News

• Robert Schenkkan has received TWO Emmy Nominations in the same category,”Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie, or a Dramatic Special”for THE PACIFIC, Episodes #8 IWO JIMA and # 10 THE HOMECOMING! See the Nationally televised ceremony, Sunday, August 29th (check your local listings.)
• Schenkkan is hired to adapt and Co-Executive Produce Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer prize winning  trilogy, AMERICA IN THE TIME OF KING, as a seven part miniseries for HBO and Harpo Productions. Branch’s three books,PARTING THE WATERS, PILLAR OF FIRE, and AT CANAAN’S EDGE have long been regarded as the best and most thorough recounting of Martin Luther King and the American Civil Right’s movement.
• Schenkkan has added new management:  Dawn Saltzman from MOSAIC ENTERTAINMENT joins David Lubliner at WME in repping Schenkkan.
• Look for the Seattle Children’s Theater announcement of a future production of Schenkkan’s adaptation of Linda Sue Park’s Newbery Award winning novel, A SINGLE SHARD.
• Schenkkan just completed a residency at The Orchard Project with (among others) the Atlantic Theater Company, Dael Orlandersmith, Kerrigan and Lowdermilk, and Naked Angels.
• Schenkkan had a workshop reading of his newest commissioned play, ALL THE WAY, for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Bill Rausch, as part of their AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS SERIES.
• Schenkkan is at work on a new play commissioned jointly by Director Warner Shook and the South Coast Repertory Theater based on R. T. Smith’s short story, DOCENT.

Cover article in the Writer’s Guild Magazine Written by, about the making of/writing of THE PACIFIC, featuring Interviews will all the writers involved.

Read the Article

• Schenkkan is hired to adapt Ed Brubaker’s Eisner Award Winning Graphic Novel, INCOGNITO, as a feature film for Peter Chernin and Fox Films! INCOGNITO is the story of a super villain who is caught, turns State’s Evidence against his former crime boss, and goes into Witness Protection – without his super powers. From God to office monkey. And then…his powers start to come back.
• “FOX has acquired screen rights to Incognito, a graphic novel series written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips. Robert Schenkkan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Kentucky Cycle, will write the screenplay. Peter Chernin and his Chernin Entertainment will produce with Circle of Confusion’s David Engel.- Deadline Hollywood Daily, 4/29/2010

THE PACIFIC tracks the intertwined real-life journeys of three U.S. Marines across the vast canvas of the Pacific Theater during World War II. The miniseries follows these men and their fellow Marines from their first battle with the Japanese on Guadalcanal, through the rain forests of Cape Gloucester and the strongholds of Peleliu, across the bloody sands of Iwo Jima and through the horror of Okinawa, and finally to their triumphant but uneasy return home after V-J Day.   Produced by Dreamworks and Playtone Entertainment. Robert Schenkkan co-writer on episodes 4, 6, 8 & 10, and co-producer on all 10 episodes.

PART ONE: Written by: Bruce C. McKenna, Directed by: Tim Van PattenPART TWO: Written by: Bruce C. McKenna, Directed by: David NutterPART THREE: Written by: George Pelecanos and Michelle Ashford, Directed by: Jeremy PodeswaPART FOUR: Written by: Robert Schenkkan and Graham Yost, Directed by: Graham YostPART FIVE: Written by: Laurence Andries and Bruce C. McKenna, Directed by: Carl FranklinPART SIX: Written by: Bruce C. McKenna, Laurence Andries and Robert Schenkkan, Directed by: Tony ToPART SEVEN: Written by: Bruce C. McKenna, Directed by: Tim Van PattenPART EIGHT: Written by: Robert Schenkkan and Michelle Ashford, Directed by: David Nutter and Jeremy PodeswaPART NINE: Written by: Bruce C. McKenna, Directed by: Tim Van PattenPART TEN: Written by: Bruce C. McKenna and Robert Schenkkan, Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa

SEE HBO for Showtimes and Further Information

Lewis and Clark’s Excellent adventure

by STEVEN MIKULAN
LA WEEKLY 12/23/05
Read the Article

“…Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates…is an important work, even if that importance proves temporary. It appears against a flat horizon of nearly universal artistic and political silence regarding America’s Iraqi adventure and its garrisoning of the world with military bases. When Harold Pinter, in a prerecorded speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, denounced U.S. policy a few weeks ago, The New York Times was virtually alone in covering Pinter’s outraged comments. Neither the Washington Post nor the Los Angeles Times covered them. These two newspapers are merely like the rest of a country that covers its ears and drowns out bad news with singsong doggerel…Schenkkan’s play forces us to listen for once…” 

Playwright Robert Schenkkan Returns to the Scene of His Pulitzer

LA Downtown News, December 3, 2005
by Kristin Friedrich

“Robert Schenkkan was driving in his hometown Seattle last year when inspiration struck. The Pacific Ocean was on his left, the Olympic Mountains to his right, and the weather was conspiratorially pleasant.

“It was a sunny day,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright said last week. “We get a lot of sunny days. We just don’t tell people because we don’t want anybody moving up there.”

That’s when the odd title for his new play hit: Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates. It gets odder, Schenkkan explained during a break from rehearsals for the play, which has its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum Dec. 11. The touchstone for the piece wasn’t the famed explorers, but rather the war in Iraq….”

VARIETY – GORDON COX 
11/20/2005

“He’s in the midst of a year during which he’ll have four stage preems. His picaresque adventure “Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates,” starring James Barbour, begins perfs at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles on Dec. 1…”

Arts Review
THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
BY ROBERT FAIRES 

“…We’ve been enjoying this type of farce ever since Plautus spun yarns about wily Roman slaves, but some three-quarters of a century ago, Tinseltown put a special spin on the form, a uniquely American zaniness that came to be called screwball. That’s what Schenkkan is channeling here, the Hollywood hijinks of Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, with their odd-couple romances, adorable madcaps and quipping cynics, and send-ups of American dreams. He loves those stories, and when his Manny sets his silver tongue wagging with that trademark phrase, he’s giving his audience what they want to hear. He’s churning out dreams just like the studios…” 

In an extraordinary season of four premieres, UT alum Robert Schenkkan brings his old school a new screwball comedy…
by Robert Faires 

THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
11/04/05
When you’re a university theatre department with an alumnus who has a Pulitzer Prize in drama, it’s only natural that you’d want to produce one of his plays, right? And beyond merely mounting one, you’d be really tickled to give one its first production anywhere. So it is with the UT Department of Theatre and Dance, which is over the moon about its premiere of a new script by 1975 grad Robert Schenkkan….