Boaz Stark
Script Editor: 1991-1992
Story Editor: 1992-1993; 1994
From a young age, Boaz was interested in the creative. After high school, he went on to study fine art but realised after a year that it wasn’t a sustainable career choice, opting to transfer to a writing course at Victoria College.
It was there, in 1984, that he met scriptwriter John Powers, a lecturer at the college and a freelance writer for Grundy television. When Grundys asked John to recommend a student to kickstart their career in a trainee storyliner position, he selected Boaz. Moving to Sydney, Boaz took on his first job in television on the short-lived series Possession, working under story editor Bevan Lee.
After Possession’s axing, Boaz was moved over to Sons and Daughters, where he worked as a storyliner for the rest of the series’ run. He then went overseas for six months and, upon his return to Australia, was offered a job on another Grundy’s series, Neighbours. He remained there as storyliner for two years under Ray Kolle, as well as writing Neighbours scripts.
In the early 1990s, Boaz went freelance and found himself working across numerous series, including Home and Away. Producer Andrew Howie has asked him to write and submit weekly ‘domestic majors’ – stories that could play out in the home to save on costs for location shooting. After doing this for some months, he moved in-house as a script editor for a year, along with writing scripts for the series.
In 1992, story editor John Hugginson left Home and Away, a role he shared with Greg Stevens. The two worked together coming up with weekly plots, and then one would meet with writers to break the stories into the scenes and episodes while the other polished final scripts after they’d been through the editing process. In a natural progression, Boaz was promoted to story editor working alongside Greg Stevens. He stayed in the role for a year while also writing scripts. He notes that his favourite character to write was ‘ditzy Marilyn’.
After leaving the in-house team, Boaz continued to write scripts, receiving at least two consecutive episodes every six weeks. He also returned for eight week stints as ‘guest story editor’, as part of a new system that saw the role rotated amongst other Home and Away writers.
Eventually Boaz was approached to be a storyliner on Echo Point, a new series by Southern Star Xanadu for Network Ten. He completed a stint there, before returning to Home and Away as freelance writer until he left in 1996 to work on other series, including Millenium’s teen series Mirror Mirror, Seven dramas Always Greener and Headland.
In 2009, Boaz was approached by his friend, Adam Jones, who had conceived a short-form web series about Sydney’s LGBTQI community. Finding the existing concept too complicated and unruly, Boaz reworked it and wrote most of the first series’ episodes before going overseas. He returned to find ACON had given Adam a production grant and the first series of what became The Horizon was produced on a minuscule budget.
Over the next three years, Boaz was a permanent fixture on the Packed to the Rafters writing team, credited with nine episodes, including the highly watched ‘Mel’s death’ episode. Following the series’ conclusion, he returned to Home and Away’s writer rotation for a stint.
Apart from writing televised drama, Boaz began working on a second series of The Horizon after the first season went viral. Over the next five years, Boaz produced six more series, all of which he both wrote and directed. He also wrote The Horizon Special, a re-working of the first two web seasons, financed by Screen Australia and directed by Stephan Elliot of Priscilla Queen of the Desert fame
The Horizon web series ran until 2017, its 64 episodes clocking up over 63,000,000 views. It continues to be the most watched men’s LGBTQI web series in the world. Subsequently, The Horizon YouTube channel has been purchased and repackaged as Pride Central, a hub of LGBTQI content, including movies and documentaries.
Boaz continues to work as a writer whilst working with Pride Central to curate the channel content.
Other Credits
Possession
Storyliner (1985)
Sons and Daughters
Storyliner (1985-1987)
Neighbours
Storyliner (1989-1990)
Echo Point
Storyliner (1995)
Image with thanks to Boaz Stark