Seth Greenland

Seth Greenland is an American novelist, screenwriter and playwright. He has two published novels, Shining City and The Bones as well as four plays. He released a third novel, The Angry Buddhist, (ISBN 978-1-60945-887-4) in 2012. Much of Greenland's work is set in Los Angeles, where he lives, penning characters dealing with or exposed to the dark underbelly of the city and treated in a tone of black humor.

His first play, Jungle Rot won both the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund For New American Plays Award ^[1] and the American Theatre Critics Association Award.^[2] His work is also recognized in anthologies such as The Otis L. Guernsey Jr. Best Plays of 1994-95, The Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural and Geographic Map of California Today,^[3] and Cape Cod Noir.^[4] Greenland's screen credits include writing for the HBO series Arli$ and Big Love. He is also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and one of the site's original bloggers.^[5]

Outside of writing, Seth Greenland and his wife, Susan Kaiser Greenland, established InnerKids, the first elementary school curriculum incorporating wellness techniques from the emerging practice known as Mindful Awareness.

Biography

Greenland was born in New York City and received his BA at Connecticut College and later, completed an MFA in film at the New York University Tisch School for Arts. He began his career as a journalist for an alternative newspaper called The SoHo Weekly News and writing spec scripts for television. One of his spec scripts caught the attention of T.V. Producer Norman Lear who eventually gave Greenland his first break writing for a television sitcom called "a.k.a. Pablo."

This would lead Greenland to Los Angeles, where he began a career in screenwriting. In 1993, Greenland collaborated with Doctor Dré and Ed Lover on the film Who's the Man?, a hip hop whodunnit starring the rap duo, directed by Ted Demme and written by Greenland.^[6] In 1995, Greenland's script My Teacher's Wife was made into a film starring Tia Carrere, Christopher McDonald and Jason London, and directed by Bruce Leddy. Greenland's latest novel, Shining City, was optioned by Warner Bros. and is currently in development.

In 2001, he returned to the television screen writing for the last season of Arli$$ and later, The Big Love."

Greenland lives in Los Angeles with his wife Susan Kaiser Greenland and their two children.

Novels

The Bones

The narrative centers around two characters; a comedian named Frank Bones and Lloyd Melnick, a highly successful TV comedy writer. The two became acquainted in New York when Melnick, then a struggling journalist, wrote a profile of the up-and-coming Bones. The pair re-unite years later after Melnick scores a huge contract writing for a network and Bones comes calling, asking for Melnick's help writing a sitcom based on the comedian's own life (his only other prospect is a role as a sitcom Eskimo). Melnick, who is grappling with his success and desperately struggling to write something meaningful of his own, turns Bones down, a snub that sets off a chain reaction of events that results in a Hummer parked in the living room of Melnick's posh manse followed by a cops-and-robbers run for the border.

Shining City

Angeleno Marcus Ripps has always been a model citizen. His brother, Julian, is decidedly less virtuous. When Julian dies of a heart attack, Marcus takes over his dry-cleaning business, not knowing of the venture's dirty details. Julian has been running a booming escort service under the front of the dry cleaning business. Marcus sets his ethics aside to do right by his brother; he continues to operate the business without telling his wife, Jan. But Jan soon becomes privy to the enterprise and, in a scarcely believable display of spousal understanding, agrees to be his partner.

The rights to the Shining City were bought by Warner Bros. Pictures and is set for development in 2011 with producer Donald De Line.^[7]

The Angry Buddhist

Set in the Mojave Desert east of Los Angeles, the novel is about three brothers, an incumbent Congressman, an investigator for the District Attorney's office, and a career criminal. Their lives are thrown into turmoil by a murder the week before an election.

References

External links

• Seth Greenland at the Internet Movie Database
• Official site