Distinguished Alumni Citation
Alumni Awards and Citations
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ou’ve seen his name listed when the credits rolled for such television series as Remington Steele, Nash Bridges, and The District. And now it appears on a Distinguished Alumni Citation awarded by his alma mater. John Wirth ’75 was present at a banquet held on October 8 during Homecoming/Class Reunion Weekend to celebrate his class’s 30th-year reunion and to accept a Distinguished Alumni Citation for his achievements in the field of entertainment. Now a writer and executive producer at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, he has built an impressive list of credits as story editor, scriptwriter, producer, and “showrunner” since moving to Los Angeles as a freelance writer in 1978. The first few years were lean, but Wirth dedicated himself to screenwriting and also found time to help write Gail Matthius – One Woman Show for his wife, comedienne Gail Matthius ’75, and work on an original stage play, Before I Do, which is based upon his own experiences the night before he married Gail. In March of 1984, after writing a spec script for the Remington Steele production staff, Wirth was invited to develop a script for the series. That story,
Distinguished Alumni Citation– John Wirth ’75
John Wirth ’75
The District, for which he won an Environmental Media Award for Best TV Episodic Drama in 2002. As he has earned a place on the “A-list” of showrunners, Wirth has also became active in the Writers Guild of America. He is now a board member of the guild’s TV Writers Council and the leader of an ad hoc committee responsible for producing a “user’s guide” for television writing, Writing for Episodic Television: From Freelance to Showrunner, which has quickly become a must-read for people in the field. Wirth has developed several pilots for CBS and NBC in recent years, including The Bounty Hunters in 2004 and Love Monkey in 2005. This past summer he closed a deal to create, develop, and executive produce series projects for Touchstone Television and served for a time as showrunner-executive producer for CBS’s new Ghost Whisperer series. He is now in New York working on the Love Monkey service project. Along the way, Wirth has honed some highly desirable skills. “Two totally different skills are involved in become a writer-producer,” he says. “one, writing; two, managing people and resources. Most of the people who run television shows don’t have the training.”
This time, the spotlight’s on the producer “Breath of Steele,” became the second show filmed for the series’ new season, and John soon joined the staff as story editor. Wirth acknowledges that the series had a reputation in the industry as a “good credit”: “If you’re a new writer and you have a Remington Steele credit, it will do well for you going on to your next show.” A succession of deals with Warner Bros., GTG, Sony, and Twentieth Century Fox followed, and in 1993 he signed on as supervising producer of the quirky Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. A year later he was hired as supervising producer of the well-received but short-lived David E. Kelly Productions series Picket Fences. In 1996 he became executive producer for CBS’s popular Nash Bridges series starring Don Johnson. When that series ended, he was signed as executive producer of another CBS series,
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The Gustavus Quarterly