Amanda L. Beall

http://www.gunnery.org/gunnery/news/displa...x?articleID=161

Amanda Beall '86, movie debuts on Showtime

Todd Santa Maria

5/15/2002

Gunnery Alum Amanda Beall '86 is revisiting her boarding school roots. An accomplished screenwriter, Amanda dives into the confidential and trusting world of residence life in her new film The Girls' Room which will be broadcasted on The Showtime Network in August. No stranger to dorm life (she was a boarder at Bourne for her four years at The Gunnery), Amanda gives a first hand account of the maturing process in a very close knit environment.

Q: What got you into the writing business?

I did a one-woman one-act at The Gunnery for my ISP that gave me the chance to hold a stage by myself for twenty minutes (every wannabe actor's dream) and studied stage writing in college. It was a natural progression for me from straight fiction because I was always more interested in what people were saying than in where they stood while saying it. Prose is about painting a picture with words, but plays, TV and film leave a lot of that to the director and the rest of the crew. The collaboration takes on its own life which leads to all sorts of exciting results.

Q: Is there a difference between writing for the stage as opposed to the screen? Do you prefer one over the other?

Much of what I learned about stage writing came from acting. Stage work is often about extremes. Things have to be bigger and weirder to engage an audience. Even tiny, quiet moments are exaggerated, simply because of the scale of the venue. On screen, small moments can stay small. That appeals to me.

Q: Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer?

Storytelling has always been a huge part of my life. Whether screenwriting or e-mails or cocktail party chit-chat, I love launching into a convoluted tale that comes back on itself like a snake. For the longest time I wanted to act, to get the story out exactly the way I wanted it to be told.

Q: Tell us about your new film, The Girls' Room. What is it about?

The Girls' Room is a bawdy look at college roommates and the way they invade not just each other's space but each other's lives. Set at my alma-mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, The Girls' Room is the story of Southern priss Grace and her head-banger roommate Casey. When Casey accidentally-on-purpose screws up Grace's chance of a post-graduation wedding, Grace fights back by usurping Casey's place in the world. That's the text of the piece. The sub-text is more about how good-girls and bad-girls aren't so easily identified. That, and the fact that young people try on personas the way they try on clothes, trying to determine who they are, who they want to be, and where those two intersect.

Q: How much of an influence did your residence life at The Gunnery play in The Girls' Room?

An enormous influence! I've shared a room with nine different girls, apartments with two others and lived in a co-ed fraternity for a year to top it off. You hear things in a dorm. You know each other's business. You stay up all night talking about outrageously personal things and then go to breakfast and casually nod at the dorm-mate who now knows all your secrets. That kind of intimacy is unforgettable and rarely duplicated. The whole issue of trying on personas was something I noticed early on at the Gunnery. Freshman year, I started talking like a dorm-mate. She had this unique cadence to her speech that was so fun and clever. She sounded cool whereas I sounded goofy, but I couldn't help myself. That was a theme I wanted to dig around in for The Girls' Room. What happens when we borrow traits that don't belong to us? How long can we wear them before they get too tight or we realize they clash with our hair?

Q: What was your experience like at The Gunnery?

My time at the Gunnery was loaded with classes I loved or loathed, morning meetings, dining hall surprises, pristine snow, Stray Shot, work jobs, chorus, the drama barn, Red and Grey, missed curfews, freezing showers, and the true gift of my Gunnery years, crew. I continued coxing well into college and am thrilled by/jealous of the current teams' enormous successes. I did plenty of writing at the Gunnery, working on the paper and the literary magazine.

Q: Who had the most influence on you at The Gunnery and why?

There's not a single teacher from my four years that didn't leave an imprint on me. Leslie Lintner is at the top of that list. She was a great French teacher but she had a real gift for emotional support. Jonathan Pitts lent me "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and changed how I looked at literature. John Linter walked me through Shakespeare so that I could finally hear both the poetry and the meaning. Bill Landis taught me lessons about the theater that I still quote today. Ed Small's sly humor made me appreciate the value of few words spoken to great effect. As advisor on my ISP, Pam Taylor had a huge influence on my understanding of the process of writing. I was used to working by instinct and stopping when things didn't come automatically. She taught me that when inspiration doesn't come, you have to write anyway. That's what a writer does.

Q: Do you have any new projects that you're working on right now that you can share with us?

Right now, one of the pieces I'm getting a handle on is set at a boarding school. While I was at the Gunnery I was fascinated by the situation of the teachers, and now that I'm older than many of them were, I'm even more intrigued. Also, there were so many things I wanted to pass on to younger students that I never had a chance to say, all the adult caveats kids reject. This new script seems like a convenient venue to camouflage a teeny bit of didacticism with a load of humor.

Q: What would you say to someone with aspirations of making it into the film industry?

Take any job you can get. Work as a production assistant, intern, runner, whatever. The pay may seem pitiful but you will learn every moment that you work. If you want to be in physical production - the day to day making of TV and films - get a PA job and work up. If you want to work in development - the gathering of material and supervision of production - start at an agency. What you'll learn there is invaluable. Yes, there are legends of ashtray-slinging agents but battle scars make great bar chat. Film school can provide both an education and an open door. If you pick a high profile film school, your classmates will keep you working when you really need it. The Girls' Room was almost entirely crewed by USC grads who continue to work together. If you want to write, write a lot but always keep an industry day-job. That's the only way to stay in the mix early on. The Girls' Room got made because after years in television production, I moved on to film. Starting at the bottom, I was working as an assistant at half my TV pay. But another assistant I knew had heard about a director looking for a female driven script. The film went into production four months later. "It's about who you know" means more than the obvious. Yes, sometimes you get a job because you're a friend of the boss. But sometimes you get a job because someone you know heard about a job before anyone else did. “Who you know” has a direct effect on “what you know,” and it's “what you know” that ultimately matters.