The Sky is the Limit
STOWE STORY LABS ALUM TISHA ROBINSON-DALY DISCUSSES THE INSPIRATION BEHIND HIGH AND THE LONG JOURNEY ALREADY MADE, AND THE ONE STILL TO COME
By Marian Cook
In 2014, Tisha Robinson-Daly received a phone call that changed her life—and this isn’t an exaggeration in the slightest. Since then, she’s worked tirelessly to realize High and spotlight the tower-climbing community she hopes to serve with her screenplay. Lately, the fruits of her labor—years of advocating, thousands of script notes, hours of team-building—have come to fruition.
Part of the journey was to partner with co-writer and co-director Jonathan Mason (pictured below). In September, prominent Entertainment Attorney, Producer, and Stowe Story Labs Mentor Jonathan Gray signed on to executive produce. Tisha and Jonathan Mason were as well invited to the highly-selective Tribeca Creators Market. And most recently, High was selected for the Tribeca x Unreal Engine: Writing in Unreal program, where HIGH became one of only ten film projects paired with Unreal Engine artists to workshop their scripts using real-time, innovative 3D tools. Now, they are slated to start shooting in Winter 2023. In the meantime, Tisha is keeping her fingers crossed that maybe, just maybe, Joel Edgerton will sign on as her lead.
Since she was 14 years old, Tisha has been writing—writing on paper, writing in her head, writing where she can. She started with novels and eventually progressed to screenplays fourteen years ago, but the transition wasn’t easy. “In a novel, there's so much description, there's so many details that you want to paint for your audience. And in a screenplay, you don't want to have so much direction and action,” Tisha stated. “It's really about your characters and what they're saying versus you painting this beautiful, elegant picture with words.”
It was only after a lot of trial and error that Tisha finally cracked the code, but it’s still a life-long journey to perfecting the craft. She reminisces about her first screenplay with amusement, a story about love in her twenties that had a “little bit of a Sex in the City vibe.” Tisha explains, “I thought I could totally see this being a movie. And I have a cousin who's actually a director so I gave it to him and said, ‘This is going to be a hit, like I know it's going to be a hit. You have to read this.’ And yeah, it wasn't a hit.”
Tish Robinson-Daly and Jonathan Mason at the Writing in Unreal program.
In delving into screenwriting, naturally, there have been projects that she has shelved, but the one she never has is High. It is raw, authentic, and personal—the main character, Butch, carrying part of her memories of her dad. That call in 2014 came from a friend of Tisha’s who had heard the tragic story of 28-year-old tower climber Joel Metz. While changing the antenna of a cell tower, some of which weigh upwards of thousands of pounds, a cable snapped and decapitated Joel. For five hours, his body hung 200 feet up in the air in the heat of July. Just hours before, Joel had posted a photo on Facebook of his view over the Kentucky hills.
Tisha explained, “I couldn't shake it. I just couldn't wrap my head around something so horrific happening to someone just doing their job. He was a father of four little boys…. My father had passed away two years before and I was really struggling. I was harboring this feeling of like, I'm so young and my dad's dead. It was unfair and I still needed him.” She continued, “So when I heard the story, it felt like a personal attack to me. Oddly enough, that same year his funeral was held on my birthday. So it’s like this really weird connection that I felt with this person I never met.”
Soon after, she started researching, reaching out to tower climber groups on Facebook, interviewing them, and quickly realized that Joel’s story wasn’t an isolated incident. In fact, there were several recorded incidents of tower climbers dying tragically on the job, just nobody was paying attention. “They work for small companies making very little money, living on the road away from their families for months at a time. And yet, we all benefit from the service that they provide us. Yet, none of us know that they exist. None of us know the danger of what they do,” Tisha expounds.
And so she started a nonprofit called High the Movement, dedicated to advocating for better safety conditions for tower climbers, and wrote High based on the stories of hundreds of real tower climbers. One year later, she was accepted to the Stowe Writers’ Retreat, the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive, and received a Sundance Knight Foundation Fellowship. Since then, it’s been a snowball effect, but she credits her success to her passion for the project and Stowe Story Labs being the first to take a chance on her.
“That is where I really felt validated that I had something—it needs work, but you have something. But it wasn’t like I went to the retreat and it was over. We stayed in contact and David kept encouraging me like, ‘I really love this story. What's going on next? What are you doing next?’ David has honestly become a friend. And giving High the opportunity to be a part of the first Launch program has been invaluable,” Tisha stated. Launch is Stowe’s Advanced Development Program, currently nurturing five alumni projects with the aim to get them into production.
Tisha and Jonathan at a script notes meeting with their Executive Producer Jonathan Gray, Launch Director Bryce Norbitz, and Stowe Story Labs Founder and Director David Rocchio.
She continued, “It's really nice to have, not just an organization, but individuals who genuinely want you to succeed. It's really hard in this industry, especially, to find people who are willing to go to bat for you and put their name on a project, and say, ‘No, this is worth a chance’.”
As High reaches new heights, for Tisha the most important thing to remember—because it’s not always a straight path—is to remain ardent about your project and craft: “You have to believe in what you're doing and love it. And I know that sounds really elementary, but like I said, I've written so many things that I thought I loved and I shelved. But I've never shelved High because I believe in what I’m saying. I love that it means something to me, even if it is an unpopular message. Yeah, it may not happen right away; it took me years to get to this point—I've been working on this since 2016 and it's still not made—but it is the furthest that I've gotten because I never stopped believing that it was something that needed to be made. So just be authentic. Don't worry about what everybody else is doing or making, just be true to what you have to say. It will work out, maybe not right away, but in time it will.”
Marian Cook is a former journalist, Stowe Story Labs staff member, and current USC student pursuing an MFA in directing. She’s been published over a dozen times, covering topics from local news to federal healthcare legislation. Although she loves the world of journalism, having done documentaries on a range of topics from plastic surgery to segregation in the church, her real passion lies in narrative film. She one day hopes to be a writer-director and tell strong, female-led stories, especially that of Latinas. When she’s not filming, she likes to explore, listen to blues and jazz, brush up on her French, and absorb everything science fiction related. Learn more at http://mariandcook.weebly.com/. At Stowe Story Labs, Marian assists with all aspects of operations, writes for the newsletter, and assists with research and writing to support fundraising and communications about programs.
