Journalist-turned-showrunner Amy Chozick writes without fear.
Don’t ask Amy Chozick to make any predictions about the 2024 presidential election. The former Wall Street Journal and New York Times journalist, who covered Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential run against Donald Trump, has been chastened by past prognostications.
“Oh my God, I’m the worst person to ask,” she said. “When I got onto the bus with Hillary in 2007, I was like, ‘I’m riding this to the White House!’ And then when I got on in 2015, I was like, ‘She’s inevitable!’ So yeah, I don’t think you want to listen to me on this prediction.”
The series is a TV dramedy that has fun with today’s highly polarized media landscape by focusing on a disparate quartet of female protagonists representing different factions: Sadie McCarthy is the next generation print journalist (and closest to Chozick herself), Grace Gordon Greene is a traditional, “old-school” print reporter, Kimberlyn Kendrick is the Fox News-esque conservative TV journalist and Lola Rahaii is the young, ultra-unconventional social media influencer. The intertwining arcs of these four characters give the show the narrative engine an episodic series demands. A dash of optimism comes from watching this group of women form bonds that transcend their political, cultural, and generational divides. (The show’s title is a riff on the legendary book The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse, about covering the 1972 presidential campaign.)
Chozick’s transition from print journo to showrunner was made significantly easier by Berlanti and Plec, who she calls “a wonderful mentor and writer. Julie really taught me everything about showrunning and writing for TV.”
She also credits the WGA Showrunner Training Program, which she completed in 2021. “That was invaluable. I learned about budgets and post. That was sort of how I really was able to change careers,” Chozick said.
In her new career, she has come to relish the collaborative nature of TV writing. The spirit of solidarity that she experienced both in the Showrunner Training Program and on the picket lines during the 2023 strike has continued in the writers’ room. “I feel like there’s a great community of writers,” Chozick said. “It can be a lonely thing to sit down rearranging words in Final Draft for days on end, so that I love.”
Her philosophical North Star while writing both her book and The Girls on the Bus is a quote from memoirist and poet Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club): “What would you write if you weren’t afraid?” Chozick keeps the quote on a Post-it note affixed to her computer.
“It’s very vulnerable being a writer and putting yourself out there,” she said. “You know you’re going to be attacked. But I think if you start worrying, if you write from a place of fear, I feel like the terrorists have won.”
“This is not an easy path, right?" Chozick continued. "If you have made it to get a job in a writers’ room, you’ve been writing, you have a million unpublished scripts and have honed your craft, you have been on the picket line for the past six months, you have gone months without employment. There are so many challenges just pursuing this art—it’s inherently like, ‘what would you do if you weren’t afraid?’ If we were afraid, we’d be accountants. God bless them. I really needed one at tax season, but it’s just scary to do this.”
She’s been in a union her whole career, and has experienced several labor stand-offs as a print journalist and member of the Newspaper Guild. Having worked on spec scripts in her spare time for years, she was elated when she finally became a WGAW member in 2019.
“I’m very proud to be in the WGA because it’s such an important union and has so much power,” she said. “I mean, it’s everything.”
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