Women Behind the Scenes Spotlight: Natalie Chaidez

Photo Credit: TheStream.tv

Today’s Women Behind the Scenes spotlight is shone on writer, producer and showrunner Natalie Chaidez.

Natalie grew up in East Los Angeles to recovering heroin addict parents who were in and out of prison during her youth. That harsh childhood gave Natalie a unique perspective on the world, providing her with plenty of material for her future career that included urban crime dramas.

Thankfully she was an exceptional student, earning admittance into the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television “where she took a class taught by Cynthia Whitcomb, the writer of telefilms such as I Know My First Name is Steven and the mini-series Buffalo Girls”.

Natalie says that her time with Whitcomb was “very influential” because she had never “really met anyone who was making a living as a writer”. She wrote a script that was “God awful”, but Whitcomb was “really encouraging”. She later wrote a better script that earned her a “spot as one of the inaugural participants in the Walt Disney Writing Fellowship”.

After spending two years in that program and “getting her ass kicked” by the executives in charge of the program, she landed a writing job on the first season of New York Undercover in 1995. She started out as an executive story editor and throughout the three years she worked on the show, she worked as a writer and co-producer. After that she worked as writer and producer on Cracker, as a writer on Profiler and as a producer on the short-lived drama Trinity.

It was 1999 that things started to change for her career as she landed a job with Judging Amy, working as a writer and producer. The next year she wrote and produced the two-hour prison drama The Warden that was supposed to be a back-door pilot on TNT, but that didn’t work out.

Over the next few years, Natalie worked on a number of short-lived dramas: she was a supervising producer on Thieves, a co-executive producer on Skin, a writer on the remake of Kojak, a writer on 1-800-Missing and co-executive producer on Heist.

A big turning point for her was in 2006 when she landed a job with Heroes, working as a writer and co-executive producer during the show’s first season. The following TV season she was a writer and co-executive producer on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and then the next year she was a co-executive producer and writer on the short-lived remake of V. That same year she worked as a writer and co-executive producer on the short-lived series Past Life.

In 2011, she joined the writing staff of In Plain Sight where she also worked as a co-executive producer and the next TV season she was a consulting producer and writer on Necessary Roughness. She followed that up with writing on the now defunct Lifetime drama The Client List. Natalie’s current project is the recently announced 12 Monkeys adaptation that is coming to Syfy where she will be the showrunner.

Natalie is married and the mother of two kids and is on the board of directors of The Feel Good Film Festival that was founded in 2008.

Source: The Longwell Files