How did StoryGPS Studio come about? Thirty years inside the story machine. Fifteen of those years as a studio executive — rising from story analyst to Senior Vice-president of Production, on films including Coming to America, Ghost, The Hunt for Red October, and Forrest Gump — with stops founding a management company and running the production arm of an independent international distribution company. Then fifteen more as an educator, mentoring emerging storytellers through the full arc of development and production. Somewhere along the way I earned an MFA in Screenwriting, where StoryGPS began as a graduate lecture analyzing The Wizard of Oz.

That lecture became the basis of my approach to teaching story development. Semester after semester, presenting that foundational structure to students kept generating the same challenge. Most creators are so confident in the story they carry inside them that they can't see when it isn't landing — when the gap between what they're trying to show and what actually reaches the audience is wider than they know.

That gap is the whole problem. Instinct is a starfield — vast, beautiful, and useless for navigation until the stars have names and coordinates. You can feel your way across it, but you can't chart a course for someone else, and you can't tell anyone where you're headed. That's what StoryGPS provides, and where the name comes from. It doesn't grade. It doesn't fix. It gives you the coordinates to see the structure already there on your page — so you can know, before it leaves your hands, what will reach the other side.

Development is an endless pursuit of better, not best. This is the instrument I wished I'd had in the room.

Selected credits, as production executive: Coming to America · Excess Baggage · Fat Man and Little Boy · Forrest Gump · Geronimo: An American Legend · Get on the Bus · Ghost · Groundhog Day · The Hunt for Red October · Love & Sex · Money Train · Multiplicity. As producer: Duets.