Unlike most people on a Monday morning, David Hudgins is thrilled to be back at work.
Hudgins, Trinity '87, walked off his job as a writer and supervising producer of the NBC drama "Friday Night Lights" for more than three months as the Writer's Guild of America hammered out a new deal.
"When the strike happened, the actors and everybody got to work another month. We stopped working and cleaned out our offices," he says. "It's been three months of not much fun."
Hudgins filled his time serving as "Friday Night Lights" strike captain, ensuring that the writers followed strict strike rules, dusting off a movie idea that had languished while his television writing career took off, and generally driving his wife crazy, he says.
But this isn't the first time Hudgins has walked away from his job and the story of how Hudgins left a successful law career to find screenwriting success could have been penned for the big screen.
After graduating from Duke, he spent the next 15 years following a path well-worn by political science majors before him. He moved to Washington, D.C. to work as an aide for then-Tennessee Senator Al Gore, moved back to the Triangle to campaign for Gore's 1988 presidential run before heading off to law school and becoming a lawyer in Dallas.
His sister's breast cancer diagnosis in 1999 changed everything.
"I had always had the creative bone in my body," he says. "When my sister got sick, she asked me 'What do you want to do?' and I said 'I want to write movies.'"
Hudgins quit his job and moved to Tennessee to focus on his writing. His second screenplay, centered on a famous civil rights case in the 1930s, was sold to actor Levar Burton.
Though the script was never made into a movie, it convinced Hudgins of his ability to succeed and prompted his family's move to Los Angeles in 2001.
"I never think it's too late in life to do what you want to do," Hudgins says. "If I'd started right out of college it may have been a different track to get where I am, but if it is your passion you're going to find it."
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