JOIN US MARCH 29 FOR AFF IN NEW YORK:
A FREE DISCUSSION ON TRUE CRIME!
Partnered with Writers Guild of America East
Wednesday, March 29 at 7 PM, at the SVA Theater
(333 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011)
Austin Film Festival is making our annual trip to New York City!
Austin Film Festival is heading to New York City!
Join AFF and the Writers Guild of America East for a free panel discussion on Wednesday, March 29th at the SVA Theater.
Doors open at 6 PM!
BASED ON A TRUE CRIME STORY
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 horror?
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.
Hilary Bettis is a critically-acclaimed playwright, TV writer, and filmmaker. She hails from a Chicana mother who grew up on the border and a Southern father who grew up Methodist. Her work is a culmination of these cultures, exploring the American identity through a working-class Latinx lens. Bettis 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.
She’s currently developing a TV series with Mindy Kaling & David Yates, a true crime limited series with Anonymous Content, and writing a feature for Amazon. Her plays have been developed and produced all over the US and Mexico. Theater accolades include Egerton Foundation New Play Awards, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Pulitzer nomination, and a finalist for the Blackburn Prize, among others. She’s currently under commission at Roundabout Theatre, Miami New Drama, Untitled Theatricals, and is writing the musical book “Lives in Limbo” with Sergio Trujillo, Michelle Rodriguez, and Julio Reyes Copello. She’s an alumni of the Sundance Institute Episodic TV Lab, a graduate of The Juilliard School, a broad member of New Georges, and proud member of the WGA East.
Becky Mode is a New York-based playwright and television writer/producer.
Becky’s first play, Fully Committed, opened at the Vineyard Theatre in 1999 and ran Off-Broadway for a year and a half at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Time magazine named it one of the ten best plays of 2000, and since then it has been produced throughout the United States, with extended commercial runs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, London and Paris.
The play has traveled to Finland, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, Sweden, Estonia and Poland. In 2016, Fully Committed had a limited run on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater, starring Jesse Tyler Ferguson and directed by Jason Moore.
In television, Becky 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, she 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.
Before becoming a writer, Becky worked as an actor. She went to graduate school at the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard. Favorite roles include Ann the librarian in Daisy Mayer’s cult classic Party Girl, Susan Walker in Anne Bogart’s Once in a Lifetime, and the young Jane Seymour in A&E’s I Remember You, opposite Clark Gregg and Daniel J. Travanti. She also spent many years waitressing, coat checking and taking phone reservations at some of New York’s finest restaurants.
Becky lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and their two children.
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”. A native of Long Island, NY, he lives in Manhattan with his wife and son.
Free with RSVP!
RSVP does not guarantee access, please arrive early.
