In 1996, Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a 'prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction' act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, New Hampshire.

Richard LaGravenese

Connie Heermann is a Freedom Writer teacher. I believe she represents the best of what dedicated teachers can be because she chose to serve her students, not her school board.

Richard LaGravenese

Teacher Freedom Writer

The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.

Richard LaGravenese

Love Why Who

The death penalty issue is obviously a divisive one. But whether one is for or against, you can not deny the basic illogic - if we know the system is flawed, if we know there are innocent people on Death Row, then until the system is reformed, should we not abandon the death penalty to protect those who are innocent?

Richard LaGravenese

Death You Who

The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a man who didn't come from much. His father left him and his family for another woman. His father was a musician, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Richard LaGravenese

Music Family Yin

Academy Awards don't really solve anything.

Richard LaGravenese

War Thing Thin

'Thelma & Louise' really hit a nerve, and I loved that movie.

Richard LaGravenese

Love T Really

In 1996, Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a 'prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction' act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, New Hampshire.

Richard LaGravenese

Life Anger Youth

Paul Hicks is the only guy The Beatles will allow to arrange, mix and engineer their music, so he did the Cirque du Soleil 'Love' show.

Richard LaGravenese

Music Love Will

I'm a dramatist.

Richard LaGravenese

Tis T Ram

I tend to believe, when you're in a relationship, if you don't fight, it's not a real relationship. You have to have arguments and tensions, otherwise I don't believe it.

Richard LaGravenese

Relationship Men You

I've always shot on film, but the times are changing.

Richard LaGravenese

Time Ways Way

When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that.

Richard LaGravenese

Time Mom Men

I just really have an affinity for women. Watching them go through journeys is more interesting to me than watching men.

Richard LaGravenese

Women Men Watching

Women have to take more control of their careers. They can't just wait to be cast in a film.

Richard LaGravenese

Women Men Car

If I can make a living as a writer, I can do anything.

Richard LaGravenese

Writer Write Thing

I think musical theater fans - obsessive fans - are very much like Comic Con fans in our personalities. We're very possessive, and we're very obsessive, and we're very critical. So don't screw with our stuff.

Richard LaGravenese

Music Wit Very

TV is where a writer can write his novel.

Richard LaGravenese

Writer Write Where

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film... at least in Hollywood studio films.

Richard LaGravenese

You Wood Woo

I really like Rosamund Pike very much.

Richard LaGravenese

Very UN Sam

'The Last Five Years' was a musical in 2002, and it's a deconstruction of a marriage.

Richard LaGravenese

Music Marriage Age

I'm very much interested in doing actual theater.

Richard LaGravenese

My true nature, I believe, is writing.

Richard LaGravenese

I had to audition as an actor, and I got so tired of doing the same monologues over and over, so I started writing my own, and then I started selling them to other actors.

Richard LaGravenese

Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.

Richard LaGravenese

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

Richard LaGravenese

The territory has changed, and a lot of really good actors want to do cable series, but they don't necessarily want to do network TV and make the commitment of 22 episodes or whatever. They find that the liberties and the creative freedoms that you get in cable is more interesting to them than the censorship of a network show.

Richard LaGravenese

Every marriage is weird! That's what it is - we just all need to start embracing the fact that there is no normal.

Richard LaGravenese

As soon as you're finished shooting, you have to go into the edit room and choose all of the shots that you're going to commit to because the visual effects vendor has to get it because they'll spend months on it. So, you're editing out of sequence before you've gotten a film for the movie and the performances.

Richard LaGravenese

The woman who runs the Pennsylvania Innocence Project told me that there's a man she's been trying to get out of prison for 26 years. Every night before she goes to bed, she thinks, 'What is he doing?' She says you don't sleep. And yet, she has the greatest sense of humor and this light that comes out of her.

Richard LaGravenese

It's not uncommon to have chaotic writers' rooms.

Richard LaGravenese

I've been a teenager. I even feel like I've been a 16-year-old girl. So I have a lot of voices inside my head!

Richard LaGravenese

I don't want to be a writer where all the characters sound the same. There's a facility in that kind of writing.

Richard LaGravenese

The South is like a foreign country to me!

Richard LaGravenese

How do you survive living in a cell knowing you are innocent? Many of those exonerated whom I have met seem to have a more benign, grateful attitude toward life than those of us who walk free. Many find a religious or spiritual stronghold.

Richard LaGravenese

A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.

Richard LaGravenese

I didn't write to become a director, which many people do.

Richard LaGravenese

I'm not really a believer in romantic, happily-ever-after love stories.

Richard LaGravenese

We have people in our lives who help us evolve along the way. If you're lucky, you find someone who evolves along with you, and that's what you call a long-term relationship.

Richard LaGravenese

Nowadays, Skype is a generational way of putting both people on camera at the same time.

Richard LaGravenese

I always thought that if you don't feel the breath in the actors' bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.

Richard LaGravenese

My dad was a presence, of course, but he worked nights a lot, and I would only see him one day a week.

Richard LaGravenese

Even as a kid, I was more enchanted watching Bette Davis than Errol Flynn.

Richard LaGravenese

Barbara Stanwyck movies drove me nuts, like 'Ball of Fire' and 'Double Indemnity.' I used to go cuckoo when I would see those films.

Richard LaGravenese

Families always have these unspoken dramas, and at holidays, everyone is supposed to sit down and pretend that none of that is going on.

Richard LaGravenese

Disney usually doesn't do pitches for original ideas.

Richard LaGravenese

I'm tired of doing rewrites for executives.

Richard LaGravenese