By Michael Robin AB '08

Roberto Patino '06 is a writer and executive producer on HBO's Westworld. He has written and produced Prime Suspect, Sons of Anarchy, and The Bastard Executioner. His feature Cut Bank, starring Michael Stuhlbarg, John Malcovich, Liam Hemsworth, and Billy Bob Thornton, came out in 2014.

Q. How did your experience at Harvard inform your path? Were there any professors or instructors who pushed you to pursue writing?

A. Brighde Mullins, who was teaching Screenwriting in the English department when I was an undergrad, was the first person to take my scripts—and me as a screenwriter—seriously.

The first thing she read was my application to write a creative thesis when I was a junior. I had written a couple scripts by that point but I'd never really shown them to anyone. For the application, I took the first ten pages of one of my scripts, and reworked them obsessively. Submitting that was the first time I took something I'd written for me alone, as opposed to, say, a class assignment, and showed it to someone. It was the first time I put myself out there and said in some kind of official way that this is what I really want to do. I was terrified.

By Henry Johnson AB '18

Michael Colton '97 is a humorist and screenwriter, most recently of A Futile and Stupid Gesture, which tells the story of National Lampoon’s founding. The film will be released on Netflix on January 26 following a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. With writing partner John Aboud ’95, Colton also scripted Penguins of Madagascar and The Comebacks, as well as episodes of Childrens Hospital and Newsreaders. He has appeared as a commentator on several VH1 shows, including Best Week Ever and I Love the ‘90s.

Q. When did you realize you wanted to go into comedy?

A. Like almost every comedy writer I know, I wrote a humor column in my high school newspaper. (Our faculty adviser, paranoid about lawsuits, insisted the column be called “Just Kidding,” which is a horrible name for a column.) I fell in love with crafting jokes and getting a reaction from people. But it was a long time before I thought I could be a screenwriter. I interned at newspapers all through college and wrote for the Washington Post for a couple years after graduation. It was a fantastic job and I was lucky to have it. And I will always be a newspaper addict (print subscriber for life!). But I realized that what I loved about journalism was the writing aspect, not the reporting. I wasn’t a great investigator and didn’t care about landing scoops. I wanted to tell stories and make people laugh. So being a screenwriter was ultimately a better fit.

2017 Harvardwood Hero Sara Lynne Wright AB '09 volunteers with Living History, a UCLA Student Volunteer Program at UCLA Medical Centers, by interviewing long-term patients and writing one-page biographies for their medical files to help doctors care for them as people rather than only as medical cases.

Thanks to the Harvardwood Heroes grant, the Living History Program at UCLA was able to provide its volunteers with better tools to write up one page biographies of patients in the palliative care, geriatrics, oncology and med-surg units at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. Those biographies have not only helped treatment teams get to know their patients as people rather than only as medical cases but also provided each patient with a valuable keepsake: a written life story to share with their families and whomever they like.

Betsy Storm AB '14 describes how she put her 2017 Harvardwood Heroes grant to use in her work with Better Angels, a Los Angeles organization that guides low-income high school students through the college admissions process.

Since receiving Harvardwood’s generous grant this spring, Better Angels has continued to guide our Scholars on their college applications, and as they share and refine their stories of hardship, resilience and hope through their essays. Our Scholars have opened their hearts about their challenges – from being abandoned by both parents at age eight, to enduring verbal and physical abuse, to unsuccessfully attempting to revive a sibling after her sudden death. As Scholars have revised their stories week after week, not only have they become stronger writers in preparation for college, but also light has overshadowed darkness as they recognize the power and hope they carry for themselves, their families, and their communities....

In Spring 2017, we awarded four $500 grants through the annual Harvardwood Heroes program in recognition of Harvard alumni performing outstanding work at the intersection of the arts and service. This Thanksgiving weekend, we're catching up with the 2017 Heroes to share their program updates with the Harvardwood community and to express our gratitude for their inspiring impact on their communities.

First in the spotlight is Shaun Chaudhuri AB '15, co-chair of the UN Women Global Voices Film Festival, which promotes female filmmakers, producers, and writers.

2017 Hero Juliana Han AB '03, JD '08 co-founded the Piedmont Chamber Music Festival (PCMF), an annual summer festival featuring internationally-renowned performers who also give interactive chamber music performances in Oakland, CA at local community centers such as homeless shelters, hospitals, and nursing homes.

The Harvardwood Heroes grant helped fund the Community Engagement Initiative of the Piedmont Chamber Music Festival (“PCMF”). The mission of the Festival and of the Initiative is to engage with people with limited access to live music and to use the power of music to help diverse individuals communicate and commune together....

By Michael Robin AB '08

Roshan Sethi MD ’13 is a writer and physician whose show The Resident, a medical drama about the darker side of modern medicine, will premiere on Fox in January. Roshan’s feature Call Jane recently attached Elizabeth Moss to star. After completing undergrad at Yale and medical school at Harvard, Roshan began a residency at Harvard in Radiation Oncology, all while balancing a burgeoning career as a writer. Here, we talk with him about his path, his process, and his experiences working with writing partner Hayley Schore.

Q. When did you start writing? When did you begin to consider yourself "a writer”?

A. I started writing as a teenager. Mainly epic fantasy. That was my favorite genre. I read Game of Thrones way before it was fashionable.

Q. What drove you to attend medical school? Did you always know you wanted to be a physician?

A. I did. At a young age, I worked in my mother’s clinic as a receptionist. My twin brother and I sat at the front desk dressed in the same clothes, and led patients back to the examining rooms. I was always in awe of my mother, a general practitioner, who saw children and adults and could handle anything.

By Brittany Turner AB '10

Reginald Hudlin AB '83 is a television and film writer, director, and producer whose film MARSHALL, about the first African-American supreme court justice, premieres in theaters October 13. His Harvard VES thesis film, House Party, was the basis for the breakout teen comedy that launched his career in the 1990s. Since then, Hudlin has directed and produced films like BOOMERANG, BEBE’S KIDS, and DJANGO UNCHAINED,  and TV shows like THE BERNIE MAC SHOW, as well as a number of live awards specials and events. For three years, he served as President of BET Entertainment, overseeing the successful AMERICAN GANGSTER series, among others. Hudlin is also a lifelong comic book lover, and wrote many of the BLACK PANTHER series for Marvel Comics, as well as an award-winning run of SPIDER MAN. 

Q. What made you want to get involved with MARSHALL and tell this story in particular?

A. I was always a Thurgood Marshall fan, always felt that he was one of the most underrated heroes in American history. I thought this would make an especially good movie because it’s a part of his life that we don’t know—we know about him as a judge, and fighting Brown vs. Board of Education—but this is a case that’s very lurid—sex, murder, mayhem, racial tension—and the audience doesn’t know the outcome. It had the makings of a really good legal thriller.

By Emily Zauzmer AB '18

Ryan Halprin AB ’12 serves as a Vice President at Lin Pictures, where his responsibilities include co-producing the LEGO movies and developing live action features. A neurobiology concentrator at Harvard, he found his passion in the college’s theater community as an actor turned director. He started as an intern at Lin Pictures in the summer after his junior year and rose through the ranks after college. Here, he discusses his career path, his advice for students hoping to follow in his footsteps, and his work on The LEGO Ninjago Movie, which comes out this month.

Q. How did you go from concentrating in neurobiology at Harvard to pursuing a career in entertainment? Does your science background inform your career path at all?

A. There’s a lot of overlap for me—the two fields get at the same big questions: why do we do what we do? Why are humans so weird? If we study behavior, can we understand it? Help people live better? What does that even mean? When I started college I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I had that curiosity, and the psychology class I took inadvertently revealed that the answers to all these questions are getting unearthed by neuroscience. I wanted in on that action. I thought I could get at the microbiology of love, or fear, even comedy. The more I dug in though, the more I found that so much of what is studied today is organisms with a few thousand brain cells, because humans have 80 billion neurons and there are a lot questions we have to answer before getting to the sexy ones. The practice of it was slow, not very creative, and seldom collaborative.