May 2012
83 posts
Each year we create a TV Writers Studio Handbook for the incoming cohort. I’ll need a short autobiography from each of you. Tell us anything you’d like your cohort members to know. You can include the college/university you graduated from, your major, graduation date, hobbies, awards you’ve received, any work experience, any field related experience, pets, etc, etc, etc.
Harry Nelson owns the complete series DVD box sets of the following TV shows: The OC, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, Friends, Party Down, Andy Ricther Controls the Universe, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Arrested Development… but that probably doesn’t matter. He can’t loan you any of them (you all own Friends by now anyway, right?) because he left them in Indiana. Indiana is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its state bird is the cardinal and state television show is NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Indiana is where Harry was born and lived for 25 years. Harry graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Film and Video Studies. When Harry tells people this at parties they seem impressed, but soon realize that it is not as interesting as it sounds and move on. This is the correct reaction.
In college Harry wrote and directed a short film called “I Think I Fucked a Vampire,” which won an award predicated on gathering a relatively small number of YouTube views. In his free time Harry likes to eat pizza, watch TV, and write in the third person. He also enjoys editing and wearing headphones, often at the same time. This is his first time in New York. Moving was tough, so he encourages you all to be impressed with his perseverance.
Harry really likes television and is excited to try and make it. His mother is pretty sure he’ll do an okay job but couldn’t elaborate as she is currently marathoning through his abandoned Gilmore Girls DVDs.
My Dreamgirl (Don't Exist)
Neutral Milk Hotel
Neutral Milk Hotel — My Dream Girl (Don’t Exist)
My dream girl don’t exist. At the age of five she slit her wrist.
She didn’t know that I’d be hanging around, so her parents buried her in the ground. And this day I can still hear the sound of a life in outer space.My dream girl don’t exist. Just you and I and this TV.
And this illness seems to feel so strange, like a henchman that’s about to hang the moon up like a ball and chain and set the sands ablaze.
“
Why was the younger person always the prize, the older person always the striver? Ever since adolescence Pella had been gathering experience in the role of the younger person, the clung-to one, the beloved. That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed. Really it made no sense. What were the old hoping the young would become? Something other than old? It hadn’t happened yet. But the old kept trying.
By the old she meant everyone who loved something younger—her dad but also David, and even the twentysomething guys she’d hooked up with in high school. Everyone always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes. You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you’d mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo.
” —Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding: A Novel