Who Am I?
I'm Susan Schader, now a professional editor, story and script analyst and consultant, and developmental editor with a background in both publishing and the film industries, in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
In the publishing industry, I was a Developmental Editor for both Canfield Press and Harper & Row (now Harper Collins) in New York, and did freelance developmental and substantive editing, copyediting, research, proofreading, redlining for such major publishing houses as Prentice-Hall, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Grune & Stratton, Abrams Publishers. I now work as a freelance editor and primarily with writers who are readying their manuscripts for either submissions to agents or publishers, or are self-publishing, which has become a burgeoning field and one highly supportive of innovative, independent authors.
In the film industry, I presently work as a staff Story Analyst for MGM Film Studio and Orion Pictures, and have — for more then 20 years — worked as a freelance story analyst on feature film and television projects for DreamWorks, New Regency Productions, Village Roadshow, DeLuca Productions, Donner-Shuler-Donner Productions, Icon Films, Jagged Films, Disney, Showtime, Lifetime, Turner Pictures, among others, and worked on the development of such films as L.A. Confidential (Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published), Get On Up, Enigma, HBO's Vinyl, and countless others. I’ve worked with private clients, writers, international film brokers and producers, and was assistant to writer/director Albert Brooks on Defending Your Life.
Presently, the film projects I’m involved in developing include:
Rapunzel; The Cruel Prince (from the book by Holly Black); The Untitled Alan Menken & Stephen Schwartz Magical Musical Manny Movie; An Untamed State (from the novel by Roxanne Gray); Bloodlines (from the book by Melissa Del Bosque); The Black Count (from the book by Tom Reiss); Everything I Never Told You (from the book by Celeste Ng); T-Rex: The Claressa Shields Story; Oxy Rush (from the Rolling Stone article, “The Dukes of Oxy”); Varietal; Warhol (from the book by Victor Bockris); Battlestar Galactica; The Invention of Rock and Roll (from the book Sam Phillips by Peter Guralnick); Madame (from the book by William Stadiem); Burnt Orange Heresy (from the book by Charles Willeford); and Sweet Tooth (from the book by Ian McEwan).
Thus, I've had and have "no power" -- the ability to say no to projects and/or point out their weaknesses -- but I also help writers take the next step to turn a "no" into a "yes." These days, in the highly competitive fields of publishing and film and TV producing, projects get one chance to impress, and publishers, agents, editors, and movie executives are looking for a reason to pass on a project because they're so overwhelmed with material.
I work creatively, supportively and personally with writers -- whether doing in-depth notes and editing, broad-based evaluations, or copyediting to clean and sharpen prose -- to insure a potential "no" becomes a "yes."
I am a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association and Book-editing.com (on which I use the pseudonym S.J. Sutton for privacy purposes).
