Lexi Savoy

Scriptwriter

Scriptwriting – Class of 2015

Like millions of others living through the COVID-19 pandemic, Ottawa writer Lexi Savoy is spending many of her days at the computer participating in Zoom meetings.

Her meetings aren’t like all the others, though. Savoy, just five years after graduation from Algonquin College, was recently spending some of her time taking a meeting with Netflix.

“It’s exciting,” Savoy says. “Really, it’s more than that: It’s kind of miraculous. So many networks and media companies aren’t able to go into production at the moment, so a lot of effort is being put into workshopping stories, pre-development, and pitching ideas for shows or films or books. I can’t think of a better time to be a scriptwriter.”

Savoy recently pitched Netflix representatives her drama Who Killed Heather McAdams, which is about a woman who returns home after being missing for 14 years. The dramatic pilot, which Savoy describes as “an absolute joy to write,” won her the Sir Peter Ustinov Award at the International Emmys in 2018, and was one of the ideas she was tackling while she was in the College’s Scriptwriting program.

She came to the program after two years at Carleton University studying English and film. She values what she learned at Carleton in those two years – “no education is a waste,” she says – but she was unhappy with studies that were more theoretical than practical. She knew she didn’t want to teach; her dream was to write.

“My family has bookstores in their blood. My mother was a second-generation bookstore owner before she retired. I always loved writing but I never thought of it as a career. I thought, if I really liked writing I should go into English. But as I quickly learned, English studies aren’t about creative writing, they’re mostly about essays. I was disappointed, to say the least.”

Her light-bulb moment came in the middle of a deepening depression that affected her in her second year of studies. “A friend who knew I was not doing well psychologically just sat me down and said, ‘You deserve to be happy.’ And it was something I’d never considered. It was so simple, and so complicated under the circumstances. I was writing, but I wasn’t writing what I wanted to write. I wasn’t pursuing what I wanted, even if at that moment I didn’t know what that was.”

She found her joy in scriptwriting. Where the university courses were centred on theory, the College classes taught her what she craved to know. How do you write a script? How do you translate emotion into text and onto the screen? How do you write dialogue for actors that sounds like it is spontaneously emerging in the moment?

“I was so grateful every day to be able to attend that program,” Savoy says. “I was learning to write for TV and film and the stage. All the professors were incredible. They really cared about us as people and about the projects we were working on. I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without them.”

Savoy’s goal for the next year is to write something for both the movies and episodic television. She says she loves both equally, and has already penned a couple of feature film scripts. She even completed her first novel in March. “I never thought in a million years that I would write one, but there it is, and I’d love to see it in print.”