Mastering the Art of B-List Films

A screenwriter of made-for-television movies reflects on his career:

Even when I wrote something like In The Line of Duty: Smoke Jumpers (sample note from NBC exec: “Can the Smoke Jumpers take their shirts off more?”), I never thought of myself as a TV-movie hack. I wrote with the anguish and conviction of an uncompromising indie auteur. And by ghost I mean that it’s pretty much all over. The kind of stuff I specialized in was, for the most part, Movies of the Week, known in the business as MOW’s....As a writer of what I call colon movies (such as Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Take Me Home: The John Denver Story), the ’90s were my golden decade. I was an A-list writer of B-list productions.