Rolin Jones

Writer

  • Born: 1972
  • Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California

Contribution: Rolin Jones is a playwright and television writer best known for his play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow (2003), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2006.

Background

Rolin Bruce Jones was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, California, where he grew up in a blended family in the affluent Woodland Hills neighborhood. His father was a corporate executive, and his mother taught at Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

Jones was educated by the Woodland Hills public school system. After attending elementary and middle school, he enrolled at El Camino Real High School, where a teacher first sparked his interest in the dramatic arts. He became an active member of the school's drama department.

After graduating from El Camino Real in 1990, Jones attended California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in Los Angeles, where he studied filmmaking and English. Upon completing his undergraduate studies, Jones saw his first original play, Once by the Pacific, produced at CSUN's Campus Theatre in 1998. The play, about a group of Generation X friends who gather at a Malibu beach house, helped Jones win acceptance to the graduate program of the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, which he began attending in the fall of 2001. Jones received his MFA degree from Yale in 2004. The same year, he was named Yale Repertory Theatre's playwright in residence.

Career

While attending the Yale School of Drama, Jones began working on the script that would become The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow: An Instant Message with Excitable Music. According to Jones, he had largely been writing gloomy, Anton Chekhov–inspired plays when one of his teachers, the playwright Lynn Nottage, suggested he write something based on his own experience. Heeding Nottage's advice, Jones drew inspiration from his hometown, a girl from his high school days, and other events in his life to write The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. The play centers on Jennifer Marcus, an intellectually gifted twenty-two-year-old with obsessive-compulsive disorder and agoraphobia who builds a flying robot replica of herself, called Jenny Chow, to track down her birth mother in China.

The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow was first produced at the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, in 2003. The following year, the play was staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, and in September 2005, it premiered Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater in New York; both productions were directed by Jackson Gay.

Jenny Chow received widespread praise from critics. For the work, Jones earned a number of awards and honors, including the 2004 Elizabeth Osborne Award for emerging artists from the American Theatre Critics Association, a 2005 Obie Award for playwriting, and a nomination for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for drama, though that year the Pulitzer board ultimately decided not to award a prize in the drama category.

Jones's next play, a comedy titled The Jammer: A Five-Stridin' Valentine, debuted in 2004. Set in 1950s Brooklyn, the play follows Jack Lovington, a devout Catholic with two dead-end jobs, as he leaves his wife-to-be and banal existence behind for the world of professional roller derby. Like Jenny Chow, The Jammer was released to much acclaim, winning a Fringe First Award for best new writing at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The play underwent various incarnations before receiving its Off-Broadway premiere in 2013.

In addition to working as a playwright, Jones launched a career in television writing in 2005, after someone forwarded a copy of Jenny Chow to Jenji Kohan, the creator of the Showtime comedy-drama series Weeds (2005–12). Kohan brought Jones on as a staff writer for the show, which revolves around the exploits of a marijuana-peddling soccer mom, played by Mary-Louise Parker. Jones wrote for the show's first four seasons, during which it achieved some of the highest ratings in Showtime's history and garnered numerous awards.

In 2009 Jones started working as a writer and supervising producer on the fourth season of the critically acclaimed NBC drama Friday Night Lights (2006–11). He received an Emmy nomination for the heavily praised episode "The Son," which focuses on a teenager coping with his father's death. As a member of the show's writing team, Jones also received nominations for best dramatic series from the Writers Guild of America. Jones returned for the show's fifth and final season in 2011, after which he began working on the final season of another critically acclaimed Showtime series, The United States of Tara.

In 2012 Jones served as a co-executive producer for twelve episodes of the NBC musical drama Smash and wrote an episode for the HBO period drama Boardwalk Empire. He subsequently helped develop the Detroit-based crime series Low Winter Sun, which premiered on AMC in August 2013. In 2014 he collaborated with Billie Joe Armstrong of the pop punk band Green Day on These Paper Bullets!, a musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing at the Yale Repertory Theatre. He also began work on a film adaptation of Green Day's hit Broadway musical American Idiot, and wrote and executive produced the television movie Knifeman (2014).

In 2015 Rolin and his production company, New Neighborhood, signed a two-year deal with 20th Century Fox Television to develop various projects. He acted as a consulting producer on the series Life In Pieces from 2015 to 2016, also writing an episode. He then served as an executive producer on The Exorcist television series in 2016. Rolin's next major project was a new television adaptation of the detective series Perry Mason for HBO, for which he was credited as both a writer and executive producer.

Rolin was the showrunner and co-creator of the television series Interview with the Vampire, based on Anne Rice's famous novel of the same name. Premiering in 2022, the first two seasons of the show were based on Rice's first novel while the third was featured the events from her second novel in the series, The Vampire Lestat.

Impact

Based on the success of Jenny Chow, Jones was able to segue into the field of television writing during a period in which many playwrights and other acclaimed authors were being recruited to the genre for their talents. Jones proved himself capable of working effectively for both the stage and the screen.

Personal Life

Jones divides his time between Los Angeles and New York. He has said that he would have been a composer if his writing career did not work out.

Bibliography

Abele, Robert. "Playwright Feels Just Right about the Strengths of the Smallscreen." Daily Variety 14 June 2011: A7. Print.

Alter, Rebecca. "Rolin Jones Unpacks 'Interview with the Vampire' Post-Finale." Vulture, 2 July 2024, www.vulture.com/article/interview-with-the-vampire-finale-rolin-jones-interview.html. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

Blankenship, Mark. "TV Lures Moonlighting Scribes." Variety 2 Apr. 2007: 40. Print.

Boehm, Mike. "A Fanciful Slice-of-Life Story." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 4 May 2003. Web. 3 Sept. 2013.

Isherwood, Charles. "Roller Derby Exerts Its Pull on Everyman." Rev. of The Jammer, by Rolin Jones. New York Times. New York Times, 23 Jan. 2013. Web. 9 Aug. 2013.

Kennedy, Mark. "Rolin Jones Writes a 'Big Ol' Dumb Comedy.'" The Big Story. AP, 23 Jan. 2013. Web. 3 Sept. 2013.

Lowman, Rob. "Playwright Rolin Jones Finds Inspiration in San Fernando Valley Life." Los Angeles Daily News. LA Daily News, 20 Oct. 2011. Web. 3 Sept. 2013.

"Meet Rolin Jones, the Guy Who Ripped Off Shakespeare in the Mod-Est Way Possible." Geffen Playhouse, 20 Aug. 2015, blog.geffenplayhouse.org/meet-rolin-jones-the-guy-who-ripped-off-shakespeare-in-the-mod-est-way-possible-4b2640d61fd1. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

Schillinger, Liesl. "The Accidental Design of Rolin Jones's Career." New York Times. New York Times, 18 Sept. 2005. Web. 3 Sept. 2013.