Employee Spotlight: Melissa Sweazy

Melissa Anderson Sweazy grew up in Germantown, graduated from Rhodes, and couldn’t wait to leave Memphis. “You don’t really appreciate your hometown when you’ve never left it,” she says ruefully. Just one week after graduation, she started an internship in Los Angeles as a script reader for a production company called Fried Films. “I had a glamorous job in a closet,” Melissa laughs, “where I would sit every day and read stacks and stacks of screenplays.” But in a serendipitous move a few months later, she got a new job as an assistant to the producer on the movie Frida. Melissa soon found herself talking on the phone with glamorous star Salma Hayek, and driving around the Warner Bros. lot in a golf cart seeing George Clooney and the cast of E.R. playing basketball and the cast of Friends having lunch together outside.

What Melissa really wanted to do, though, was write her own scripts. So she took a job as a writing assistant at Sony Pictures, and successfully pitched a script idea to her boss for the TV show Wolf Lake, starring Lou Diamond Phillips. It would have been her first screenwriting credit, a dream come true. Unfortunately, the show got cancelled in the wake of 9/11. Undeterred, Melissa pitched an episode of the CBS series NUMB3RS, and her boss loved it. Again, however, her hopes were dashed, when her boss suddenly got fired.

While Melissa’s professional life wasn’t playing out exactly as scripted, the plot of her personal life had taken a much better turn. She met and married a guy named Caleb Sweazy, who worked at DreamWorks in video game development. After becoming pregnant with the first of their two children (Harlow and Declan), the coupled decided to leave the Hollywood hills for the Bluff City. It was not an easy decision. “I wanted to be in the movie business, and it felt defeating to come back,” Melissa explains. “But I would say that it gave me the opportunity to really see Memphis for the first time and fall in love with it.” She began to write and direct her own short films, and Caleb started a successful custom furniture company. “After the market crashed in 2008, when you had people getting priced out of bigger cities, people really saw Memphis as a land of opportunity. I think that’s what made me proud to be here, to be invested in the city. It gave me courage to start writing again.”

Melissa started working freelance for Running Pony in 2015 and joined the company as a fulltime writer/producer/director a few months later. Now, as a Creative Director, she works on projects ranging from short social media videos to feature-length documentaries. You could say it’s the “happy ending” to her Hollywood story, or a sequel that’s a hometown love story. “I love Memphis, and I really enjoy this job. I like that every day is something different,” says Melissa. “I love meeting people and having the opportunity to interview them, getting to hear people’s stories and helping to tell them.”