Ron Hutchinson International Playwright

Category: Featured Resident
Published on Sunday, 04 April 2010 04:49
Written by Renee Montgomery

Out of all the neighborhoods, in all the towns, in all the world, he chose ours.

When acclaimed screenwriter/playwright Ron Hutchinson describes his block in Kinney Heights in West Adams, he uses descriptions like “a web of relationships” and “a little family”.

 

If teenage daughter Isabella is dressed up for a party, she goes next door to model for the neighbors.  When one of Ron’s plays ran in San Diego, the whole neighborhood turned out in a bus.  When a neighbor moves, it’s to a different house on the block.  Even the piano relocated within the neighborhood. And a stray cat seems to have miraculously found a home here out of the back of a van.

 

No amusing or profound detail of his tightly-knit community, past or present, is lost on Ron, widely considered to be one of our most important contemporary dramatists. Best known for the screenplays for John Frankenheimer’s Against the Wall and The Island of Doctor Moreau and Robert M. Young’s Slave of Dreams, other credits include Emmy Award-winning Murders Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story, The Burning Season, The Josephine Baker Story, Fatherland, The Tuskegee Airman, Traffic (nominated for three Emmys in 2004), The Ten Commandments, and Marco Polo. Equally renown are Ron’s nearly two dozen plays, such as Moonlight and Magnolias (2004), Topless Mum in Dead Hero Shocker!! (2007) and Durand’s Line (2009). Now in his early sixties, Hutchinson continues to write prolifically with a musical in workshop soon in New York. He also teaches screenwriting at AFI and is a popular “script doctor”.

Ron’s plays are produced all over the world so he and his wife, former dancer, Alisa Taylor, could have chosen to live anywhere but they selected West Adams for its live-able urbanity.  After doing a stint in Santa Monica and Venice Beach, the couple moved to Kinney Heights in 1990 so their family could be exposed to a greater diversity of people.  Ron was born in Northern Ireland but lived in Coventry as a child and spent several years in the London theatre world before falling in love with Los Angeles when one of his plays was in production at the Mark Taper Center.

“Pumpkin” the adopted cat abandoned on Halloween, the neighborhood racoon, the joy of the sun sending its last rays of light down the street-- spend some time with the wry, creative Ron on his neighbor’s Porch Sitting Club and you’ll soon be immersed in engaging stories that reassure the spirit and confirm the uniqueness of our community.