Today we’d like to introduce you to Tracy Held.
Hi Tracy, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m a multi-racial Chinese/Eastern European writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. I studied Conservation and Resource Studies at UC, Berkeley, briefly worked in science labs, and then transitioned into nonprofit marketing and fundraising. While I was considering getting an MBA to eventually become a nonprofit Executive Director, I decided to take an acting class–just for fun, mind you–and ended up falling in love with theater and playwriting.
After a while, I took enough classes to earn an associate’s degree in Theatre Arts from Laney College, and then I launched an independent, site-specific theater company called All Terrain Theater. We did a lot of cool work, including performing a full-length play by Barbara Jwanouskos about a female DJ at a record store. Before the show, audiences flipped through records at the front of the store and then went to the back of the store to watch the play. Our most popular production was “Women in Solidarity: Cat Ladies,” an anthology of one-woman plays about cats–we sold out every performance, including extensions. My play was called, “The Librarian Who Was Allergic to Cats,” and sometimes people booed at my piece because my protagonist hated cats. It was intense.
Eventually, I moved to Pittsburgh to get a Dramatic Writing MFA at Carnegie Mellon University. There, I started writing screenplays and wrote a feature called “Science Fair the Musical,” which won an Alfred P. Sloan screenwriting award. I quickly realized that screenwriting felt more natural to me, and if I wanted to make a living as a writer, it would probably be easier to switch over to screenwriting. So, I moved to Los Angeles after graduation to focus on film.
I still did a lot of theater once I got to LA, more than I expected. All Terrain Theater produced a touring one-woman show I wrote called, “Suddenly Split and Swiping Over,” and I got into two playwriting groups: Playground LA and The Vagrancy. But I also started doing more indie film projects and got into the Writers Guild of America through their now-defunct Caucus program. I have been very involved in the WGA, including helping to draft the statement against Asian hate, and last year, I was elected to serve as the Vice-Chair of the Asian American Writer Committee. Now that we’re on strike, I’ve helped coordinate and promote special pickets tied to the AAPI community.
Last year was actually a very exciting year for me. I’ve done a few historical fiction pieces and got introduced to showrunner Barry Schkolnick who had a great idea about an anthology series that I immediately connected with, so we’ve been working with actor Brian Tee on that, and while that’s been happening, I’ve been setting up a film production company called Erosion with one of my good friends, Megan Morrison. Our mission-driven company is dedicated to sneaking conservation and climate problems into the public conversation through blockbuster films and binge-worthy TV shows. All of our work has a comedy element, including genre stories like family-friendly musicals and campy horror.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We spent a lot of time finding a name for our company because we wanted something that was active and influential, and that’s how we came to Erosion. We named our company Erosion because we respect that it’s a powerful process that creates consistent, gradual changes that ultimately lead to major impacts like diverting the course of a river or carving out the grand canyon. All of my work has been built on small yet progressive actions that have helped me prepare for my current work.
In addition to getting direct training, I’ve worked on a lot of productions, both in theater and in film, and performed a lot of roles that give me a 360-degree view of the industry. I’ve volunteered as a production assistant on tiny indie films for my friends, worked as a professional background actor in huge TV shows wearing the same pretty blue floral dress I was first photographed in, and was commissioned to write and direct indie and industrial films. Each project comes with challenges, opportunities, and lessons, and taking the time to understand what does and doesn’t work for me or for collaborators with very different needs than me, has meant that I’m building on my experience all the time. I love collaborating with teams and I love being on sets, troubleshooting to make sure we get the footage we need before everyone has to go home. For me, figuring out how to make something work that probably shouldn’t work is part of the fun.
As far as challenges go, I would say finding the right collaborators and investors who understand how important it is to have climate conversations and how necessary it is to engage the public and media now. Once we talk to people, all of this makes sense to them, but, in a lot of ways, we’re really breaking new ground in helping people make the connections between fun comedy entertainment and critical climate dialogue. These things go together–and they have to go together to engage people who don’t consider themselves to be environmentalists–but some people need to see us make it work before they believe it. That’s okay. We know what we’re doing.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Erosion?
Erosion is a mission-driven production company dedicated to changing the world one story at a time, using comedy, family-friendly musicals, and campy horror to sneak conservation and climate themes into blockbuster films and binge-worthy TV shows. With all the environmental challenges we’re facing today, we need to be addressing these issues in popular media. Everyone wants to live on a healthy planet, and everyone wants to enjoy the content they’re consuming on their screens. Why isn’t there more fun content that helps us be good stewards of the planet?
We recently launched our first web series, “Conservation Starters,” a comedy anthology series of short, standalone webisodes meant to start CONVERSATIONS about CONSERVATION. We’re going at it from different directions, but everything starts from our characters and their personal challenges–whether they’re having relationship issues or personal crises–and we throw a funny spin on all of it. We want people to understand that these topics are part of their lives and they don’t have to be dry, even though California has been suffering from a drought. Every episode is written by a different writer, with different characters and conservation themes. Our goal is to get as many perspectives included in this conservation conversation as possible. I wrote our first episode, but as a WGA union signatory company, we had to pause production to honor the current writers’ strike. We have a collection of scripts ready to shoot as soon as writers get a better contract.
Recently, we also got accepted into the VentureBridge startup incubator to help us build up our business and connect us with other founders and investors.
In addition to Conservation Starters, our slate includes the production of two award-winning feature film scripts, Megan’s campy horror “Hiking Buddies” and my teen musical, “Science Fair the Musical.” We’re also developing a workplace comedy pilot.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
My favorite industry podcast is Children of Tendu, by TV writers Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina, and a really great organization full of resources for indie filmmakers is Film Independent. Megan and I have also been reading a book called “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, which is dedicated to making incremental changes that lead to exponentially significant changes–sort of appropriate for the work we’re doing.
Contact Info:
- Website: tracyheld.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/madebyerosion
- Facebook: facebook.com/madebyerosion
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracyheld/
- Twitter: twitter.com/madebyerosion
- Youtube: youtube.com/erosionllc
- Other: erosionmade.wordpress.com
Image Credits
Adam George Key – all photos with the hat and the brown dress Pauline Oh – photo with Tracy and Megan Morrison
