Rawson Marshall Thurber and Haley Hope Bartels | 2021 Nicholl Conversations
Writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber dives into the craft of screenwriting and storytelling inspiration with Haley Hope Bartels who won a 2021 #Nicholl Fellowship for her script “Pumping Black” (logline below).
“Pumping Black”: After a desperate cyclist takes up a team doctor’s dangerous offer, he seems on course to win the Tour de France. But as the race progresses and jealous teammates, suspicious authorities, and his own paranoia close in, he must take increasingly dark measures to protect both his secrets and his lead.
Haley Bartels is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter.
She is originally from a small town in the Northern California wine country, where the onlyentertainment available to anyone under 21 was the tiny local movie theater. That, coupled with a voracious appetite for reading and parents who wisely (or not, depending who you ask), encouraged her to pursue her love of storytelling, launched her into writing – initially with blatant Neil Gaiman knockoff fanfic, then original short stories that occasionally involved murder, and now, ultimately, into screenplays that
almost always involve murder.
A die-hard genre fan, she primarily works in historical fiction, horror, sci fi, and fantasy. She received her MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute, and, prior to that, her BA in English from UCLA. She has also studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in New York, as well as at Russia’s premiere school for the dramatic arts, the Moscow Art Theater (МХАТ). She is the winner of AFI’s Writers’ Room Ready Award, and has also worked as an advisor for Sundance Co//ab’s “Crafting Your Pilot” course. Currently, she has a period drama pilot in development with Chemically Altered Productions, and is in the midst of writing and producing her first feature film, an elevated indie horror, which is slated to enter pre-production in early 2022 and shoot that summer with Nightshade Pictures and director Austin Rourke.
When she’s not writing, you’ll find her cycling in Griffith Park, reading the latest from (who else) Neil Gaiman, Mohsin Hamid, or David Mitchell, or at Sunset Nursery agonizing over whether she has room (she doesn’t) for the plant she’s about to buy.
She lives in Glassell Park with four comedians and one very ridiculous dog, which she highly recommends to anyone who spends most of their time writing about murder.
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