Super
cool writing team on the blog today!!! Best friends and co-writers. How cool is
that! And check out this bio. I am a
little geeked out!
Alyssa Embree Schwartz and Jessica Koosed Etting are each half of a
writing team. The two met the first day of freshman year at the University of
Southern California and instantly bonded over their obsessions with Brenda
Walsh, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Babysitters Club books they read
growing up. After spending a full year mourning the end of college, they began
writing television and feature scripts together. They have set up pilots at
ABC, NBC, Fox and CW, and sold films to The Weinstein Company, Happy Madison,
Paramount, New Regency, MGM and Alloy Entertainment. They love writing
female-centric stories, especially for teen and tween audiences, mainly because
they still think they are the 18-year-old girls they were when they first met
at USC.
Let’s
find out about how these two became best friends and what they entailed.
So, how did
you two meet?
The two of us (Alyssa and Jessica)
actually met and became best friends freshman year in college…and we then
followed that up by living together after graduation and becoming writing
partners. Not only are we in touch, but we’ve worked together almost every day
for the last ten years! People say not to mix business and pleasure, but in our
case, it’s been fantastic…we can go from discussing a character arc in our novel
straight to discussing whether one of us should cut bangs and back.
That
just sounds AWESOME. So, did you ever have a big fight?
Despite the fact that we’ve worked closely
together for so many years, we really don’t fight. In fact, our biggest tiff
occurred before we were friends, when
we first met…we actually hated each other at first sight! It was the first day
of classes freshman year at USC and Alyssa was sitting in the classroom,
feeling homesick. That’s when Jessica showed up to class fifteen minutes late,
her platform shoes clicking loudly on the tiles and interrupting the teacher.
Alyssa eyed her disapprovingly and wondered, Who is this incredibly rude
girl (who wears four inch heels to class!) – that is NOT someone I’d ever be friends with. Meanwhile, Jessica
took one look at Alyssa glowering at her from the corner and thought, Who
is that miserable depressed-looking girl who refuses to crack a smile? Note to
self: Steer clear of her! A few
weeks later, though, we both had to stay after class to speak with the teacher,
and we started talking to each other on our way back to the dorms. We haven’t
stopped since.
Love!!!
So did you have a favorite song, or a favorite place where you hung out?
Our favorite song is Say My Name by Destiny’s Child because we made complete fools of
ourselves singing it for a Karaoke night at a super trendy bar in Hollywood. We
were so terrible that we got booed off the stage by the crowd…which was
mortifying at the time, but now utterly hilarious to us.
One of our favorite places to hang out has
to be the Japanese sushi restaurant and bar behind our old apartment. When we
lived there, we’d go there all the time for dinner with each other…or when we
were feeling super lazy, we’d yell down from our balcony to the waiters (our
friends) who were hanging in the alley outside of the kitchen to bring food out
for us, then one of us would run downstairs and bring it up for the other. We
don’t live near there anymore, but we can’t drive by it without remembering all
the fun nights that started there.
Best
memories ever! So what did you guys most love to do?
Nothing better than a good old fashioned
gossip session followed by watching some reality television together with lots
of breaks to discuss the drama (our favorites are The Bachelor and Bad Girls
Club. Yes, Bad Girls Club. We
love it!)
Um…yes please!! What did you love
most about your college best friend?
It’s
almost narcissistic for us to answer this question because we’re so similar
it’s frightening. We grew up on opposite coasts, but after fifteen years of
friendship, some people (our husbands) are convinced we share a brain. We
usually finish each other’s sentences and we’ve also mastered the art of having
conversations with our eyes which definitely comes in handy during work
meetings.
What did you learn from your best
college friend?
We
both remember the very first thing we learned from the other person. Alyssa
grew up in a fairly small city in Virginia that is not exactly on the cutting
edge of fashion and style. So at the all important age of eighteen, as the two
of us were listening to Madonna’s Immaculate
Collection and getting ready for a fraternity party, Jessica taught Alyssa
that before you blow dry your hair, you have to put product in it. Alyssa and
her hair have never looked back.
When
we moved in together not long after that and lived in our apartment for about a
week, Jessica’s room was overtaken by an Eiffel Tower-size pile of clothing on
the floor, plates of old, crusty food, mugs of half-filled coffee and popcorn
kernels that crunched beneath your feet as soon as you walked in. This is when
Alyssa taught Jessica how to use a mop. Though Jessica doesn’t always make a
habit of using this wonderful skill, it was an important life lesson she hasn’t
forgotten.
So great! Are your relationships different
at this stage in your life? How?
We’re
still close with all our friends from college, though we obviously don’t see
everyone nearly as much. In college, you can spend three days straight with
each other and not even realize it! But what’s amazing about the bonds we
formed then is that even if we haven’t seen someone for months, we always pick
up right where we left off—definitely the sign of a strong friendship.
As for
the two of us, we lived together until we were twenty-five and got hit with the
next stage of our life—Jessica got engaged. We still laugh about the day when
we realized the wedding was only two months away and it was probably time for
Jessica to move in with her fiancé. We thought everything would change after
that, but the only person whose life shifted was Jessica’s husband who didn’t
quite realize he was gaining a second wife (something he made sure to warn
Alyssa’s husband of a few years later). Then this September, we entered another
phase—Alyssa moved from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. and again, we thought
things might be different being across the country from each other. But we
Skype for work every day and make sure to start early because inevitably the
first hour will be devoted to hearing about what happened to each other in the
last fifteen hours, TV recapping and analyzing ad nauseam any problems one of
us might be having. The most impressive thing about friendship by far is that
we actually get any work done at all.
You two sound so fun and what a great story of friendship!
Thanks so much for sharing it today!!!
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