Drew Crevello Michael Peterson Kathleen Peterson Lance Black Maggie Cohn city Salt Lake City state North Carolina Hollywood show Banner Drew Crevello Michael Peterson Kathleen Peterson Lance Black Maggie Cohn city Salt Lake City state North Carolina

‘The Staircase,’ ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ and More Limited Series Scribes Talk ‘Tightrope’ of Writing About Real People

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Cynthia Littleton Business EditorWhat’s harder to work with when it comes to writing a limited series — true stories taken from real life, or the stuff of fiction?

A panel of top writers debated the challenges of working with headline-driven and historical material during the final hour of Variety‘s Night in the Writers’ Room on June 9 at 1 Hotel in West Hollywood.“There’s a little bit of a tightrope-walk in a true story that you don’t necessarily have to walk in fiction,” said Dustin Lance Black, the writer-producer behind FX’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.” He noted that the series, about the 1984 murder of a woman and her infant daughter in Salt Lake City, deals with three intertwined stories, one of which is fictional. “That one to me, I had a slightly easier time with.

If I hit a dramatic wall and needed a complication, I was able to make it up. That’s lovely,” he said. Drew Crevello, creator of Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed,” stressed that writers adapting true stories have to take some narrative liberties to keep the plot moving and the audience engaged.“We’re all painting paintings.

These aren’t photographs,” he said. But there’s a larger truth to strive for that is important in the storytelling, he added. “I did feel responsibility to find the truth even in the things we were inventing between the reported facts.”Moderator Joe Otterson, Variety‘s senior TV writer, opened the session with a specific question for Maggie Cohn, showrunner of HBO Max’s “The Staircase.” The series is adapted from the famed true-crime docuseries about Michael Peterson, the North Carolina man who maintains his innocence despite having been convicted of the 2003 murder of his wife Kathleen Peterson.“Do you think he did it?” Otterson asked.

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