Biography
Heather got on the Hollywood map in 2000 when The Courage to Love, the $5.5 million dollar Lifetime Original Movie starring Vanessa Williams, Diahann Carroll, Gil Bellows and Stacy Keach (now available on DVD), was produced off her spec screenplay, Quadroon Ball.
Since then, she’s written and/or produced over 45-hours of award-winning television including The Evidence, a news magazine docudrama series that won “Best New Series Pilot” at the 2001 WorldFest Houston International Film Festival and Lifestyle Magazine, a holistic health talk show hosted by Clifton Davis (Amen, Any Given Sunday), that won two Tellys and a Gold Award from the 2001 WorldFest Houston.
Prior to that, Heather was on the writing staff of two PBS edutainment series: Psychology: The Human Experience which won an Emmy Award for Best Instructional Series, a Bronze Telly Award, The Videographer Awards, International Film & Video and an Aegis Award of Excellence and Dollar$ & Sense: Personal Finance for the 21st Century, which won an Emmy Award for Best Instructional Series and an Aegis Award of Excellence.
Heather served as the Director of Event Programming for the National Association of Television Program Executives which included producing NATPE ’05, the major television market which annually attracts an estimated 8,000 producers and executives to the Mandalay Bay Resorts in Las Vegas to hear over 200 speakers including high profile Show Runners and the CEOs and Presidents of virtually every major network, cable and satellite station as well as converging digital technologies. Heather also programmed NATPE’s 2004 TV Producers Boot Camp.
Heather is a Jury Judge for RKO Picture’s Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Competition alongside Ivan Reitman (Ghost Busters, Stripes, Animal House), Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under), Linda Seger and Dara Marks. She has been a Judge or Judge’s Coordinator for The ABC/Disney TV Fellowship, The Scriptwriters’ Network’s Carl Sautter and Producers’ Outreach Programs, The American Screenwriters Association's and Writer’s Digest's International Screenwriting Competition and the Independent Feature Project, among others. She has taught workshops and sat on panels at various film festivals and conferences including being a STAR SPEAKER for several years running at The Screenwriters’ Expo, the Austin Film Festival, the Vancouver Film and Television Expo, The Willamette Writers Conference, Selling to Hollywood, Slamdance, Moondance, The Great American Pitch Fest, the Vail Film Festival, the Northwest Screenwriters Guild and the Temecula Film Festival, among many, many others. She is one of the most popular guest lecturers for The Los Angeles Film and Recording Schools, Champman University, UCLA, The Learning Annex, Learning Tree University and online with TheIndustry.LA ("The Craig's List of Hollywood").
In addition to film festivals and writers conferences, Heather is a popular corporate and collegiate trainer as well, and has led workshops at the annual convention of Meeting Professionals International as well as colleges and universities around the globe including being a showcased speaker at several NACA and APCA National Conventions, internationally for University of Dreams College Internship Program, the University of Barcelona, University College London, NYU, Yale University, UCLA, University of Chicago, USF, UNLV, CSUN, CSU Riverside and many others.
Heather is currently writing her long-demanded non-fiction franchiseable book: PowerNetworking: The Secret Hollywood Code while juggling writing assignments and producing projects with her teaching and consulting.
With what's left of her time, she routinely volunteers with emerging screenwriters and producers. She is a mentor for the Friar's Foundation, the Film Industry Network and teaches 11-year old ADHD kids creative writing and improv through RKO’s The Story Project. As a board member of the non-profit “Kids Making Movies,” Heather mentors a group of home schooled children 5 – 17 who make independent films. Heather has recently been asked to sit on Sarano Kelley’s The Game Board of Directors as well.
Prior to working in the entertainment industry, Heather was the CFO of her own privately-held mortgage-banking corporation. With three branches staffed with twenty loan officers and processors, Approved Mortgage went from a start-up operation to a thriving business that table-top or warehouse-line funded over $2 million per month through 300 approved-affiliate relationships with wholesale lenders. She spent almost a decade writing, pitching and underwriting real estate investment packages for everything from custom home sub-divisions to car washes, golf courses, vineyards, incubator warehouses and mobile home park land banking opportunities. She helped private investors learn to carry back paper on lease-options-to-buy in addition to funding their first hard money loans. She taught classes on private mortgage insurance and real estate economics for GE Capital, PMI and the Board of Realtors as well as FHA classes for first time homebuyers.
As one of the founding members of the South Orange County Professional Speakers Bureau, Heather team-taught Clintonomics (tax-saving strategies and estate planning) to gate-guarded communities and as the Vice President of the San Juan Capistrano Chamber of Commerce, Heather was awarded a Senate commendation for being instrumental in helping them be the only city to avoid being dragged through Orange County’s bankruptcy.
Heather has written business plans for IPOs, cable channels, dotcom and telecom companies, chambers of commerce and non-profits in addition to financing packages for production companies and independent films. Before all that, Heather lived in Kobe, Japan teaching CEOs English.
Heather received her Bachelor’s of Arts in Creative Writing with a minor in Linguistics and an ESL certificate from San Diego State University and completed UCLA’s sequential program in writing for Television and Film. Heather is single and lives in Marina del Rey, California.
Instrumentation
Heather Hale
Discography
DVD's - The Courage to Love; Navigating Hollywood; Non-Linear Story Telling, Become a Better Leader, Writing & Implmenting Business Plans
BOOKS: Nirvana in a Cup: The Founding of Oregon Chai
Links
| http://www.HeatherHale.com |
| Navigating Hollywood Promo Video-45 Sec |