From Black Adam to The Eternals and beyond, news of new superhero films is not hard to come by. Next up: Green Lantern. Iranian-American screenwriter and creative executive Sara Saedi is set to work on HBO Max’s upcoming Green Lantern series. This latest will follow her most recent work for ABC’s Grand Hotel and The CW’s Katy Keene and iZombie.
A decade after the 2011 Green Lantern film starring Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, which disappointed Warner Bros. at the box office and was poorly received by audiences and critics alike, HBO Max has decided to give the superhero another chance. Producer Greg Berlanti will team up with executive producers Seth Grahame-Smith, Marc Guggenheim, Geoff Johns, Sarah Schechter, David Madden and David Katzenberg. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Hunter and Sara Saedi have joined up as co-executive producers.
From screenwriting and producing to books, Sara Saedi crafts stories
Saedi earned her B.A. in film and mass communications from the University of California, Berkeley. She then began her career in television and visual productions as a creative executive for ABC Daytime. In 2010, she shifted her focus to screenwriting to pursue her dream of being a writer. During this time, she earned an Emmy award for new approaches for her ten-part ABC web series, “What If…”.
Saedi then worked on the FOX sitcom The Goodwin Games and prepared her first young adult novel, Never Ever. This sold to Viking Children’s Books for publication in summer 2016. She then followed up this first YA novel with another one about teenagers, The Lost Kids.
Following these first two fictional book projects, Saedi shared her own story and experience with the world through a memoir. In 2018’s Americanized: Rebel without a Green Card, she drew on her memories and wrote about her personal experience of being an undocumented Iranian teenager growing up in the USA. Americanized describes Sara’s 18-year-long path to citizenship, and captures the overpowering anxiety of being an undocumented immigrant from the Middle East.
Sara Saedi captures the anxiety-inducing effects of being undocumented in Americanized
Saedi was born in 1980 during the Iran hostage crisis. As such, she came into the world in the midst of war and revolutionary fervor in Iran. This chaotic environment, and the rapid change produced by the latter soon led her family to seek a life elsewhere. The Saedi family had relatives in the US and Saedi’s father had studied at Louisiana State University. So, they decided to flee to the US.
In 1982, when Sara was only 2 and her sister 5 years old and while the borders were closed in Iran, Sara’s father managed to bribe somebody in the government to get papers for his wife and daughters, so they could go to California. He stayed behind for a while, though, not to give the impression that the family was leaving permanently. Her father joined them in the Bay Area after three months. However, Sara writes in Americanized that she did not recognize him, and was afraid of him at first.
When their tourist visas expired, the family stayed and applied for political asylum. However, their application somehow got lost in the shuffle. So they had to look for alternate ways to gain a legal foothold in the US.
Sara herself only learned about her family’s legal status at the age of 13. She recalls her sister’s frustration while filling job applications, when they all asked for her Social Security Number.
As she shows in Americanized, those years were marked by a looming fear of deportation. It was “something that was always in the back of my mind,” she says, pointing out how being secretive about their situation was contributing to her teenage angst. After 18 years, though, Saedi finally got her Green Card, through her uncle’s sponsorship, in 2000, and became a citizen 6 years later.
Green Lantern in production and set to debut secretly gay FBI agent Alan Scott
While a release date for the upcoming HBO series has not been announced, production for Green Lantern is underway. Lee Toland Krieger will be directing the first few episodes of the show, and Finn Wittrock has been cast in a lead role.
The story will span different decades and galaxies, starting in 1941 with the very first Green Lantern, secretly gay FBI agent Alan Scott. The story will later depict the year 1984, with alpha male Guy Gardner and half-alien Bree Jarta joined by other Green Lanterns.
Watch the trailer now:
