Telling the Stories That Matter: A Conversation with Screenwriter & Producer Madeline Rooks
If you have ever had a story burning inside of you that you just couldn't shake — one that felt too important, too real, too necessary to keep to yourself — then you are going to want to hear this story.
This week on The Chaotic Middle, I sat down with Madeline Rooks, the Los Angeles-based screenwriter, producer, and founder of Rookie Productions. Madeline’s films revolve around things that are sometimes hard to talk about, like mental health, social issues, collective trauma, and the weight of experiences we all lived through but never really talked about. She puts all of it on screen, and she does it with intention, research, and a whole lot of heart.
Are you ready for this story? It’s a good one.
From the East Coast to Hollywood with $200 and a Dream
Madeline grew up outside the DMV area, which, as anyone from DC, Maryland, or Virginia knows, is not exactly a hotbed of film culture. What she did have was a mom from California who had a very specific habit of watching films with her and then immediately explaining how they were made.
Most kids get the magic. Madeline got the behind-the-scenes breakdown. Instead of just falling in love with stories, she became fascinated by how they were made. She loved learning about the craft and the intentionality behind every scene. That curiosity never left her, and neither did the desire to tell stories of her own.
So she did what any determined, slightly fearless young woman with a dream and very little in her bank account would do. She packed her bags and moved to California.
She landed an internship script reading for production companies, found her first client, and wrote her first feature. From there, she built a career in the indie film world.
Why Short Films Are the Perfect Vehicle for Big Conversations
While many businesses come from a perfectly executed business plan, Rookie Productions was born of a moment of collective frustration.
The pandemic had ground the industry to a halt, the writer strikes had made an already difficult industry nearly impossible to navigate, and Los Angeles was, as Madeline put it, just not it. But instead of waiting for the industry to sort itself out, she and her film partner looked at each other one day and said: What's actually stopping us from just making something?
The answer was nothing. So they did.
What started in an apartment with two friends and a camera has grown into a small, tight crew making short films that shine a light on the conversations that aren't happening loudly enough. Their film The Meeting is a perfect example of that mission in action. It follows someone attending an anonymous meeting for the first time as they explore the weight of guilt and trauma carried by first responders who couldn't save everyone. It's the kind of story that doesn't get a big Hollywood budget or a major streaming deal, but it's exactly the kind of story that needs to be told.
As Madeline says, short films are the ideal format for this kind of storytelling. Without the pressure of filling two hours of screen time, the message won’t get diluted. Everyone can say exactly what needs to be said in the time it takes to say it and then leave the audience sitting with something real.
It’s that precision that makes these stories so powerful.
Filmmaking and Mental Health: Why These Stories Need to Be Told
Here is something that I think about a lot and don't say out loud enough: we went through a global pandemic, and then the world just kind of expected us to dust ourselves off and get back to it. There was no debrief or collective exhale. Or even an acknowledgment that a lot of us spiraled in some way during those years. We just moved forward as if nothing had happened, which probably wasn’t the best way to handle it.
Madeline’s background is uniquely wired for the types of discussions we should be having. She grew up in a family of therapists and counselors, surrounded by conversations about mental health long before it was something people talked about openly. That upbringing gave her both the language and the urgency to tell these stories. Filmmaking allows her to bring those conversations to people who might not otherwise be ready to have them.
That’s the great thing about art. It doesn't force anything. It allows the viewer to find their own way into the hard stuff and gives them space to process it on their own.
The Personal Layer of Storytelling
Besides loving the act of filmmaking, Madeline also has a personal reason why telling hard stories is so important to her.
She grew up just outside DC, and on September 11th, the plane that hit the Pentagon flew directly over her elementary school. Her mom was a flight attendant with American Airlines and was supposed to be on one of those flights. Luckily, she wasn't. But her friends were, and they didn't come home.
Madeline came home from school that day to find her mom watching the news, devastated, grieving, and still having to hold it together for her kids. That image of a woman carrying unimaginable trauma and still showing up never left her.
"I think it really goes back to my mom. She just went through stuff that was so traumatic in her childhood and then having to go through adulthood like that and still have to be like… I've got kids, I've got to figure it out."
That is exactly why filmmaking and mental health are inseparable for Madeline. Because the stories that shape us deserve to be told, and the people who lived through them deserve to feel seen.
The Research Behind the Story
The way Madeline processes heavy stuff like trauma, social issues, and collective grief that fuels her work is incredibly interesting. It’s not through journaling, therapy sessions, or long walks to clear her head. It's research – deep, obsessive, no-stone-unturned research.
Before she writes a single scene, she immerses herself completely in the world she is trying to portray. She goes so far down the rabbit hole that by the time she surfaces, she has absorbed entire worlds that the audience will never directly see on screen.
And that is exactly the point. The research doesn't show up as facts or figures in the finished film. It shows up as that indescribable feeling of realness that makes a story land in your chest instead of just passing through your eyes.
It's something that resonated with me deeply as a copywriter, because the process is not as different as you might think. Whether you are writing a short film about first responder guilt or a website that needs to connect with a specific audience, the work underneath the work is the same. You have to step inside someone else's experience, and understand not just what happened, but why it happened, how it felt, and what it meant. That level of empathy and curiosity is something no algorithm can replicate, no matter how sophisticated it gets.
"If the audiences don't ever see that, at least they'll kind of feel the real and raw story that I'm trying to tell because I've done so much research on the back end."
That right there is the difference between a story that entertains and a story that stays with you for years.
AI, Creativity, and Why the Human Story Still Matters
Before we move into this next part of our conversation, I want to be very upfront with you: I do not have a hard and fast rule about AI. I use it as a tool in my own work, and I think there is a version of it that genuinely helps people organize their thoughts and streamline their processes. But there is another version of it that keeps me up at night a little, and that is the version that is quietly convincing people that human creativity is optional.
As with any industry, AI is working it’s way into filmmaking, so Madeline and I spent some time discussing it. She said something about AI that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. AI was built by humans. Flawed, imperfect, beautifully complicated humans.
This means the thing we built is also flawed, imperfect, and complicated, except it doesn't know it is. It will generate an answer with complete confidence, whether that answer is right or completely made up, and the people consuming that information often have no idea which one they're getting. Madeline compared it to that one aunt or uncle at every family gathering who tells the same confident, detailed story about your family history, and then you grow up, do your own research, and realize they were just making it up the whole time.
We lose a little accuracy when we outsource our creativity to an algorithm. But our story also loses its soul. It's the pain and the love and the desire and the lived experience that artists pour into their work specifically because they have felt something and they want you to feel it too.
A Harvard Business Review article I came across recently suggested that leaning too heavily on AI for creative work is actually giving people brain fog. That’s because your creative muscle is just that – a muscle – and when you stop using it, it weakens. In a world that is already struggling to process collective trauma and disconnection, the last thing we need is to lose the one thing that has always brought us back together: storytelling.
"You kind of lose that soul in a way. We create because we have that pain, that love, that desire… and we put that into our art to share it with one another and connect."
The technology is not going anywhere, and I am not here to tell you to throw your laptop out the window (especially because I am typing this on a laptop right now.) But Madeline's work is a powerful reminder that the human story, as messy and imperfect as it is, is irreplaceable. It always will be.
Living the Dream (Even When It's Scary)
Madeline will be the first to tell you that the indie film life is not glamorous in the way people imagine it. There is crowdfunding and rallying communities and taking on day jobs to offset production costs and that very specific anxiety of being a 1099 worker who can’t set their clock to a two-week pay period.
What Madeline has that a lot of people don't is a resilience that was forged early. She grew up in a household where finances were unpredictable and stability was not guaranteed. That kind of childhood either breaks you or builds you.
For Madeline, it built her. She learned early that figuring it out was not optional, it was just what you did. And so when she packed up and moved to California with $200 and no safety net, it wasn't recklessness. It was just the only version of forward she knew how to move in.
"I grew up on survival mode. You don't really know when you're going to be able to pay for the groceries next week. Because of that, there was some drive in me where I'm like, I've got to figure out where the money's coming from."
And she does. Every time. That is what living the dream actually looks like from the inside. It’s a daily decision to keep going anyway.
The Dream Project: Summer Out West
Every creative has that one project living rent-free in their head — the one that feels almost too big to say out loud, the one they are quietly working toward while the rest of life happens around it. For Madeline, that project is Summer Out West, and I have to be honest with you, just hearing her describe it made me want to watch it immediately.
Summer Out West is a feature film satire about the birth of Hollywood. Not the version of Hollywood history that has been handed down to us through decades of carefully curated mythology, but the real version — the one that gives credit back to the people who actually built it. The minorities. The women. The voices that were written out of the story somewhere along the way and replaced with a much tidier, much less accurate narrative. Madeline wants to shoot it on actual film, because if you are going to tell the true story of how Hollywood began, you might as well do it in the most gloriously fitting way possible.
It is a project that feels especially urgent right now, at a moment when history itself feels like it is being contested, rewritten, and in some cases actively erased. Madeline's response to that is not anger — it is art. It is the kind of film that reminds people, gently but firmly, that you cannot rewrite what actually happened. The evidence exists. The stories are there. And someone is going to tell them.
"You can't erase history. There's going to be evidence somewhere. You can't just ChatGPT it."
The world needs this film, and I genuinely believe Madeline Rooks is exactly the right person to make it.
Answering the Chaotic Questions
At the end of every episode, I ask each guest a few questions. Here's how Madeline answered:
If you could go back and talk to your 2005 self, what would you tell her?
Don't be afraid to express yourself more.
A new mom comes to you for advice. What's the first thing you tell her?
Do you need a drink?
Where to Find Madeline
If this conversation sparked something in you, go find Madeline and tell her.
You can follow Rookie Productions on Instagram and visit her website to learn more about what’s coming next. She will be the first to admit she is not the most prolific social media poster in the world, but when she does show up, it is worth your attention.
And if Summer Out West ever makes it to a film festival near you, do yourself a favor and go. I have a feeling it is going to be one of those films people talk about for a long time.
Want to Hear More Stories Like This?
I will be honest with you…this conversation went about fourteen different directions and I loved every single second of it. Madeline is the kind of guest who makes you think differently about the world before the episode is even over. We talked about trauma and art and AI and Hollywood history and Disney Channel movies from the early 2000s, and somehow it all connected because that is just the kind of conversation Madeline inspires. I am so glad she came on the show.
If this episode resonated with you, you are going to love The Chaotic Middle Podcast, where every week I sit down with real people navigating the beautiful, messy, unpredictable overlap of work, life, motherhood, and everything in between. No highlight reels. No perfectly curated advice. Just honest conversations with people who are out there figuring it out in real time — just like the rest of us.
Subscribe now on:
Because the world needs more stories like Madeline's. More honesty, more courage, more art that makes us feel something real. And maybe yours is next.
