On Story

Austin Film Festival started in 1994 as the first organization of its kind to focus on the writer's contribution to film and television, and it recorded its panels and conversations for years. In 2009 executive director Barbara Morgan concluded that the tapes were at risk of deteriorating and began working out how to preserve and share them. The result was the On Story Project.

The television series came first. With underwriting from the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, the festival launched the 30-minute On Story on Austin PBS, KLRU-TV, in 2011. It edits festival footage into episodes on the craft of writing for the screen. KLRU's CEO, Bill Stotesbery, predicted it would do for Austin film what Austin City Limits did for Austin music. The show began locally, was picked up by other public stations, and by 2022 aired in 86 percent of PBS markets. It won Lone Star Emmys for a Season 4 conversation with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan and for the Season 8 episode Script to Screen: Arrival in 2018.

The project kept expanding. A podcast launched in 2012 as an audio companion and passed 1.7 million downloads by June 2022. A one-hour radio show debuted on KUT in Austin in February 2015 with 11 episodes, gained distribution through Public Radio International in its second season, and later moved to PRX. With the University of Texas Press the festival published three books: On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft (2013), On Story: Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films (2016) and On Story: The Golden Ages of Television (2018). The raw recordings went to the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, where the On Story Archive is open to the public.

Later seasons widened the scope to playwriting, documentary, web series and virtual reality. Recent episodes on the website include conversations with Abbott Elementary co-showrunner Patrick Schumacker and Michael Arndt.