I met my wife on the job.
I was the music critic at the St. Petersburg Times and she was usually the late editor fixing my grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and non sequitors.
It was a great professional relationship that mushroomed into a personal one and we’ve been together now almost 25 years, including one teenager, five dogs and a house.
But when we tried to work together on projects outside of the institutional setting of newspaper articles, it nearly rendered the union asunder.
CHARLOTTE BARRETT podcast excerpt: "At NYU, we started writing on our own. We kept looking over our shoulders and decided, 'Let's try doing this together.'"
We were – are – two very strongly opinionated people who might show some give to other people, but not to each other, at least not in professional matters. She edited my first two books and that was it. I don’t think she’s even read any of the 10 books since then, which is just as well.
So I’m always fascinated with how other married couples do it.
That brings me to today’s guests, Charlotte Barrett and Sean Fallon, a young couple who met while studying film production at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. They eventually worked together as writers for David Letterman and are now on the verge of seeing their first film, Virgin Alexander, released on DVD. (It will be in stores and for sale online on July 17.)
I admire that these married screenwriters have been able to work together and live together and am curious to know how they do it.
