January 31, 2022 Get to know Wendy Braff and her latest career achievement: a new film, Just Swipe on demand!
Hi fans and friends of Catalyst! My name is Wendy Braff and I’m a Sitcom Writer, a Screenwriter and a Young Adult/Children’s Author. I entered the 2019 Catalyst Content competition and was honored to win Best Comedy Script for my pilot "Mr. Trivia."
My trajectory as a writer was set at a very early age – I used to sit in my bedroom in Connecticut, holding my cassette recorder up to the TV to record the audio of my favorite show, “Soap.” Then I would use the tapes to transcribe my favorite scenes. I was obsessed with the concept that all my favorite shows existed as words on paper, far away in Hollywood.
So in 1989, two weeks after graduating from Emerson College in Boston with a Mass Communications degree, I moved to Los Angeles and started my career in showbiz. I was a production assistant, then a writers assistant and it was on that job that one of the writers on the show suggested I submit a spec to the Warner Bros. Writers Program. I got accepted, and at the end of the program I was hired as a Staff Writer on “Growing Pains,” a show I had been watching since I was in High School. Surreal doesn’t go far enough to describe how it felt to get THAT call.
I was on staff of a few other shows, then was hired to develop a bunch of original pilots, then wrote my first feature “The Governess,” which Columbia Pictures bought for Jennifer Lopez to star in. It never got made, teaching me one of the first tough life lessons I needed to learn about this business.
But I kept at it and wrote every day, building a library of spec pilots and features. I had gotten to see my words on TV as a sitcom writer, but getting my first movie made was an uphill battle. Some of my scripts got attention, some got awards, and some even got optioned, but it wasn’t until my new movie “Just Swipe,” that I got to see my words go from script to screen. I’ve always been a big fan of Jodie Sweetin and to get to have her star in my movie and bring the character of Vanessa to life was thrilling. Not only that, but David Lipper, who stars and produces the film, went to Emerson with me and was in the very first project I ever wrote and shot when we were students there.
Shooting a movie about the pandemic DURING the pandemic was challenging and insane. But everyone involved was working at the top of their game and we got it done! I’m very proud of this movie and its messages about love, friendship, and what’s really important in life.
“Just Swipe,” starring Jodie Sweetin and David Lipper is available VOD on 2/8/22
Stay up to date with Wendy's work at https://www.wendybraff.com/
