Marilyn Atlas
Instructor
About Marilyn
An award-winning producer and personal manager of actors and writers, Marilyn R. Atlas is equally at home in the worlds of film, television, and live theater. Among her credits as film producer are “Real Women Have Curves” for HBO, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, “A Certain Desire,” starring Sam Waterston, and “Echoes,” which won the Gold Award at the Texas International Film Festival. In addition to producing a variety of programming for the cable/ pay TV market, Marilyn served as a production consultant on the film “Call Me.” She was also involved as a producer in the development of the MOW “Nightwalker” and “Playing for Keeps.”
In live theater, Marilyn co-produced the West Coast premiere of the musical “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater” by Ashman and Menken (the writers of both “Enchanted” and “Tangled”). She also co-produced the award-winning play “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday,” which was made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter Gallagher. Her additional credits as a producer in live theater include “Today’s Special” and “As I Sing.”
Marilyn is a member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. She has spoken at their Writers’ and Producers’ retreats, the DGA-sponsored LA Asian Film Festival, as well as various other symposia for the Sherman Oaks Experimental College. She is a founding member of Women in Film’s Luminas Committee which supports the portrayal of women in non-stereotypical roles in film and television. She has spoken at events such as The San Francisco Writers Conference, the Santa Fe Screenwriters Conference and Richard Krevolin’s USC Screenwriting Retreat. Marilyn has also taught several actor workshops. Additionally, she was a guest lecturer in the Writing Program at USC, where she also teaches a class every year on creating three-dimensional, non-stereotypical characters. She has spoken at the Texas Bar Association and was a guest lecturer at Whittier Law School.
Marilyn has been a guest at various colleges, including Harvardwood, UCLA, USC, Emerson, University of Redlands, and the University of Wisconsin. She has served as the professional-in-residence (in theater and film) at Ball State University, and was the speaker at the International Writer’s Conference at Hollins University (2010). She structured an intensive course at Skyline College in San Francisco covering the inception, development and promotion of a script in “The Business of Screenwriting: The Idea – and its Execution.”
Her clients have appeared in shows such as Star Trek, Fringe, Pretty Little Liars, 90210, Revenge, Hart of Dixie, NCIS:LA, True Blood, Dexter, Chuck, Castle, and Criminal Minds. In addition, her clients have worked on feature films such as Holes and Transformers. Marilyn herself has been in development on pilots for Showtime and ABC Family.
In addition to Marilyn’s film/TV credits, she has sold (first time) novels “Chasing the Jaguar” to HarperCollins, “Hungry Woman in Paris” to Grand Central Publishing, and the “Ave Maria Bed & Breakfast” to Hachette Publishing, and the “Last Ride of Caleb O’Toole” to Source Books.
Recently, Marilyn has been developing the “Brides’ March” for Lifetime Television as well as a limited television series. She previously produced the musical version of “Real Women Have Curves” in Los Angeles in 2009 and is involved in the current development of “Real Women Have Curves” for 2015. In the fall of 2012 she co-produced the play “Detained in the Desert” at the Guadeloupe Theater in San Antonio. As of late, her Lifetime movie “The Choking Game” based on the YA book by Diana Lopez aired in summer 2014. She is also featured in the book “Write Now!” from Penguin/Tarcher. She is the co-author of a relationship-based, screenwriting guide called “Dating Your Character,” about an organic approach to character creation for Stairway Press’s Fall 2015 catalog. She was also recently a speaker at the International Women’s Writer Conference in Italy.