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Melissa Rosenberg
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Melissa Anne Rosenberg (born 1962) is a Jewish American screenwriter. She has worked in both film and television and has been nominated for one Emmy Award and two Writers Guild of America Awards. Since joining the Writers Guild of America, she has been involved in its Board of Directors and was a strike captain during the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. She supports female screenwriters through the WGA Diversity Committee and co-founded the League of Hollywood Women Writers.
Raised in Marin County, California, she majored in dance at Bennington College in Vermont but decided to pursue filmmaking instead, later graduating from the University of Southern California with a degree in film and television producing.
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Encyclopedia
Melissa Anne Rosenberg (born 1962) is a Jewish American screenwriter. She has worked in both film and television and has been nominated for one Emmy Award and two Writers Guild of America Awards. Since joining the Writers Guild of America, she has been involved in its Board of Directors and was a strike captain during the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. She supports female screenwriters through the WGA Diversity Committee and co-founded the League of Hollywood Women Writers.
Raised in Marin County, California, she majored in dance at Bennington College in Vermont but decided to pursue filmmaking instead, later graduating from the University of Southern California with a degree in film and television producing. She worked on several television series from 1993–2003 before joining The O.C.s writing staff and leaving the show to write the 2006 film Step Up. In 2006 she began writing for Showtime series Dexter, which she continues to write for. She wrote her second produced screenplay, a film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's novel Twilight, over five weeks in 2007, and has been hired to adapt the novel's two sequels, New Moon and Eclipse. She is married to television director Lev L. Spiro, with whom she lives in Los Angeles.
Biography
Early life
Rosenberg was born and raised in Marin County, California. Her father is Jack Lee Rosenberg, a psychotherapist and the founder of integrative body psychotherapy, and her mother was Pat Rosenberg, a musician. She was the second of four children by her father's first marriage and another by his second. As a child, she enjoyed presenting plays and recruiting other neighborhood children to perform in her shows. She attended a "massive public high school with a crowd of people bunched in a classroom and expected to learn" in Southern California, and later moved to New York City to join a small theatre company before moving again to Bennington, Vermont to attend Bennington College. She originally aspired to work in dancing and choreography, which she studied in college and describes as her "first love". She says she began too late, however, so she moved to Los Angeles, California to pursue a career in the film industry instead. She graduated from the University of Southern California's (USC) Peter Stark Producing Program with a Master of Fine Arts degree in film and television producing.
Career
Rosenberg acquired an agent through her USC Professor Glen Adilman and was working as a secretary when she was offered her first project, incidentally a dance film commissioned by Paramount Pictures which was, ultimately, never made. She then shifted to television writing. She first wrote for Class of '96 in 1993, and went on to work on shows including Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1995–1996), Dark Skies (1996), The Magnificent Seven (1998), Ally McBeal (2001) and Birds of Prey (2002) before she came to join the writing staff of The O.C. in 2003. Leaving The O.C. at the conclusion of its first season, she was hired to write her second screenplay, the 2006 dance film Step Up. (Later, she was also offered the job of writing the sequel, Step Up 2 the Streets, but turned the offer down as she was busy with other projects.) Rosenberg went on to write for the television series Love Monkey (2006) and Dexter (2006–present). Her job on Dexter, which is broadcast on Showtime, was her first on a show written for cable—she stated in 2007, "Cable is the place to be ... it's just wonderful." She and the other members of the Dexter writing staff were nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony for her work on the first season of Dexter. She was nominated for the same award at the February 2009 ceremony for her work on the third season of Dexter, and as an executive producer was also co-nominated for the Outstanding Drama Series award at the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards.
Summit Entertainment, the production company which had produced Step Up, offered Rosenberg the chance to adapt Stephenie Meyer's bestselling novel Twilight into a film of the same name, which she accepted. Her primary inspiration for the adaptation was Brokeback Mountain, which she described as a "great model" of forbidden love alongside Romeo and Juliet, and thought its adaptation from short story to film was "beautiful". She was given a "manifesto" written by Meyer outlining everything that had to be included or could not be changed in the adaptation. She wrote a detailed 25-page outline in August 2007, expecting to have another two months to write the actual screenplay, but had only five weeks to finish the script before the commencement of the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. After the release of Twilight, she was hired by Summit to adapt the sequels New Moon and Eclipse, the second and third books in the series, respectively, and she had already begun drafting the New Moon screenplay by November 2008.
Rosenberg was on the Writers Guild of America's Board of Directors for five years before stepping back because "you can get really, really wrapped up in it". She was very active, however, in the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, standing on the line as a strike captain. She is currently involved in the WGA Diversity Committee supporting female screenwriters, but is more active in the League of Hollywood Women Writers, which she and several other women set up while on strike, aiming to fight the "boys' club mentality" in television writing rooms.
Personal life
Rosenberg's mother died when Rosenberg was a teenager, after her father had remarried to Lynn MacCuish; he later married again to fellow therapist Beverly Kitaen-Morse. She has an older sister, Andrea (born 1960), younger brother and sister Erik and K. C. (twins, born 1963), and a younger half-sister, Mariya (born 1981), by her father's second wife.
Rosenberg lives in Los Angeles with her husband Lev L. Spiro, a television director, and their dog Zuma. She joked that "At our wedding, half the attendees were shrinks, the other half, their clients," after explaining that "My sister is a dance therapist; my other sister is in graduate school to become a therapist. My husband's parents are both shrinks. His uncle, two aunts and sister are shrinks."
Filmography
Films
Television
External links
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