Writers
Margaret Nagle
Margaret Nagle was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for writing the HBO original film Warm Springs, which was nominated for 16 Emmys and won five, including Outstanding Made for Television movie. She was also honored by the Writers Guild of America with awards for long-form original for Warm Springs and for Best New Show for Boardwalk Empire. Her Lifetime series Side Order of Life, which she created, was among the recipients of the first Television Academy Honors in 2008 for its bold and realistic depiction of a young woman battling cancer. She is currently working on pilots for both NBC and HBO.
Kirk Ellis
Kirk Ellis won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, a WGA Award, a Peabody and the Humanitas Prize for his work on the HBO miniseries John Adams. The miniseries won a record-breaking 13 Primetime Emmys in total. Previously, Ellis received an Emmy nomination and won the WGA Award and Humanitas Prize for ABC’s Anne Frank. His miniseries Into the West, Life with Judy Garland and The Beach Boys: An American Family all received multiple Emmy nominations. Upcoming feature projects include a two-film biography of the Marquis de Lafayette for director Jean-Francois Richet (Mesrine) and Oscar-nominated Why Not Productions, and the Mormon polygamy drama Escape, for director Lasse Hallstrom and star Katherine Heigl. For HBO, Ellis is writing The Day the Laughter Stopped, an account of the Fatty Arbuckle trials of the 1920s, to star Eric Stonestreet and to be directed by Barry Levinson. Series projects include The Company, a pilot script for HBO and George Clooney’s Smokehouse Productions about the agribusiness world, and OSS for Starz, the story of the famed WWII spy organization. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television, Ellis began his professional career as a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, and at age 24 served as the magazine’s international editor. In 1992 he formed Shadow Catcher Productions, an independent production banner under which Ellis develops his own independent features and documentaries. He serves as chairman of the Santa Fe, New Mexico, Arts Commission, and sits on the advisory board of James River Writers and the Western Writers of America.
