Alumni Scores A Spot On The Blacklist With GRAND PORTAGE

EDITOR’S NOTE: Alumni Dan Olson (MFA/Directing ’07), along with Derek Johnson (MFA/Screenwriting ’06), are having their script Grand Portage featured on The Blacklist right now. We wanted to share his success, and let Dan talk about how the story came to be.

They say, “Write what you know,” and for me, that included the possibility that my twin boys were going to die.

My boys were born 11 weeks early, at a scant two pounds each. This was after my wife’s diagnosis of pre-eclampsia. Everyday my family feared the worst, but I lucked out. As preemies, our boys avoided all but the most minor complications. Presently, they’re tearing up the house like young boys do. But the trauma of their birth lingers.

Writing became therapy. I turned my fears into an honest, heartbreaking, and occasionally funny exploration of grief that I hoped would reveal some of the many ways people handle loss, fear, and moving on. It was the worst fear I had ever felt, and the result was 
Grand Portage
.

The script emerged during a daily train commute in and out of Manhattan, when I was trapped with my thoughts and emotions, emotions strong enough that I needed to put them somewhere other than my head. 
Grand Portage
 became the embodiment of a fear that kept me awake at night as I pondered the future of my children, trapped behind protective, plastic shells in a Connecticut Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Unlike in life, 
Grand Portage
 realizes these fears for my protagonist. He loses his wife and son in premature childbirth and runs to the place of his wife’s youth, afraid he has nothing left – the woods and waters of northern Minnesota. It’s a place I very likely could have ended up had my fears become real, lost in a wilderness on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Today, 
Grand Portage
 is The Blacklist’s featured script.

A couple of Chapman alums helped me get it there. Prior to completing the script, I joined creative forces with Derek Johnson and Joe Pezzula (both MFA in Screenwriting, 2006), and we got busy utilizing the production skills we gained at Dodge College to develop the film’s path forward.

When submitting to The Blacklist (
www.blcklst.com
), we were confident in our work, but we also recognized the need for an objective measure of our story’s strengths and weaknesses. The Blacklist’s feedback and compliments proved invaluable; they armed us with encouragement as well as constructive criticism.

Dan Olson