richard willett

Richard Wilett is an award-winning fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter.
about

PUSHED TO DEFINE HIS "BRAND," RICHARD TELLS PRODUCERS HE WRITES COMING-OF-AGE STORIES, WHATEVER THE GENRE -- OR THE AGE OF THE MAIN CHARACTER.

He was born in Hollywood but grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and spent several years as a playwright in New York City before returning a few years ago to Los Angeles.
He is a published fiction writer, produced playwright, and an optioned screenwriter currently working on his tenth paid writing assignment.

"My characters are often on the outside looking in -- you may not even like them at first, but by the end they'll break your heart."

Richard's screenplay THE FLID SHOW was a semifinalist in the Nicholl Fellowships competition (top 50 out of more than 7,000 scripts) and has a unique star attached -- Mat Fraser, Paul the Illustrated Seal from AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW. The script is now being shopped to directors and female actors for the strong female lead and other roles.
His stage play 9/10 premiered off-Broadway in August and September 2023. "Powerful, haunting, elegiac, touching—in a world of happy shiny theater this stands out, and you should go see it. Fittingly, it plays through September 10th." — Lisa Ramici, Hi! Drama "The story that really got me was that of office worker Scott (Royce Thomas Johnson) and temp office worker Sahar (Chandini Prakash). Prakash and Johnson are fully living their characters as they confront cultural differences and innate prejudice in an earnest effort to be good to one another. . . . Both characters work out boundaries with each other and, in the process, make willing sacrifices with their eyes opened to each other’s humanity. But one final sacrifice is made blindly because tomorrow is unknown to them—and because we know, it shatters us. " — Margret Echeverria, Front Row Center
  • His novel A Friend of Dorothy's, a coming of age novel set at the start of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York City, will be published early next year. Richard Willett wrote A Friend of Dorothy’s when he was in his twenties. It was excerpted in the legendary gay literary magazine Christopher Street and in Permafrost, the literary journal of the University of Alaska, and it was slated to be published by Gay Men’s Press in England, when they were acquired by an American company that apparently wanted only to publish pornography. Richard’s book was off the list, and he put the manuscript in a drawer. He proceeded to publish ten short stories, have multiple play productions in New York and elsewhere, and win awards as a fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter. His agent for the novel once said, after receiving a pile of rejection letters praising the book highly, “By the time this thing is finally published it’s going to be a period piece.” Well, here it is. Period and all. “Nothing can have prepared you for the wit and insight, the eccentricity and inspiring optimism with which this consistently surprising young writer depicts a year at the heart of his generation’s greatest calamity.”—Joseph Pintauro, author of Cold Hands and Raft of the Madusa
    “There is a knowingness, a sense of timing, a compassion and forgiveness under all the action, character to character. What Richard Willett has—in abundance—is love for the people he is chronicling and, by recording, saving.”—Allan Gurganus, author of The Practical Heart, Plays Well with Others, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
    “The writing is poignant, realistic and fine; the reader is pierced and instantly seduced by the characters’ appeal and immediacy.”—Harlan Greene, author of The German Officer’s Boy, What the Dead Remember, and Why We Never Danced the Charleston
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