Bobette Buster: Hollywood's Secret

Bobette "Bobbie" Buster was born on September 4, 1953 in Ohio, raised in a small town of Leitchfield, Kentucky until 1958 when her father, Bob Buster, moved the family to to Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father  taught US and World History at Sycamore High School in Blue Ash. During his 25 years, and he became Asst. Superintendent, facilitating the rise of the Sycamore Township School System to city, state and national prominence. Growing up in Ohio, she would collect stories in her youth about the older generation, which included her own family members, and has the oral histories preserved at the Kentucky Museum. She graduated Northwestern University with a B.S. in Speech and USC Film School with an M.F.A. in the Peter Stark Producing Program. Currently she is the Special Projects Adj. Professor of Storytelling at Tufts University, while writing/producing documentaries. She is also writing her third book.

Currently living in Los Angeles, she has been working as a part-time lecturer as a Stark adjunct professor since 1992. Her lecturing and consulting experiences have comprised of Pixar, Disney, Le Femis (Paris), DFFB (Berlin), 20th Century Fox, Sony Animation, Screen Training Ireland, North By Northwest (Denmark), and more. Her area of expertise in the film industry focuses on the development of storytelling for all cultures, incorporating corporate, nonprofit, and academia. Her influences extend to writers like, Josh Goldsmith (EP, King of Queens, What Women Want), Pete Chiarelli (The Proposal), Elizabeth Klaviter (Producer/Writer, Grey’s Anatomy), Dana Fox (EP, Ben and Kate), Miles Millar & Alfred Gough (EPs, Smallville), Garret Lerner & Russell Friend (EPs, House), John August (screenwriter,) documentary producer Karen Johnson (Double Dare,) and many more. She focuses on principles such as The History of Hollywood Economics, Violence in Entertainment, The Purpose of Happily Ever After, Epiphany, and The Ten Stages of Transformation, among other important storytelling principals.

Aside from lecturing, Bobette is also a screenwriter and documentary producer. "There is phenomenal work being done in documentaries," she praised. "The constraints of raising funds and delivering ideas that can be marketed worldwide have created a really taut story discipline among documentary makers." Her works include Deadly Code (2013), Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2016) and Weapons of Mass Distraction (1997). She also has written a book that is apart of the “Do” series, entitled, Do Story: How to tell your story so the world listens that engages and connects the craftsmanship of storytelling. She is a member of the Writers Guild, and in December of 2007 while picketing outside of Paramount during the writer's strike, she reinforced, "Writers took the lead here because we're contrarians, independent thinkers."

(c. 1971, high school senior year)