new teacher profiles
Teacher follows her script
Mar 27, 2008 2:56 PM
A vindictive teacher channels a Shakespearian spirit in order to ruin a student who got away with murdering his daughter. He gets a job at the boy’s high school for the sole purpose of destroying him. Not only will he do him in, the kid will actually thank the teacher for doing so during his demise!
So goes the storyline of Jennifer Grunin’s script, a psychological thriller called “Chameleon” that’s based on “Othello.”
Fed up with fickle agents and a show-biz runaround that had more twists and bad surprises than a Shakespearian plot, the struggling screenwriter decided to take control and self-publish the script on Amazon.com.
And hey — it’s selling.
“There’s no ‘American Idol’ for writers,” Grunin said. “I knew the script was good, that it was very marketable. But it wasn’t making any money sitting in a drawer. Now I’ve made 30 sales, adding up to about 600 bucks total.
“The teacher in my screenplay is a modern version of the villain Iago,” Grunin said. “But he’s a sympathetic Iago, kind of like Scarface, whom you root for even though he does some pretty mean things.”
Although revenge fantasies are not unfamiliar to anyone trying to get some teaching done in a vast public school system, Grunin isn’t entertaining any in reality. She’s in love with her job at Life Academy of Film and Music, a new small high school housed in Brooklyn’s Lafayette HS building. Both she and the new school are in their first year.
In her native Massachusetts, Grunin worked as a disc jockey, a community theater actor and director and a high school English teacher, fresh out of college, in a public school just north of Cape Cod. She had an epiphany one day that her music and theater work “were entertaining but also educating and fit into the work of being a teacher. When you’re a teacher you play roles; you’re a cop and you’re a nurse and you’re a standup comic and a professor.”
She wanted to bring it all together and make literature come to life for her students, but came smack up against a wall.
“In my old school I felt I was teaching literature for literature’s sake and that it wasn’t relevant for the students. So what I started doing was teaching a film and lit class in one. The kids loved it, and even though it met the state standard for literacy and media, a few parents complained that I was teaching just a film class,” she said.
That’s when Grunin decided that her life story needed some serious rewrites.
She’d often dreamed of living in the arts capital of the world, and now she got a little help from fate. A poetic fate, in fact, as in the famous line from Christopher Marlowe, “Come live with me and be my love.”
“I was planning to move to Bensonhurst to be with the love of my life. I had just finished grad school in screenwriting and wanted to teach kids as well as write,” she said.
While trolling for job openings on the Web, she found Life Academy, which sounded like her dream school, and then she discovered it was not far from the apartment she and her Romeo had rented. “I was ecstatic, the universe was handing me a gift and I was like, cool, thanks, brilliant!”
And just in case she needed another omen from the universe that she was in the right place, that sign came after landing the job and learning that the school’s chapter leader, Elizabeth Bouiss, was an award-winning documentary filmmaker.
“We pride ourselves at Life Academy for having a curriculum that’s practical, relevant, meaningful,” she said. “In my English class we might read ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ then act it out, show some film versions of it, and analyze and compare them.”
Grunin teaches acting, screenwriting and the art of writing a story. The technical side — “stuff like angles and lighting” — are taught in film class. Grunin’s students have made short films, starting with storyboarding, and her goal is to get them to develop longer and better scripts.
“It’s a work in progress,” she said.
“We’re acting almost every day. On the practical side, I give my kids tips about what it’s like to try and make it as a screenwriter. I always tell them, ‘Get health insurance first.’ But I also tell them that anything can happen at any moment.”
The moment Grunin is waiting for is to see her own writing come to life.
“I’d like to be able to throw a script in someone’s lap and say, ‘Here, breathe life into this.’ That’s the only thing I want,” she says.
“No matter what, I’ll be teaching for a very long time. I love getting up in the morning. I get ideas for my writing every day from those little characters in my class. I get to chat with some teenagers about some great books, and they get to run around and wave swords. That’s a beautiful thing.”
And what if those little characters act out in a way that’s not in the script?
“I always tell the kids, ‘If you keep misbehaving, you’re going to end up in one of my screenplays.’”
