CREATE with Liz Hara: Running towards failure, writing the future of TV, and finding the fun
Julie and Casey chat with Liz Hara (prolific TV writer, expert puppeteer and costume designer, citizen of Sesame Street, candy expert, all-around-cool-chick) about running toward failure, the pure magic and community-building power of puppets, what it’s like to be the only POC in a writer’s room (and how that world is changing for the better), and why puppets and emus don’t mix.
TOP TAKEAWAYS:
Liz fell in love with puppets while working in theater in Minneapolis as a teenager and watching a gruesome dark comedy called Shockheaded Peter. Her first love is Butoh-style puppetry, where the puppeteers actually disappear even as they’re right in front of you working the puppets.
For the last several years of working with Jim Henson studios, she’s been learning the art of moniter-style puppetry, where you have to puppet while watching a reversed image on a monitor to make sure the puppet is doing what it’s supposed to. Our brains hurt just thinking about it.
Her work with puppets has allowed Liz to travel all over the world with shows and to festivals. One of those festivals, the World Puppet Festival of Charleville-Mézières, came along at a time when she was feeling some existential dread (“maybe I’ve just seen everything that there is to see and I don’t know what I’m doing with my life blah blah blah”), and renewed her faith in everything. Couldn’t we all use a dose of that?
“For puppetry to work, the audience has to buy into the premise. By putting it up there, the artist is inviting the audience to ‘come play’. You have to agree that the thing we are moving is not just a doll being wiggled—we have to agree that this thing is alive. So there’s this immediate sense of community that is built, and that’s what I think makes it so special and so powerful.” (And isn’t that the goal of every artist and every public speaker—to create community?)
Sesame Street is “the home of [Liz’s} heart”—she started out as a puppet builder and puppet costume designer and became a puppet “wrangler” (which she describes as the “pit crew” for the puppets on set.) And she’s got some STORIES…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pvtcWwPVmk&t=113s
It was actually one of the head writers on Sesame Street who encouraged Liz when she wanted to venture from writing plays and works for puppets to writing for TV. She began writing for Sesame Street, and then entered a pitch competition at the Austin TV Festival (which she won!), got a manager and an agent, and got her first staff writing position on a sitcom, and found out she had to move to LA from NY with about 17 hours notice.
Liz has now been in several writers’ rooms, sometimes diverse, and sometimes where she’s been the only person of color in the room. Her experience is that being “the only” means that she was looked at as the default expert on ALL people of color, or wondered if she was supposed to be the “BIPOC police”. Part of the ethos of a writers’ room is that you never want to kill an idea or a joke unless you can “one up” it. This means that a lot of energy goes into “do I speak up or will this moment pass,” which means you get quieter, which means you may be seen as not fully present . . . (classic double binds). A more diverse writer’s room means that each writer can draw on their own personal experience instead of having to represent EVERYONE’s experience.
Why YA TV shows might have some of the best writing out there.
If you need ideas for how to bring your community together digitally in this time, Liz has your back . . . (QUARANTEDTALKS!!??)
“Play is a joyful approach to life without fear of failure—play and failure are extremely linked and you can’t create good work or live a good life without failure.”
Puppeteering and writing is a “relentless process of learning a CRAFT”—which is why both the dedication to your own learning and the generous sharing of knowledge with others is so crucial. Institutional knowledge and the experience of/training from mentors is hugely important. Liz credits her many wonderful mentors, and is excited to now be playing that role for others.
LIZ HARA writes television for little kids, big kids, and even bigger kids. She currently writes for Sesame Street, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in 2018. She has also written for CBS’ Life in Pieces, Apple+’s Helpsters, HBO’s Esme & Roy, and Nature Cat and Odd Squad for PBS. Her newest gig is writing for Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, the newest Marvel superhero cartoon for Disney. Liz is also a puppet and costume builder, winning an Emmy for Best Costume Design in 2015 with her team for their work on Sesame Street. She has worked on several other theatrical and film productions, including Avenue Q, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and The Lion King.
Liz is also a fantastic dancer, is super fun at weddings, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of candy.