Lauralee Farrer
Lauralee Farrer
BURNING HEART
Writer, Producer, Director, Editor
"Laundry and Tosca"
Lauralee Farrer has been writing for over thirty years and producing for almost fifteen. Her latest production, completed in September of 2004, is a documentary entitled, "Laundry and Tosca" about the life and dreams of opera singer Marcia Whitehead—a rare lirico-spinto soprano—studying with renowned New York vocal coach Maestro Franco Iglesias (Placido Domingo). Farrer is in preproduction on her own script of a one-hour film entitled, "Praying the Hours," while her feature "The Burghers of Calais" is currently in development.
Farrer started as a freelance writer for humanitarian organizations such as The Salvation Army, Feed the Children, and Food for the Hungry. Her work took her to Spain when Franco died, to Kenya during the droughts of 1981 and 1991, to Somalia when the war broke out and to Uganda to write about early outbreaks of AIDS. She visited the Sisters of Charity in Ethiopia; was in Moscow when the 1991 coup took place, and when Leningrad became St. Petersburg again. She was in East Germany before and after the wall went down, in Mexico City to write about cultures of poverty, and in U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Houston, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle to write about American life. This is the substance from which her fiction and non-fiction work emerges, including more than half a dozen screenplays such as "Acts of God" a feature-length love story set within the world of human trafficking, "After Life" a feature dramatic script about a woman whose senses are fractured by grief, and "Original Art" a dramatic feature about exporting original art from a country at war.
Farrer earned a degree in English and Communications from Azusa Pacific University after studying abroad in Heidelberg and also at various California institutions including Pepperdine University, Fuller Seminary, and UCLA. She studied graduate-level filmic writing at USC, followed by her own independent study course that included various screenwriting seminars (Robert McKee, John Truby, John Schlesinger, etc.) and informal interviews with Sydney Pollack ("Out Of Africa"), Hume Cronyn ("Cocoon"), Milos Forman ("Amadeus"), Roland Joffe ("The Mission"), Ralph Winter ("Star Trek") and David Puttnam ("Chariots of Fire").
While Farrer was researching tribal warfare in Kenya, the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings occurred. That event birthed a small classical theater group pairing volunteer professionals and at-risk teenagers, for which she served as producer for five years, culminating in the largest-ever production in the Opera House of The Kennedy Center and receipt of the prestigious Community Solutions in Education Award. This was the effort that launched Farrer's producing career.
Farrer was line-producer for LA-based Lovestruck Pictures' "Best Man in Grass Creek" for which she was a corecipient of the 1999 Heartland Film Festival Crystal Heart Award. She was assistant to the producer on the film "To End All Wars," and has acted as a titles producer for Picture This (ABC, The Learning Channel).
Between 1997 and 2000, she lived in a Benedictine community in Denver, Colorado and wrote for Law Brothers Entertainment, Syntax Productions, and the Denver International Film Festival. While in Denver she served as advisor to the Rocky Mountain News, Denver School for the Arts, Career Education Center, and the Arts and Culture Task Force of the Denver Comprehensive Plan; and worked as the director of Membership and Development for the Denver Film Society.
Farrer started writing and developing scripts at USC, and has read, edited, advised, rewritten, collaborated with or tutored filmmakers, students, professional and novice writers. For most of the last ten years she has also independently tutored several beginning screenwriters, and guest-lectured at many high school- and college-level writing classes.
She is currently in the process of publishing a book entitled 1.1 Inches of Rainfall, and two books of poetry called, The Poets of One Brief Hour, and Truth in the Inward Parts. She was most recently an editor of theologian Ray Anderson's upcoming volume, The Soul Of God: A Theological Memoir, and is editor of publications at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California—a position which includes managing editor of the most widely distributed theological journal in the world, Theology, News and Notes. She also serves as a special consultant to The Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.