Author: Richard Willett

Richard Willett is the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, and Tiny Bubbles, presented off-off-Broadway and across the country. Honors include an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. His play 9/10 premiered off-off-Broadway in September 2024 and won four Broadway World Awards including Best Play; Grief at High Tide (first prize, Capital Rep Next Act! New Play Summit) premiered at Vivid Stage in Summit, NJ, in October 2024; and A Terminal Event (Julie Harris Award winner and Woodward/Newman finalist) premiered in 2022 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, with Stage Raw naming it one of the best L.A. plays that year. Richard is developing a one-woman show about Ingrid Bergman with actress Annemette Andersen and director Henning Hegland, premiering in 2025 in Iceland. He was a finalist last year for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program and as an optioned, working screenwriter has twice been in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Top 50 and a finalist for the Sundance Labs. He was also a finalist for the Cynosure Diversity Screenwriting Awards, the Stage 32 Diverse Voices Springboard, and won the Lonely Seal Film Festival award for the best script with a disabled lead. His novel A Friend of Dorothy’s, set during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the late 1980s, was in June 2025.

The Button That Changed Everything

I supported Jesse Jackson in the 1988 presidential primary. Wearing my Jackson button around Manhattan,…

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A COVER’S OWN STORY

I didn’t talk that much with my cover designer, Laura Duffy, about my novel, A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S, which I’d hired her to design. I wanted to see what she would come up with on her own. To my surprise, she read the entire book, and was very moved by it, and the cover she […]

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THE ONE WHO’S SEEN THE MOVIE

I’ve had the interesting and fortunate experience recently of seeing two works – my play 9/10, which I wrote twenty-two years ago, and my novel A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S, which I wrote over a period of a few years beginning almost forty years ago, finally see the light of day and, after years of (however […]

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MORTALITÉ D’ETOILE

I confess that when my partner John first pointed out Carole Cook across the room at Café  D’Etoile in West Hollywood, I didn’t know who he was talking about. Carole was one of those faces (and voices) people often instantly recognize without remembering her name. She had been on Broadway and in movies, and famously […]

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PAGING DR. KILDARE – STAT!

I find some strange nostalgia trips comforting. 1950s science fiction movies, for example. The kind I grew up watching on the Saturday afternoon movie. THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US or THE DEADLY MANTIS. I can turn on almost any of those movies – and there are now hundreds of them on YouTube – and be […]

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Welcome to my personal blog, “Skywriting Extrapolations.” Here you’ll find me pontificating about this, that, and the other thing – whatever strikes my fancy for further exploration. For more concrete stuff, about upcoming and current projects and where they’re at, be sure to sign up for my newsletter, “Bread-and-Butter Answers,” to stay in the know […]

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