Alan
Brennert was born in Englewood, New Jersey, to Herbert E.
Brennert (an aviation writer who contributed to such magazines as Skyways
and American Helicopter) and Almyra E. Brennert. Since 1973 he has
lived in Southern California. He holds a Bachelor's degree in English from
California State University at Long Beach, and also did graduate work in
screenwriting at UCLA.
In addition to novels, he has written short stories, teleplays, screenplays, and
the libretto of a stage musical, Weird Romance, with music by Alan Men
ken and lyrics by David Spencer. Produced in 1992 by the WPA Theatre in New
York, it has since been licensed for more than a hundred regional, high school,
and college productions, both in the United States and abroad. A cast album was
released by Columbia Records in 1993.
His work as a writer-producer for the television series L.A. Law earned
him an Emmy Award in 1991. He has been nominated for an Emmy on two other
occasions, once for a Golden Globe Award, and (three times) for the Writers
Guild of America Award for Outstanding Teleplay of the Year. He received a
People's Choice Award for L.A. Law, and his short story "Ma Qui" was
honored with a Nebula Award in 1992.
He has developed screenplays for major studios, as well as miniseries, pilots,
and television movies. Other series to which he has contributed include
China Beach, Simon & Simon, and the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.
"But in television and film," he says, "sometimes your best work is never
seen." In 1999 he spent six months writing a four-hour miniseries for NBC and
Kevin Costner's Tig Productions, based on David Marion Wilkinson's epic novel
Not Between Brothers, about the founding of Texas. When the network
opted not to produce it, Alan decided he needed to write something that people
would get to see, and the result was Moloka'i.
His new novel, Honolulu, grew out of the research he did for
Moloka'i. "One of the most colorful periods of modern Hawaiian history was
the so-called 'glamour days' of the 1920s and 1930s," Alan explains. "This was a
time period I couldn't really explore in depth in Moloka'i, since my main
characters were in isolation at Kalaupapa. These were the years when Hawai'i
made its deepest impression on the American consciousness: the years of Matson
liners, the China Clipper, Hollywood celebrities vacationing in Honolulu, and
the Hawai'i Calls radio show that broadcasted popular hapa-haole music to the
mainland. Yet at the same time this image of paradise was being presented to the
American public, many Native Hawaiians and immigrants to
Hawai'i labored on plantations for low wages or lived in poverty in Honolulu
tenements. So Honolulu, the novel, is partly about this collision of
image and reality...and how that reality was actually far richer and more
captivating.
"It's also about the people from other countries and cultures who came to
Hawai'i in search of a better life. Where Moloka'i was principally about
Native Hawaiians, Honolulu is more about the immigrant experience in
Hawai'i, and the origins of its unique multicultural society."
From the author's website
This biography was last updated on 03/04/2009.
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