Julie Sherman Wolfe’s path to success sounds straight out of a romantic comedy.
She was laid off and lost her boyfriend on the same day, all before she was set to take a San Diego, Calif., stage as an aspiring standup comic.
She performed her set, even though she didn’t want to, and it was then that she got some career advice that would change her life. Another comic said that, as a funny woman in the 1990s, she should be writing movie scripts.
“It was just that moment of total epiphany, where I was like ‘that’s exactly what I should be doing,’” she said during a recent event at the University of Hartford.
Wolfe’s been writing scripts for more than 25 years since that day, including romantic comedies for the last eight years for the Hallmark Channel.
Her 24 Hallmark movies include holiday hits like “One Royal Holiday,” “A Holiday Spectacular” and “Hanukkah on Rye”, the first Hallmark holiday movie focused entirely on the Jewish holiday.
“Once I started working for Hallmark, it’s perfect because it’s all I want to be doing,” she said. “I don’t care about anything else, this is all I care about now.”
Wolfe talked about her career this week as part of an event co-sponsored by Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and the Friends of the Avon Free Public Library.
She got her start working for sitcoms, first as a production assistant before becoming a writer for shows like “3rd Rock from the Sun” and “Phil of the Future.”
She also worked on the animated “Baby Blues” series and the Disney Channel movie “Avalon High.”
Wolfe said romantic comedies have always been her “first love of a movie genre,” though, and she finally got time to write some scripts of her own during the 2007 writers strike.
Those were optioned into movies, which ultimately helped her get to Hallmark in 2015. Two years later, she and her husband lived a “real life Hallmark movie” by moving from Los Angeles to Connecticut in 2017.
“I’ve always had an affinity for New England,” said Wolfe, who now lives in Avon. She said New England is the perfect setting for holiday movies, and she has repeatedly used Connecticut in her movies.
Some UHart students attended, hoping to get some tips about how to break into the television and movie industries.
Jack Anderson, a junior studying cinema, was interested in hearing how things have changed when it comes to breaking into the industry.
“Just how it changed over the course of the last 30 years, how 20, 30 years ago it used to be very ‘Mad Men’ was very interesting,” Anderson said.
Wolfe herself compared her career path to the hit show, saying she had to fax resumes to production companies and the first offer was to be a secretary and not a writer in a path similar to character Peggy Olsen.
Wolfe also pointed to her own life in Connecticut as a sign writers don’t have to live in New York or Los Angeles to succeed. She said it’s still helpful, though, noting she had established her career with Hallmark before moving from Los Angeles.
Other were just fans of Hallmark movies. Sonia Nunez said she just wanted to put a “face to the name.”
“You know that it’s going to be a clean, positive, feelgood movie,” Nunez said about her fandom, adding the movies give her a break from news cycles that can be overly negative.
Wolfe knows that some people see Hallmark movies as formulaic, but said she just laughs at social media memes and Saturday Night Live sketches.
“That’s when you know you’ve made it, when you’re being made fun of,” she said.
Wolfe said she tries to put her own creative twist on the “Hallmark bingo,” giving the audience something they didn’t expect.
But she also said she would love to get in on the joke by writing a musical about it, even though she doubts the network would let her.
“It’s poking fun at the Hallmark stuff but still you would bring your family and it would be a nice thing,” she said of her idea.
