Janet Brownell at the Orcas Senior Center
Updated Dec. 8 at 9 a.m.
It may surprise some islanders to know that Janet Brownell’s main “day job” is as a television and feature film screenwriter.
In addition to her chosen profession, Janet works indefatigably, it seems, as President of the Orcas Island Education Foundation, Chair of the Orcas Island School Board, Development Director for Camp Four Winds, member of the OPAL board and the Community Foundation’s Endow Orcas Team, as the wife of Chamber Director Lance Evans, and the mother of Bix the Beagle.
Earlier this week Hide, a police mystery scripted by Brownell, was aired on the TNT Channel. This Sunday, 12 Dates of Christmas, a holiday romance which she also wrote, will be broadcast on Dec. 11 on ABC Family Channel at 8 p.m.
The holiday romance, 12 Dates of Christmas, starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Amy Smart, follows a young woman who re-lives the same first date on Christmas Eve over and over again until she learns to open up her world to new things and stop living in the past. Brownell re-wrote the script after it had made the rounds for an extended period of time.
"The 12 Dates of Christmas" on TNT this Sunday, Dec. 11
Brownell came to Orcas Island after establishing her bona fides in the film industry in Los Angeles, where she grew up. She describes herself as an unathletic kid who spent most of her time indoors, watching old movies on television. She started in the movie industry first as a script reader and consultant and then as a television executive, developing ideas for TV movies.
She recalls the day she was in a script conference with a writer and had the epiphany, “I could be as mediocre a writer as you are.”
In Hollywood, Janet says, a successful career depends first of all on the connections that can be made with other professionals. She says, “Fortunately for me, I had a lot of connections.” She wrote some episodes for the TV soap opera, “Days of Our Lives,” and eventually set her goal on writing a feature film. Her first script was written during the Screenwriters Guild strike of 1988. The executive producer of Hide is Stephanie Germain (The Day After Tomorrow), with whom Janet has worked before. Her screenwriting credits include the films The Santa Clause starring Tim Allen and Eloise at the Plaza.
Achievement as a screenwriter meant that Brownell and Evans didn’t need to live in Los Angeles to further her work, and they moved to a smaller town on California’s central coast. From there, they came to Orcas Island in the mid-90s.
The fast pace and complexity of her life energizes Janet. “If I don’t have a ton of stuff going on I get addled,” she says. Her writing schedule is hard-wired into her schedule, though, and she writes for two to three hours every day, without fail. Her usual writing time is in the afternoon, but there have been times when she starts writing at 8 a.m. and plows straight through the pages, “but I always stop at 5.
“I’m known for being super fast in terms of getting things written. I usually complete the first draft script for a movie in a week, and most contracts are for an eight-week period.”
Her next project is writing a movie for TNT based on an “identity mystery-thriller,” Edge, by Jeffrey Deaver,
