Previous entrants include Black Swan, Buried, and Chronicle. Welsh adores movies, but she also hopes to work in other entertainment fields down the road.Īnother Princetonian who inspires her is Winnie Holzman ’76, a writer who was able to achieve success both in television - with shows such as thirtysomething - and on Broadway by penning the book for the hit musical Wicked. Says Welsh, “I’d love to be able to do what she did.BloodList 2016 is here, and this year, the list is filled with sinister stories based on real life, alien invasions, paranoia, and horrifying events in the woods.įounded in 2009 by literary manager and producer Kailey Marsh, BloodList compiles a list of the best screenplays in the ‘dark’ genres - horror, thriller, dark comedy, and science fiction - as voted on by industry professionals.
“It’s a free film school in a podcast,” she says.
Welsh credits the Scriptnotes podcast, hosted by Craig Mazin ’92, for providing essential guidance in forging a career in movies. Then in 2008 she announced she was separating from her husband, who produced her music, after he had an affair with her close friend. The singer, who grew up in a household unraveled by domestic violence, went on to record several albums that shattered sales records, but lost her voice at the peak of her career after contracting Lyme disease. Mining books, interviews, and fan websites, Welsh studied the dramatic ups and downs of Twain’s life. In her free time, Welsh penned her script about Twain, using the research skills she honed at Princeton. She started on the show as a script coordinator, which gave her an opportunity to be in the writers’ room and pitch story ideas.
She now is a staff writer for Stillwater, an animated series on Apple TV+ for preschool-aged children that tackles topics such as grief and loneliness. Her responsibilities ranged from making sure all the gummy bears on the set were made by Haribo to creating a path through a jungle in the Dominican Republic for a scene in a remote cove and serving as a hand double for a film’s lead actress. Two weeks after graduation, Welsh moved to Los Angeles and landed a job as a director’s assistant, where she worked on the set of films such as the thriller The Disappointments Room. She was an English major with a concentration in film history and theory, and for her thesis, Welsh wrote a screenplay about a female superhero who rebels against the writer penning her tale after he cuts her out of the story. Welsh studied screenwriting at Princeton with lecturer Christina Lazaridi ’92. It currently is in development at the studio. Just before the list was published, Welsh’s screenplay was purchased by Sony Pictures. Welsh’s screenplay, Shania!, which she wrote on spec, was selected for the 2021 Black List, an annual ranking of the year’s best unproduced screenplays and a list that generates lots of buzz in Hollywood circles. After seeing the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter, about country music star Loretta Lynn, Welsh realized that Twain’s story of escaping poverty in rural Canada to become a globally known singer would make a great film in the popular genre of movies about music legends.
“I’d listen to it over and over,” she recalls. When screenwriter Jessica Welsh ’14 was 5 years old, she was obsessed with her mom’s Shania Twain album Come On Over.
Welsh’s script about singer Shania Twain made Hollywood’s annual Black List