Pictured: FVS Guest Speaker Ligiah Villalobos

From: Dennis Conway Date: Oct. 22, 2017

How does it feel to start your career as a dancer, then become a television executive, a producer, a comedy show writer, a children’s show head writer, a screenwriter, a consultant, and an educator? Hollywood veteran Ligiah Villalobos explained her multifaceted life for over an hour in a candid interview to Mass Media’s Film and Video Society via Skype on Wednesday, Oct. 18. FVS Advisor Dennis Conway moderated the opening interview, while President Jonathan Bice relayed questions from the audience thereafter.
Villalobos is perhaps best known for writing an independent feature film, Under the Same Moon, which earned $23 million worldwide. She also served as a writer for NBC’s situation comedy show, Ed, and as Head Writer for Go, Diego, Go, a children’s show on the Nick, Jr. cable network. More recently, Villalobos won a Humanitas Prize in 2013 for her writing of the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, Firelight, produced by Alicia Keys and Mary Martin, which aired on ABC. She has served as consultant on the Pixar movies, Planes and the upcoming Day of the Dead project, Coco.
Villalobos was born in Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles, where she attended Antioch College for her B.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She explained that the current writing opportunities in Los Angeles are good and improving, since more cable outlets are creating their own programming, and online show producers such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon have created even more writing opportunities.
Villalobos feels that currently the “quality of storytelling” is better in TV than in film, claiming that “TV kicks ass.” She explained that writing for TV can be very lucrative. A TV writer can earn $24,000 for a 30-minute episode, and $60,000 for a 60-minute episode. But it can be a “hard life,” she says, and unpredictable. Someone “might earn $500,000 one year, and then $30,000 a year for the next two years.” She said that young writers need to “live in a way to save your money.”
She also thought that Hollywood films at present were somewhat narrow in their focus, saying that “Hollywood only wants to make broad comedies, action films, and comic book stories” right now. Villalobos claimed that she would like to see more work produced with themes about the lives of “women, Hispanics, and LGBT people.” She claimed that the only studio summer film she really liked was “Wonder Woman.”
Villalobos explained her unique career path by saying that she started as a studio executive at the Walt Disney Company, where she oversaw television production in Latin America for five years, launching eight children’s shows in seven countries, and then supervised their Writer Training, and later, Directing Training Programs. After that she served as Current Programming Executive at the WB network. Still, she longed for even higher-quality shows to produce, and that made her want to become a writer, and develop her own projects.
When asked what made her low-budget feature film, Under the Same Moon, a hit at the Sundance film festival, where she watched five studios engage in a weekend bidding war for its rights, she answered that it was “authentic.” Ironically, she claimed that her career as a writer received its biggest boost in status and publicity from that film, even though in one night, “8.5 million people watched Firelight,” her Hallmark TV film.
When asked what the major differences were, regarding writing for film or TV, she answered that the production pacing in TV was much faster. Her feature film script was written in 2001, started shooting in 2006, and was released in 2008. However, in the TV industry, a script may be written in weeks, shot a few months later, and broadcast quickly thereafter. For special projects, “the writer knows in 9 months if it will be moving forward” (being produced). Villalobos also said that the pressure in TV can be great. She recounted a co-worker’s suicide, saying that “No job is worth your life.” Happily, Villalobos explained that she is at a stage of her career in which people come to her with jobs, and that she is paid ”beforehand” for her work.
Villalobos offered more advice for young screenwriters who wish to work in Hollywood. When asked what types of writing samples they should submit, she said they should submit one original piece, and two “spec” (speculative) scripts for existing shows, comedic or dramatic, but not in both genres. She said industry people prefer short scripts, and that writers need to “stay in your lane,” meaning that agents and executives prefer that writers be categorized as either a comedic or dramatic writer, but not both. She also said that young writers should develop a “writing regimen,” to hone their skills.
When asked about “demo disks” (a sample of clips from students’ video projects), Villalobos said these were helpful to those who wish to be directors. She also said that in Hollywood, “a 20-minute student film would be considered long.” Students should concentrate on making films that last “ten minutes or less.” Villalobos also said that for young writers, sometimes working a “’brainless job’ might be better than one which requires intellect, because the latter might drain their ‘creative energy.’” “Don’t be a reader in a studio,” she said, “Take a temp job or be an Uber driver. Save your mental power.”
When asked about film producer Harvey Weinstein, the subject of numerous accusations by women for his predatory behavior, Villalobos had absolutely no sympathy. She claimed sadly that “It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” and that in the film and TV industries “some things are accepted that absolutely shouldn’t be accepted.”
When asked if she has met many Hollywood celebrities, Villalobos regaled the audience about being a close friend of Jennifer Lopez in their early days as dancers, and hobnobbing in Las Vegas at a prizefighting event, in a VIP tent with Kevin Costner, Denzel Washington, and Jack Nicholson. Years later, she regrets that at the party, she did not have the nerve to speak with one of her idols, dancer Gregory Hines.
Along with writing and consulting, Villalobos now teaches as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California. She also serves on numerous Outreach committees for the WGA (Writers Guild of America), where FVS Advisor Dennis Conway contacted her for this engagement. For more information about Film and Video Society events, contact Jonathan Bice at jrbice@valdosta.edu.