HBO wants female and minority writers for writing fellowship

A hot topic preceding the Oscars before the real controversy of Neil Patrick Harris’ bad job as host overshadowed everything was the fact that Hollywood is white as hell. Just a bunch of whiteys giving each other awards, talking about how Selma couldn’t get award votes because the stars wore protest t-shirts and then when a Mexican director actually wins an award there’s a completely bizarre green card joke. HBO figures maybe they can fix this by getting more women and minorities into the movie business, so they’re looking for women and minorities for their intensive writing fellowship/TV development program.

The HBOAccess Writing Fellowship is a one-week program that runs eight attendees through the rigors of “character, story, pitching, securing an agent, and networking” according to the application page, with lessons coming from HBO executives and showrunners. After the week-long course in sunny California, the writers get paired up with an executive from HBO or Cinemax who helps them workshop a script that gets presented to entertainment executives after eight months of work. Our advice is to make sure you know how to write a sex scene if you get paired up with the Cinemax person.

If you’re reading this and saying “I’m a woman or minority with great TV ideas who also has a 1/2 hour or 1 hour script or teleplay in my back pocket,” then you’re in luck because that’s two of the requirements to apply for the fellowship. HBO also wants a resume or bio and an answer to the question “How has your background influenced the stories you want to tell?” Once you’ve got all that together, you can apply anytime starting March 4, but hurry: IndieWire notes that after there are 1,000 applications, HBO won’t be looking at any more of them. And remember: Only you can prevent the next racist Sean Penn joke.

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