
By: Sarah Chaisson-Warner
Kevin Noonan won our One-Hour 2022 TV Pilot Contest with his script, THE BERLIN AGENT. Set in 1956 during the Cold War, a murder in East Berlin draws a disgraced British intelligence officer and a cynical German detective into a conspiracy of espionage, scientific discovery, and the future (and the past) of world history.
Kevin, a former journalist, writer, and performer originally from Kansas, has a love of and passion for the works of John Le Carre, Elmore Leonard, and Agatha Christie, as well as anything with a heist. Kevin previously wrote and performed at the Pack Theater in Los Angeles with house ensembles Very Famous and Nobody Yell at Me.
He has been a writer at heart his whole life, starting from when he was a schoolboy. “I remember always looking forward to projects that required some element of creative writing, especially if I could make myself laugh,” he says. He loved writing and movies, and grew up with older siblings who “introduced me to a far broader scope of film than they probably should have at my age.” (Kevin occasionally still gets nightmares about the opening credits of Se7en, but – in his words – “they’re cool nightmares.”)
As he grew older, he wrote for a variety of different mediums, including newspapers and magazines. In college, he read William Goldman’s books, opening his eyes to the idea of screenwriting as a craft and as a profession, and that made the idea of sitting down to write a screenplay feel like a much more tangible goal.
“Now nothing gives me a rush of adrenaline and anxiety quite like staring at a blank Final Draft document and starting to craft a story.” – Kevin Noonan
In 2017, he took a comedy sketch writing class, which proved to be incredibly valuable in his journey to becoming a screenwriter. “It helped me convert my desire to write into functional, practical, and economical writing skills that I apply to everything I’ve written since,” he says.