2012 NYTVF: Graham Yost

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Last week I attended the 8th Annual New York Television Festival. Here’s a summary of the Graham Yost keynote.

The second day of the festival featured keynote speaker Graham Yost. Graham is a screenwriter, who is currently the showrunner on FX’s Justified. The conversation was moderated by columnist John Sellers. Graham talked about breaking in, his time writing for Hey Dude and Full House, and how he transitioned into features by writing Speed.

While Graham was interesting, the conversation suffered from Sellers’ poor moderating. At two different points Sellers lost the crowd. Audience members fired up their phones, texted, and were constantly checking the time; some left mid-conversation.

Sellers seemed unprepared as he bounced around in a way that made it seem like he wasn’t listening to the answers Yost was giving. Sellers asked several throw-away questions such as “You seem to work with actors with cool names, is that on purpose?” The audience, largely comprised of artists from the festival, was left wanting more depth – and so was I. The young writers and filmmakers in the crowd wanted more detailed stories about Yost’s process of writing, outlining, and making a project happen from script to screen. There was some of that; however there were also Sellers’ editorial comments on Christian Slater, and a bunch of other nonsense that prevented Yost from giving more details about his experiences. This event was good, but could have been so much better.

 

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