystopian regime of Gilead and her struggle to strike back against overwhelming odds. Startling reunions, betrayals, and a journey to the terrifying heart of Gilead force all characters to take a stand, guided by one defiant prayer: “Blessed be the fight.”

Along with Moss, the series stars Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Samira Wiley, Alexis Bledel, Ann Dowd, Max Minghella, Madeline Brewer, O-T Fagbenle, Amanda Brugel and Bradley Whitford.

Watch TheWrap’s full “Crafts Masterclass” with “The Handmaid’s Tale” team via the video above or click here.

The post How ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Team Built a Ruined Washington, DC During a Government Shutdown (Video) appeared first on TheWrap.

“I grew up in white culture. I went to an all-white private school in Dallas, Texas, and I’m first-generation American, I’m Nigerian American,” Acho told TheWrap editor in chief Sharon Waxman Tuesday during a webinar titled “Allies Unite: Fixing a Broken System and Using Your Platform for Change.”

“I don’t deal with the same hurt and pain in my heart due to years upon years of slavery, but nonetheless I’m clothed in a 6’2″ 240-pound black frame and so when I step outside I’m still perceived as a threat and so I realized there’s a disconnect,” said Acho, who will soon replace Jason Whitlock as co-host of FS1’s “Speak for Youself.” “Let’s call it what it is: There’s a disconnect between our white brothers and sisters and our black brothers and sisters and it’s because of limited exposure.”

That disconnect prompted Acho to produce and host the unscripted video series “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” whose first episode has garnered more than 22 million views across various social platforms since it premiered last week (a second episode, with actor Matthew McConaughey, debuted on Wednesday). “Ultimately my goal was to start a dialogue,” he said. “I hung out with so many of my white friends and they asked me questions I never thought they had.”

Tika Sumpter, the star of ABC’s “mixed-ish,” said she has felt a range of emotions since the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and unrest, from feeling hopeless to feeling hopeful, and wondered what she can do to make lives better for others and for her 3-year-old daughter. “I think this is an open dialogue,” she said. “I think now more than ever it’s driving us to talk about the wound that has never been healed.”

The actress, who also co-founded of Sugaberry, a lifestyle brand for “moms of color,” said she was mindful of the hazards of public protests while the country is still in the middle of a pandemic. “We’re doing all the things to save our own lives while also being the highest at-risk group of people,” she said.

For Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, the widow of the late U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) and the CEO of Global Policy Solutions, the current push to address racial inequality feels all too familiar. “I’m experiencing this moment as a sense of deja vu,” she said. “I don’t know if you all remember but just five years ago, it was Baltimore city that was up in arms with troops on the street, tanks on the corners, and upset African Americans who were just basically mad because of years, decades, of having bad relationships with the police.”

Cummings stressed the importance of turning the momentum of the protests into meaningful action. “We will continue to be here if we don’t address the structural changes that are needed in this society, not only in the area of policing, but in the area of health, education, and economic security,” she said. “We have work to do as a nation and that work is to get rid of the racist anti-black system, that’s currently operating across our areas of influence so that we can actually have real opportunities for diverse people to live in a fair and inclusive society.”

Media-tech entrepreneur Adam Platzner, who is producing a PSA focused on how white people can effectively respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, noted the role that white allies can play in pushing for change. “We need to take responsibility, white people need to take responsibility for racism in their daily lives, and stopping it, and calling it out, if you see it, if it seems like a small thing, it’s not a small thing,” he said.

“If we’re going to disrupt racism, we need to do things that we haven’t been doing before,” he added.

Watch the video above.

The post Emmanuel Acho, Tika Sumpter on How ‘Open Dialogue’ Might Combat the Wounds of Racial Injustice (Video) appeared first on TheWrap.

According to actress, producer, author and entrepreneur Tia Mowry, if you want to be productive during this time, it’s important to focus on self-care by allowing yourself to heal first. She has found that the key to her success in quarantine has been through meditation.

“The first time I [meditated] during this quarantine I just started to cry…as a mom you’re like ‘I don’t want my kids to see how frustrated and overwhelmed I am. I don’t want them to see me cry. I gotta be great for them’…all of these things were just coming at me like a big wave,” the “Sister, Sister” and “Family Reunion” star said during WrapWomen’s live webinar on Tuesday.

“Then when I started to meditate I just balled. I was like ‘oh my gosh, this is exactly what I needed.’ I just released and I became aware of those feelings and kind of just let it go. Meditation has definitely been very helpful,” Mowry added.

Mowry, along with multi-hyphenate artist and host of ‘Simplexity’ podcast Alyson Stoner and national best-selling author and workshop leader Jen Pastiloff joined TheWrap founder and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman Tuesday on a virtual meet-up about self-care and mastering your new normal during quarantine.

Watch the full video above.

For more information about WrapWomen visit: www.wrapwomen.com.

The post Tia Mowry Shares How Meditation Is Helping Her Get Through Quarantine (Video) appeared first on TheWrap.

“If you’re in the production business what you have on the other side of this pandemic is the greatest opportunity of your life. What the pandemic did was solidify the position of steaming services in people’s lives…The streaming model is now permanentized as the future and with that means tons of production, for tons of shows, from tons of competitors of every network and every streamer,” said Gerber during TheWrap’s live webinar on Tuesday with founder and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman presented by Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management.

Watch the full video above.

The post Will Hollywood Financially Recover Post-Pandemic | Webinar appeared first on TheWrap.

That was one of the key topics discussed on Tuesday during TheWrap’s latest “Survival Guide to Social Media & Digital Start-Ups,” hosted by TheWrap CEO and Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman. Joining Waxman were Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor, who has gained 45 million social media followers thanks to his popular comedic sketches and videos; Maureen Polo, general manager of Fullscreen, which specializes in helping social media content creators and has more than 2,500 influencers under its umbrella; and Greg Kampanis, SVP and general manager of Omnia Media, a gaming-focused, digital-first media company that pulls in 2.5 billion views per month with content aimed primarily at Millennial and Gen Z fans.

Bachelor, whose new comedy film, “Coffee & Kareem,” recently debuted on Netflix, said he’s primarily focused on churning out free content for his fans, rather than partnering with brands during this chaotic time.

“In this time, you have to find work for yourself. You have to make yourself busy,” Bachelor said. “You can get trapped in the depression state and thinking everything is hopeless, but you have to motivate yourself. What I’ve been doing is motivating myself to get up, work out, and find work to do. I’m hanging in there.”

That means not only maintaining the same breakneck content-creation pace he normally would but in some cases exceeding it. Bachelor said he normally posts videos between 3:30-6:00 p.m. during the week, aiming for when people get out of school and out of work, and then shifts to 10:00 a.m. on the weekends. Now, “every day is a weekend,” Bachelor said. He’s now having to “pump out content” every day, he said, sometimes with a humorous PSA-style take on COVID-19. And because more people are spending time on their phones and devices, he said “engagement is a lot higher.”

This was something the other panelists pointed to as well. Kampanis noted views have gone “through the rough” in recent weeks for Omnia content.

“On our own network, we’re seeing 20-30% viewership increases from just three weeks ago,” Kampanis said. “It’s continuing to go up, the watch time is going up.” He added this is a consistent trend across YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and Omnia’s AVOD channel.

This has caused Omnia to rush deliver certain content, Kampanis said, because there is an “opportunity” for new shows to grab a captive audience; he pointed to a new show, focused on the popular “Grand Theft Auto” game franchise, Omnia just put out on Snapchat. “Every platform is looking to fill holes in their schedules because production is shut down.”

When it comes to content, Polo said she sees a “new normal” emerging because of the pandemic, where less is more. Refined production has been replaced with a more stripped-down approach — and viewers are gravitating towards it. Polo pointed to late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon now hosting shows from their homes and finding a way to still make it entertaining.

“Audiences, we’re seeing — especially younger audiences — they’re craving more authenticity,” Polo said. “They’re craving less polished content. They want a deeper connection, and they actually believe in a world where brands can bring that connection to them… this pandemic is fostering that more quickly than would’ve happened pre-COVID-19.”

Watch the full one-hour webinar for more insight on a potential advertising crisis for content creators, avoiding “burnout,” and what audiences are interested in watching while quarantined.

The post The ‘New Normal’ for Content Creation and Distribution During a Pandemic | Webinar appeared first on TheWrap.

“Restarting a production is going to be difficult depending on how long this goes in terms of retaining actors, keeping the schedules available for the productions to restart, which means spending money to keep the production costs in place,” Jeff Zaks, senior vice president of media and entertainment banking at Opus Bank, said during TheWrap’s live webinar on Tuesday.

Zaks, along with Banc of California head of entertainment Adrian Ward and Viviana Zarragoitia, vice president of boutique lending firm Three Point Capital, joined TheWrap founder and Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman Tuesday on a Zoom virtual meet-up to discuss how the pandemic is, and will continue to, impact film financing.

“The whole landscape of production financing is going to change,” Zaks continued, “Primarily with how insurance companies are going to evaluate this moving forward.”

Whether production companies would be covered, or have to absorb the losses incurred from productions that were interrupted due to the spread of COVID-19, became a major talking point in the early days of the pandemic’s impact in the U.S. Most companies, experts said at the time, weren’t covered and would have to take the financial hit.

Zaks said that those production insurance packages are likely going to change in the aftermath of COVID-19, with insurers including exclusions for things like COVID-19, though it’s unclear how broad those exclusions would be.

“Other than going out and finding separate insurance, which undoubtedly would be very expensive, then I think there’ll just be that risk there is either another outbreak or a reemergence of this which could obviously cause a lot of problems for the production,” Ward said. “I spoke with one of the bond companies recently and they’re saying when production does start again there’s going to be a bunch of exclusions for COVID-19 and other things so it’s going to be a bit of different landscape as they won’t be covering those issues going forward.”

One potential bright side is that coming out of the pandemic — whenever that happens — there’s expected to be a clamoring for content from folks confined to their homes. That too, however, comes with its own challenges.

“There’s going to be a great need for content and in a few months once, hopefully, things return back and we can go outside again, people are going to want whatever is fresh,” Zarragoitia said. “But it’s going to be very hard to sort of manage and schedule the productions that were already scheduled and the ones that were pushed.”

Zaks agreed the industry should brace for some logistical challenges and anticipate an influx of delayed and new content, but also said the concerns will likely be much graver once the dust settles.

“It’s gonna be a bottleneck situation when resources are being clamored for by everybody at the same time,” Zaks said. “And frankly as far as lending goes, we don’t know what the other side of this is going to look like and two or three months from now we don’t know what companies will still be solvent enough to be bankable.”

The post Coronavirus Pandemic Will Change How Some Films Get Financed | Webinar appeared first on TheWrap.

During “TheWrap’s Survival Guide for TV Pilot Season” webinar on Tuesday, TheWrap’s TV editor Tony Maglio spoke with “Will & Grace” creator Max Mutchnick, “Arrow” star Katherine McNamara and “Good Girls” producer Carla Banks-Waddles about the state that each of their respective broadcast pilots were in when the COVID-19 pandemic grounded filming on all the potential series earlier this month — and how they’re trying to keep working on those projects during the shutdown.

McNamara is in a different boat than both Banks-Waddles and Mutchnick, not just because she’s the star of a pilot rather than the writer of a pilot, but because she’s the star of a pilot that was already filmed *and* already aired.

The “Shadowhunters” alum stars on an untitled spinoff of The CW’s now-ended “Arrow,” a series on which McNamara played Mia, the adult daughter of Green Arrow/Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards). The “backdoor pilot” for the show aired in January as the second-to-last episode of “Arrow’s” final season.

“Our pilot aired, which normally doesn’t happen until you know if you’re picked up, and we’re waiting to see,” said McNamara of her “Arrow” spinoff, which would follow Mia as she takes on the role of Green Arrow from her father — if it gets ordered to series at The CW. “They told us pretty much right away that we wouldn’t know anything until May, because they wanted to see their other pilots and see what other shows they had on their slate and everything else and now that a lot of pilots aren’t being shot, there’s a couple of other series that have been picked up, we really don’t know what’s going on at this point. So we’re all just in a holding pattern.”

Mutchnick’s pilot is “The Big Bad Wolfes,” a CBS comedy about a powerful businesswoman, which he’s working on with his “Will & Grace” co-creator, David Kohan. And just before everything was halted due to the coronavirus, Kohan and Mutchnick cast their leading lady.

“We wrote this script, CBS decided we were going to make this pilot, we were in the casting phase — and thank God we closed with Julie Bowen, which is just a very good, solid person to have in the process and on the project because it made it very real,” Mutchnick said. “I feel like if we did not have that, we just would have been a pilot that we were trying to cast for CBS for the upfronts. This makes us that much more solid — but I was trying to push this as long as it would possibly go. I was watching shows close right and left and colleagues were calling me and were saying they were getting shut down. And I felt like, ‘Well, I’m in a position where I’m just casting, let’s keep going. If actors are willing to come in and read, then I’m willing to show up and be there for the audition process.’ And then on that Friday, three Fridays ago, we finally got the call because [NBCUniversal’s Universal Television studio] was willing to keep us up and running, but it was only when CBS, the network, decided we are not going to pursue making these pilots at this time, that we stopped.”

Mutchnick says this “doesn’t mean that anything was canceled — everything was just put in a holding pattern.”

“But I’m in a holding pattern with Julie Bowen as No. 1 on the call sheet, which I like very, very much, that that’s a part of this,” he said. “And now I just have to sit and wait and see. And I was able to use the time to do a rewrite of the pilot to just send that to CBS and say, here’s a polish of this thing, to get it that much closer to what we would want it to sound like when we shot it. Yesterday would have been our table read and I’m waiting to hear what everyone’s thoughts are because it would obviously be fantastic to get an assignment to keep writing, but I don’t know how they’re weighing that.”

Fortunately for Banks-Waddles, she *does* have an assignment to keep writing — for now — as NBC has ordered a second-episode script for her drama pilot, “At That Age.”

“The plan was to shoot in New York for the pilot,” Banks-Waddles said. “So we were there for prep, all systems go and meeting with key departments and mostly doing location scouting. And the news just kept getting worse and worse. But we were about two weeks out from our shoot date when we got the word. And it was very distracting because we would be in the scouting van and everyone was on their phone and new information was coming in by the hour. ‘Oh, they closed down NYU. Oh, they sent everyone home. The NBA is gone. Broadway is going dark.’ So it was so distracting.”

“Everybody knew it was probably going to come our way very soon and so we got the call,” the “Good Girls” producer continued. “The actors had not come out yet, which was a blessing, because I think everyone was nervous about flying and unsure… They pulled the plug on a Thursday and the actors were scheduled to come out that Sunday. So I came back home to LA and everything has just been head-scratchy, what’s next?”

Since then, Banks-Waddles’ potential show has received its backup script order, as have many other pilots, which gives the writers something to do — even if the pilot itself can’t be shot.

“It keeps us working, keeps us creative, keeps the trains moving,” she said. “Writing is already such a solitary task, so it hasn’t changed much for me in that regard. Just being at home with everyone and trying to have as many meetings as we can, teleconferencing with the producers and make any decisions that we can still make to just sort of keep moving ahead.”

Typically speaking, pilot decisions are made by early May ahead of broadcast networks’ upfront presentations to advertisers, during which they show off their new fall slates. But because of concerns over the coronavirus outbreak, all in-person upfronts have been canceled — meaning McNamara, Banks-Waddles and Mutchnick don’t know when they’ll be hearing if their pilots have been ordered to series or not. And that’s the going to be the case for many key players with projects in limbo at NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC and The CW, until the networks decide how to proceed with the usual pilot season in an incredibly unusual situation.

In the meantime, McNamara, Banks-Waddles and Mutchnick told TheWrap they are trying to continue working on their projects while in isolation. Watch the full webinar, which is the second in TheWrap’s “Survival Guide” series, via the video above to find out how they’re pulling this off.

TheWrap’s next webinar will take place next Tuesday, April 7, at 12 p.m. PT/3 p.m. ET. Details to follow.

The post Pilot Season Grounded by Pandemic: How Some Key Players Are Making the Shutdown Work | Webinar appeared first on TheWrap.