Aim High
Can You Make Your Own Favorite Movie feat. Rob Edwards ‘81
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Episode notes
If you’ve seen The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Treasure Planet, or The Princess and the Frog, you've seen some of our guest’s writing work.
Rob Edwards is a screenwriter. After Cranbrook, he went on to major in film at Syracuse University, and is now living in Beverly Hills. He also works as an adjunct professor for Syracuse University’s Los Angeles program.
He sits down with Robert and talks about the teachers at Cranbrook who inspired him to pursue his creative dreams, learning to read and appreciate literature at Cranbrook, tenacity, and collaboration in writing rooms.
About The Guest:
Rob Edwards has been writing for film and television for the last 30 years. He is an Emmy-nominated writer whose credits include Full House, In Living Color, Roc and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. His work in animated feature writing includes Disney’s Oscar-nominated The Princess and the Frog and Treasure Planet.
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Selected Quotes:
Rob’s approach to screenwriting
15:02 - You should be delighting yourself all the way through it, and really making your own favorite movie. So that you yourself are crying when you see it. And you yourself laughing at all the jokes and you yourself are truly identifying with the story. If you've done that, if you've truly pleased yourself, then chances are, you've also pleased your friends and probably your family and by extension, you know, 500 million other people will have a similar experience.
How Rob finds the drive to keep writing
30:44 - That lure is always there for me. I want to die with my boots on, so I'm like -I love the challenge of new stuff. And, just seeing if I can break news stories. I love telling stories. I love breaking the structure of it.
On finding motivation at Cranbrook
26:32 - Everybody that I knew was super driven. You didn't find a lot of guys who would just give up on stuff. Everybody was really competitive and it was good for me.
Collaboration and drawing inspiration from your own history
18:44 - It's the joy of the process. It's really teamwork. Its best where you're kind of sharing souls in order to tell a really great story. Another fun thing that happens is, in order to get to those places, you wind up really sharing intimate stories about your own past. Why these things are important to you and why you want to tell the story in a certain way.