Lawyer, Screenwriter Mary Craven Adams Celebrates the Art of Film
Mary Craven Adams. Photo courtesy of Diana Greene.
There is nothing quite like watching a film.
Whether your favorite genre is drama, action, romance, comedy or a mix of genres, something special happens when the title sequence appears on the screen. Catching a flick is like entering a new world.
Who can forget the first time a movie left them speechless and spellbound and wondering what just happened?
Beyond creating surprise and awe in the audience, a film can serve a purpose greater than entertainment alone. A well-crafted movie can provide space for a new perspective, one that empathizes with others and embraces the range of human experience.
Crafting moments such as these for audience members is why Mary Craven Adams, an attorney and partner with Womble Bond Dickinson, decided to pursue filmmaking while also working full time as a litigator in Winston-Salem. Adams, a graduate of Wake Forest University School of Law, has practiced law for more than twenty-five years. She is a member of the NCBA Sports & Entertainment Law Section and serves on the section council. Her husband, Cal Adams, is also a partner with Womble Bond Dickinson.
When she is not practicing law, she now spends the bulk of her time in one of two ways: with her family primarily chasing fifteen-year-old twins or writing screenplays and working on creative projects. Two years ago, at 51, she began a Master of Fine Arts degree in filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and in May, she graduated from the program.
Aside from the tragic loss of a beloved mentor, she loved every minute of it.
It’s clear that for Adams, the art of film brings her joy. In thinking about her “why” – her purpose in pursuing this interest – there is one idea she comes back to again and again: the magic of entering someone else’s perspective.
“My goal as a screenwriter is to transport the audience into another person’s shoes, especially someone they might not necessarily relate with otherwise,” she says.
The chance to view the world from someone else’s eyes is a fantastic prospect, even if it might not be the most pressing reason for watching a film. Some people might say they go to the movies for a moment of self-discovery whereas other people might want to escape from reality for a short time. Others might watch a film to learn something new or experience what it was like to live at a certain time in the past.
For whatever reason you tune in, being transported is a necessary part of the experience. The act of transportation happens precisely when you pause thinking. In the blink of an eye, before you know it, you’re in someone else’s world – that is, if the movie moves you.
Gaining a new vantage point is something that happens when you sit down to watch a film, and it can also occur when your imagination takes flight.
Adams has been transported through the art of film, both by watching movies and through her experiences in the filmmaking classroom at UNCSA. The late Peter Werner, an Oscar-award winner and the director of Moonlighting, was one of three mentors to Adams in the program. Werner interviewed Adams for the program, and Adams first took Werner’s class in August 2022.
But partway through her degree, Werner passed away on March 21, 2023.
“He had an extraordinary love of human beings, story, kind people, and living in the present. He died extremely unexpectedly, and it’s difficult to explain how devastating it was for our cohort,” says Adams.
Werner left a rich legacy to the filmmaking world and to Adams and her classmates. Asked about what it was like to learn from him, she recalls a particular class session.
Picture this: your Oscar award-winning professor walks in, only this time, he is carrying his award with him.
“One of the most powerful visuals occurred during a class the week before Peter died,” she says.
“Peter had each of us hold his Oscar and give an acceptance speech to visualize what it would be like to see ourselves there. The class was already very emotional because an undergraduate student had committed suicide, and Peter began the class with an open and frank discussion about suicide. After tears and a little comedy and drama with respect to the speeches, we group hugged at the end, lifting each other up. It’s very touching to look back and realize that our first and only group hug is how his teaching career ended.
“He was an anchor in terms of inspiring and instilling confidence. I called him Winston-Salem’s only ‘Jewish Buddhist New Yorker from L.A.’ He imparted life lessons. One of his most frequent quotes, and I don’t know who this was originally attributed to, was to always remember to always keep the most important thing the most important thing.”
Her other two mentors, Agatha Dominik and Lauren Vilchik, are active film industry professionals/professors who contribute to making UNCSA a top ten film school.
Adams, right, pictured with screenwriter and UNCSA mentor Agatha Dominik, who works from Los Angeles and Poland.
“While working on multiple scripts of her own and traveling back and forth from LA to Poland to North Carolina, Agatha elevated us to an entirely higher level of writing and kept up with dozens of stories and hundreds of characters at a time.”
As she looks back on her filmmaking journey, Adams says that in the beginning, she viewed herself as only a writer. Because of her mentors, she is pursuing writing and producing.
Her experience practicing law especially equipped her to produce films.
“It was wild that my mentors had to actually tell me that the skills that you develop as a lawyer are well suited to being a producer and putting a deal together, collaborating with many different people with the shared vision of bringing it across the finish line. And almost two decades of business valuation experience creates a familiarity with financial metrics – providing a foothold to understand film financing and the necessary ROI in order to move forward with a project.
“If you’re solely a writer, you’re in less control of your destiny,” says Adams. “You’re waiting for someone to hire you for a project or fall in love with your spec project and decide that they want to try to produce it and put it together, you know, package it, get the financing. Lawyers, like producers are used to being a decision-maker on moving a project forward.”
“How to Make it Happen”: perhaps this would be the title if a movie was made about Adams.
Her career trajectory reads like a movie script.
Here is the premise: an ambitious law student is inspired by a family law professor to become a family law attorney only to realize many years into her career that family law is not a good fit for her strengths. The attorney decides to make a change in her professional life by transitioning to a different practice area. Years later, she pursues a secondary interest, a love for writing and producing films.
Without giving away too many spoilers, I am happy to share that Adams discovered her passion for employment and health care litigation and enjoys working on behalf of her clients primarily in these areas. Over the past several years, she has been learning about entertainment law and gaining experience as she plans to increasingly focus on this area of law in the future. Womble is a powerhouse in terms of intellectual property lawyers and has an office in L.A.
She enjoys the mix of law and being creative.
“I love my clients and have no plans to quit practicing law. I try to set a lot of things on autopilot to make better use of the 168 hours in a week. For example, I eat the same thing almost every day for breakfast and lunch,” says Adams.
Adams, middle row, second from left, photographed with her graduating cohort and Agatha Dominik, bottom row, second from left.
She found her happy ending, but how did the plot unfold, exactly?
When Adams was a law student, her favorite class in law school was family law because of her professor, Suzanne Reynolds. Reynolds was the professor who had a command of every topic from constitutional law to contracts, and could put it all in a big-picture perspective of examining practical effects of legal precedent on different demographics as well as how it reflected societal values.
Reynolds authored “Lee’s North Carolina Family Law, Vols. 1, 2 and 3.” Adams gained hands-on experience one year in law school by assisting Reynolds with the equitable distribution section of the treatise. Reynolds went on to become Dean of Wake Forest University School of Law.
“While I was enamored with my professor, I didn’t love practicing family law,” she says. “I made the jump because her teaching made it my favorite class in law school.”
Adams gave one hundred percent as a family law attorney. She joined Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice (now Womble Bond Dickinson) in 1996 and began practicing high net worth family law. After joining the NCBA in 1997, she served as a committee chair for the NCBA Family Law Section, served a stint on the council, as well as being the editor of the Family Forum, the section’s newsletter. Inspired by Reynolds, Adams co-taught family law courses at Wake Forest University School of Law when the law school needed an interim for two semesters.
After practicing for five years, Adams became certified by the North Carolina State Bar as a specialist in the field, and went on to serve on the State Bar Committee on Specialization, which writes and grades the exam for other lawyers seeking board certification.
“I was all in,” she says. “At one point I handled some very significant cases and some celebrity-type divorce cases. And I realized I was so unhappy that I literally turned my specialization back into the bar before it needed to be renewed and said I don’t want to be a family law specialist anymore.”
The field may not have been the best fit for her, but she doesn’t regret beginning there. Her background in family law gave her insight into the law, and, further, into different types of conflict. Certain moments in her career have unfolded as if she were in a film.
She calls these happenings “movie moments.”
“Conflicts drive story. Daily tug-of-wars about power, relationships and money provide ample inspiration for understanding the unlimited number of ways that internal and external conflicts can arise. From working with extraordinarily colorful and successful clients to assisting when an attorney accidentally set his hair on fire during a client meeting – I’ve seen some wild things happen.”
Her schedule as an early career attorney was different from her pace of life now, in part because, over the years, a shift has occurred in the culture of big law firms. During early years, an office day was longer and more involved. Over time, a move has occurred toward prioritizing work-life balance and encouraging outside interests, especially pursuits that foster a sense of well-being.
In one of her beginning roles as an attorney, her first daily commitment was at 5 a.m., when she met a partner in her firm for racquetball before a standing 7 a.m. working breakfast. Before leaving the office around 7 p.m., the law firm partner would usually give her an assignment she needed to have completed by the following morning.
Work-life balance and diversity are important values to her law firm, and because of that, during her off hours, she has been able to pursue her long-held dream of being a filmmaker.
“I had always wanted to become a screenwriter,” says Adams.
“I came very close to quitting my job when I was in my late 20s and early 30s at Womble. I considered moving out to L.A. with a group of friends who were living there. And at the time, it just seemed utterly irresponsible to give up a great career with the firm that I loved to go work in a mail room for one of the big agencies.”
She continued working as an attorney and began to seek out ways to focus on film on the side. In the early 2000s, she began volunteering in the film space with RiverRun International Film Festival through her Junior League Placement, and she took an adult education class in screenwriting through UNCSA. While President of the Forsyth County Bar Association, she planned a full-blown formal event, themed around her then favorite movie: “A Night in Casablanca.” After her tenure with the bar association was over, she became more involved with RiverRun.
RiverRun holds an annual eleven-day festival in which attendees gather to view screenings from independent filmmakers from around the world. In 2024, films from 30 countries were screened. Two categories in the film festival are Oscar qualifying. When Adams attended RiverRun for the first time in 2002, she fell in love with international storytelling.
Adams, center row, right, with UNCSA graduate school classmates at the 25th Anniversary Celebration for RiverRun International Film Festival.
As a budding film enthusiast, she quickly jumped in as a RiverRun volunteer. “I started out driving foreign filmmakers around and working in venues. I eventually served on the board and then chaired the board.”
And when Stephen Soderburgh and George Clooney made the movie “Leatherheads” in Winston-Salem, she worked as an extra on set. She was asked to come to multiple small shoots with the lead actors – not because she had talent as an “extra” but because instead of trying to draw attention to herself, she was the perfect “potted plant” as she was reading legal documents under her costume.
She expanded her volunteer role in film.
“I also served on the film commission board for eight years, in order to better understand the economic development value of film production, and the ins and outs of film incentives.”
Being in the film space fueled her passion further, as did watching others reach for their dreams later in life.
“One of my sisters-in-law went back to school after she was 50 to obtain a graduate degree. Later that year, one of my close ‘college era’ friends went back to school and got a master’s degree,” says Adams.
“I was on a walk with one of my documentary filmmaker friends reflecting that I had never given up on wanting to be a writer. She encouraged me to apply to the master’s program at UNCSA, and once I was accepted to the program, it was a lightning-fast two years.”
During those two years, she worked on several films.
Adams and four other women formed an LLC and obtained a grant to produce a trilogy of three short films about invisible labor; there were 45 women who worked on the project.
“We decided to experiment with a project where every single person working on the project behind the camera and in front of the camera was either a woman or identified as a woman,” says Adams. “It was a uniquely rewarding experience; ‘Women of Acadia Street’ will be submitted to festivals in the upcoming months.”
For the second short, filmed in Latvia, she worked with Autumn Karen, from her cohort.
“Autumn and I wrote the script; the entire case and crew were in Latvia. After 13 rewrites of the script, the director ran into an obstacle filming on a major bridge in Riga after being assured he could do so,” she says.
“At the last minute, we were on FaceTime with the director, rewriting the script for the culminating scenes to take place in a historically significant cemetery rather than the bridge.”
It was great practical experience.
Her time in the program culminated with a meaningful moment during her graduation ceremony. Troy Kotsur, of CODA fame, gave the commencement address.
Kotsur is the first deaf man to receive an Academy Award. He earned the accolade for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the father of the main character, a hearing child. Adams connected with Kotsur’s story because he found success in the filmmaking world later in life.
She was also inspired by his tenacity.
Before landing the role of CODA, Kotsur shared that he had many years of struggles in regional theatre, including living out of his car. Everything changed after he was cast in CODA.
“His life took off in his 50s,” says Adams. He was a delightfully personable speaker. He had a personal connection to the Dean of the film school, Deborah LaVine, who directed him in his first major film role for her feature ‘Wild Prairie Rose.’ His work with her helped him to get the role in CODA.
“To have Kotsur standing up there talking about feeding that spark and saying ‘Don’t ever let go of your dream’ was powerful for all of the students. But especially, I think, for us old folks because creative success came for him later in life!”
Kotsur’s commencement address was the perfect “movie moment” to complete her experience in the program. It was one of the highlights of the past few months, during which Adams has been writing much more than she was able to do as a film student.
Autumn Karen, left, a member in Mary’s graduating cohort, and Troy Kotsur, pictured at graduation.
In the spring, she wrote a blog post with Harris Tulchin, an entertainment lawyer based in L.A. and Las Vegas. The blog post, So, Your Client is Considering Investing in a Film, was published on the NCBarBlog.
What are some of the film projects she is working on?
She describes her current projects as stories that are “about something” relevant right now.
“If I said ‘What’s the movie CODA about?’ someone who’s not a filmmaker might say, oh, it’s about a woman, a girl and her whole family is deaf. When you ask a filmmaker what a movie is about, they generally don’t tell you what happens. ‘What it’s about’ is how hard it is when you absolutely love your family, and you’re committed to your family, but you can’t move on with your dreams and still continue to serve the same role in your family.
“With a filmmaker, when you’re pitching a project, they don’t want to necessarily know the gimmicky line. Of course a producer wants to know the genre, but what they really want to know is what is this movie about and why does it need to be made now.”
Adams’s top three feature-length scripts are varied in both genre and scope. Her project “Unusually Cold” is a feature-length script set in the backdrop of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. She explains the meaning behind the title: it describes the dynamic between a mother and a teenage son whose relationship is strained because the mother is too overprotective.
“I remember 1986 as a time where the United States was so much more united. It was a proud time for NASA and space. ‘Unusually Cold’ is a double entendre for the theme of their relationship and the cause of the Challenger exploding, and ultimately speaks to the role of open channels of communication to avoid disaster and move to the top of Maslow’s pyramid.”
Her second project is an ensemble dramedy about five 40-year-old women who pledged the same sorority, went different ways and reunite for a destination trip that exposes and ultimately celebrates their differences.
“I feel strongly about making this film because the characters are so strong in such markedly different ways. There are at least five or six dream actors for every single one of those five roles because of the plethora of talented 40-year-old female actors.”
The third script she is moving forward is called “The Summer That I Counted.” The script is based on Adams’s experience in 1990 as a “Non-Response Follow-Up Field Enumerator” for the United States Census Bureau.
Adams provides more detail on this project.
“This is a coming-of-age story about a soon-to-be college freshman – a consummate rule follower – and the struggles she encounters when she realizes that following the rules will hurt someone she cares deeply about.”
The main character encounters a 15-year-old girl living alone because her father, a Pete Rose fan – has left her to work at the Ohio prison where Pete Rose is serving time for tax evasion. She laments, “It kills me when people ask me, ‘Who is Pete Rose?’”
Reflecting on the filmmaking program, Adams remarks on the spirit of the students. She found the collaboration with others especially powerful.
“The law school learning environment could learn from the collaborative model of the creatives. No one in film school cares about class rank or having the most gold stars; it is just accepted that we all rise by lifting others,” she says.
“Being in a group project with 25-year-olds when you’re in your 50s, I realized that these young adults can already see the benefit that it takes some people years to learn, that you give and share whatever you’ve got with your colleagues in the hopes that everybody’s going to grow and get more opportunities.”
Adams and three other filmmakers have joined efforts in a development and production company. Their first feature film is a SAG low-budget sci-fi film which is being co-produced with another North Carolina-based production company. The film should be ready for distribution by late spring 2025.
Through her filmmaking degree, Adams has realized her love for both the art of film and the law. Writing and creating energizes her in other areas of her life.
And from Adams’s story, one can imagine how being both a lawyer and screenwriter is more than possible.
It’s a dream role, and one that is perfect for her.
Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.