Perhaps it was the diversity of her experiences and interests that prepared Erika Green Swafford, a television writer on one of the hottest crime shows to debut last fall, for the challenge of weaving weekly surprises into murder mystery plots.
As an undergraduate, she studied at Cornell University’s renowned School of Hotel Administration and took classes at its business school. She followed that up by enrolling in writing courses at Georgetown University — while doing comedy improv at night after working at a major hotel during the day.
And that all occurred before she moved to Los Angeles and got her M.B.A. at UCLA Anderson.
Today, Green, as she is known professionally, has landed firmly on the creative side in the entertainment industry. She is a writer on ABC’s new series, “How to Get Away with Murder,” which was launched in September 2014 to broad critical acclaim. In January, she won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series.
If you think Green’s decision to go after an M.B.A. degree in the entertainment capital of the world was an odd one for a future television writer to make, she most certainly doesn’t.
“Anderson was where I first decided to test my mettle,” Green said. “I was always verbal, I never thought of myself as very good at math. I went to Anderson because I wanted to challenge myself, though I was scared of what the outcome would be. I thought I might bail out. While there, I met some really amazing people who were also challenging themselves in different ways. I think that experience opened me up as a human being.”
Green landed in L.A. with the clear notion that an M.B.A. would help launch her career in the entertainment industry. For Green, writing wasn’t the area she wondered about — she’d been exercising those muscles for years. Rather than pursue a dual degree by straddling both business school and film school, she sought a program nimble enough that she could adapt to her own interdisciplinary purposes.
She said “weird and wonderful things happened” as a result of connections she made while she was studying at UCLA Anderson. Still close with a core group of her classmates, she recalled, “They didn’t look at me crazy when I started talking about entertainment.”
While at Anderson, she took classes in UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television from the late Tom Sherak while he was still an executive at Fox. She later interned at Sony and later worked at CBS in the daytime programming department before receiving her M.B.A. in 1999.
But her first fulltime job in entertainment came when an Anderson friend and former classmate, Laura Spence Miller, met someone poised to join Oxygen’s comedy division in Los Angeles. He agreed to grant Green an informational interview — which she remembers conducting clad in a suit and armed with a very businesslike CV amid the Oxygen startup culture of jeans and sneakers.
As it turned out, her future boss was looking for a script coordinator — could she fill that slot? “Can do” was essentially her answer, although Green had no inkling about what the job entailed and had misgivings about her ability to bluff her way into it.
Down to her “last couple hundred bucks,” Green was visiting some Anderson classmates in New York when she got a call notifying her that she had landed the position at Oxygen. She quickly found out that in her new job, she had to back up virtually every studio department to ensure both progress and continuity. In other words, it exposed her to the creative side of the industry, exactly where she wanted to be.
Green realized that working in the production office was like working in a business office and even required facility with HR and payroll processes. She then became an assistant in acquisitions working for Elizabeth Cullen, who was tasked with establishing a movie block for Oxygen, funded in the millions of dollars. Cullen knew Green held an M.B.A., and Green put it to work.
“I was giving my opinion on creative content in a business context,” Green said, although she said she had never imagined that the creative and business sides would come together in such an applicable way.
From creating spreadsheets to negotiating new deals, Green kicked her business school training into high gear. Using her knowledge of finance and contracts and refining negotiation techniques on the job, she learned from the content creators what an effective pitch sounded like. Recognizing the importance of new acquisitions, the network moved Green’s boss up — and Green with her.
Green counts many years of hard work — including six seasons with CBS’s “The Mentalist” where she moved from staff writer to story editor up to producer — before signing on with “How to Get Away with Murder.”
“No one is an overnight success,” she said.
Green now works on a team of as many as nine writers, who hole up together for long periods to conceive and knit together stories for the series.
It’s a show Green said she loves. “I’m writing for a really strong, wonderfully flawed woman of color, who also happens to be an Oscar-nominated actor,” she said of the show’s star, Viola Davis, who won the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series.
“I wouldn’t be where I am now without my Anderson degree,” Green said. “It taught me that I am limitless. I embraced things I didn’t even know that I could do. So now I think, ‘What else do I believe I’m unable to do' — or that I haven’t even thought about doing — that I will totally crush?’”
This story was adapted from one posted on the UCLA Anderson website.
