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HOLLYWOOD husband and wife script writers Andre and Maria Jacquemetton lent a helping hand to multi-media students at the University College of Bahrain (UCB), giving a lecture on the inner workings of their profession, writes Charlie Holding.
The couple, who have worked on shows including Baywatch, Highlander, Star Trek and Mad Men, have been married for 22 years and have spent the whole time working together in a dog-eat-dog industry where loyalty and camaraderie are far from commonplace.
Andre and Maria told bachelor degree students how they got started in the business and offered tips, advice and insider knowledge to the students who are diligently working on creating their own short films/pilot episodes and documentaries.
The UCB multi-media department has been active for three years but recently changed curriculum, making it internationally-accredited. Thanks to a unique scholarship the visit was made possible.
UCB senior multimedia lecturer, Zeeshan Shah, said: “This is the first seminar in association with the US Embassy who I have been in contact with for some time. They told me they were bringing artists to Bahrain under the Fulbright Scholarship.”
The scholarship offers a programme of merit-based grants for the international educational exchange of students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists and was founded by US Senator J William Fulbright in 1946.
“Our students are making short films based on a script. The script and story is very important, if people like the story they’ll watch your movie and if the story isn’t any good, they won’t,” explained Mr Shah.
Maria, 52, from Massachusetts, US, said: “It took me 10 years to crack the script-writing field. In the meantime, I worked as a secretary in the film production industry. I was writing at night and on the side, eventually one of my scripts got noticed and allowed me to win a Fellowship at Disney and that was my shot at being a paid writer.
“I did the fellowship for two years and at the end of it I met Andre and we got married and started working as a husband-and-wife team. We were able to catch the attention of an agent who got us a pitch meeting at a TV series called the Raven, a spin-off of the popular Highlander series.
“After a while we became staff writers for Baywatch. Once you get into that world you move up to eventually become a producer.”
Andre, 48, originally from Leon, France, moved to the US when he was 12. After his father passed away, he realised that he didn’t want to be involved in the family textile business and started to focus on writing and meeting new people.
He said: “We meet so many different people and most people have fascinating stories if you dig deep enough. Some of our best stories come from talking to people and brainstorming. We’re sort of like vampires, taking a little piece of people we meet and turning that into a tale.
“It took us 10 years before people took us seriously and knew we could write and it was a long struggle.
“Part of being a writer is being rejected all the time. We pitch a lot of stories and a lot of them don’t fly and yet we just keep on going and that’s the difficult part. You can’t be shy, you have to express yourself and have a thick skin if you’re going to make it.”
They detailed the process of writing a script, using storyboards and creating characters and narrative. The couple also reiterated that ‘the more life experience you have, the deeper your writing becomes’.
