The 2022 spooky season has been quite the celebration for Jen D’Angelo ’06. The EA alumna recently returned from the NYC premiere of Disney’s Hocus Pocus 2, a film that she had the honor of serving as lead writer. On Friday, Oct. 21, she spoke with Upper School Scholium editors and members of the Creative Writing Club via Zoom to tell her story and inspire the next generation of writers.

While speaking about her journey from EA to today, Jen detailed her time at EA and remembering how she loved to write comedy skits for the annual Can Drive and Scrooge Chapel, which helped begin her interests in script writing and stand-up comedy.

"It was amazing [to talk to EA students]," Jen said. "It's cool because it feels like [I was at] EA not that long ago, and I feel like I relate to them so much in having that feeling of 'I want to be a writer, how do I do it?'"

Although Jen is not new to the world of film and television, this highly anticipated sequel to the 1993 film Hocus Pocus was the first production she's worked on of this scale. “It's been three years of working directly with the director on everything,” she explained. 

Jen’s excitement about the opportunity to work on the sequel to the Halloween cult classic has been bubbling over since early 2019, when she was first asked by her agent if she was interested in meeting about it. The following fall, the news broke that Jen got the gig and Hocus Pocus 2 was officially in the works. Since then, she said it has been an “absolute dream.”

“When I started the script… the first words I wrote were EXT. SALEM - 1600s. I then immediately stopped because I was tearing up. I couldn’t believe I was writing Hocus Pocus 2. I still can’t!” Jen wrote on Instagram. The film debuted on Disney+ on Sept. 30.

Students asked Jen a myriad of thoughtful questions, such as her biggest challenge in writing Hocus Pocus 2. "There are a lot of voices weighing in and input that you have to balance and compromise," she answered. They also wanted to know about her screenwriting process for different characters, to which she said: "Have an actor in mind to help envision each character and performance; it makes it easier to write because you can hear the voice."

Students also asked about writing a sequel and balancing the nostalgic factor with a feeling of newness. "That was always the dance," Jen said. "I always felt like Hocus Pocus in particular has a timelessness to it, and I felt like as long as I kept that timelessness by not succumbing to the temptation to make them do a TikTok dance in the opening two minutes and just stay in the spirit of Halloween, it would feel like the original, and I could tell a different story with different characters within that." 

While Jen didn't know anyone “in the industry” growing up, she took her drive to succeed and creative flair for writing and chased her dreams. A writer, producer, actress, and stand-up comedian now based in Los Angeles, Jen said she knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of seven when she worked on the EAPA Book Binding Project and remembers thinking, "I'm an author now!" As senior warden of the Vestry, Jen said she even used her Chapel speeches as a time to test out some comedy...with a biblical twist. "EA made me feel so independent," Jen said. "I don't remember why, how, or when I just started saying, 'I'm going to write more Chapel skits, and we're going to do them,' but that happened and Rev. Bert Zug was great and fostered that creativity, as did Rev. Squire. You could carve your own path [at EA], which I thought was cool. EA really created that space for me."

After graduating from EA in 2006, Jen went on to Northwestern to study screenwriting and perform stand-up in Chicago. Upon earning her degree, Jen moved to LA where she started working production assistant jobs and was “writing all the time” on the side. After getting an agent through performing comedy, she shared all of the scripts that she had written, which began to get passed around and launched her writing career. She eventually landed a job as a staff writer for Cougar Town and worked her way up to projects such as Young Rock, Solar Opposites, Happy Together, LA to Vegas, Workaholics, and Loosely Exactly Nicole.

With a goal to get into movies, Jen said she wrote a feature sample to show her voice and comedic style, which got "passed around a lot" and helped her begin setting up movie meetings with and pitching on movie projects, which is how she landed a meeting with Disney and got the Hocus Pocus 2 job. Most recently, she finished filming an untitled sister comedy in New Orleans starring Sandra Oh and Awkwafina–a film in which she wrote the script and served as producer. Jen is also currently working on Stranded Asset, a film she is co-writing with Sam Richardson and that Chris Pratt is producing.

She told Upper Schoolers about continually pursuing her love for writing and stand-up and just working at what she enjoyed. "It all comes down to finding the things that you love doing. It really feels like it's so important to love what you're doing on some level, whether that's making you laugh or because you feel like you're getting this story out that is really important to you. That feeling is so important—if you are staying true to what you want to see, what you want to hear, what you want to learn, people can sense that and will gravitate to that."