Roberto Orci

Biography

Roberto Gaston Orcí (born July 20, 1973) is a Mexican-American film and television screenwriter and producer. He began his longtime collaboration with Alex Kurtzman while at school in California. 

Together they have been employed on television series such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. In 2008, together with J. J. Abrams, they created Fringe. In 2013, they created Sleepy Hollow alongside Phillip Iscove.

 Orci and Kurtzman's first film project was Michael Bay's The Island, and due to that partnership, they went on to write the scripts for the first two films of the Transformers film series. Orci first became a film producer with 2008's Eagle Eye and again with 2009's The Proposal.

He and Kurtzman have since returned to working with Abrams on Mission: Impossible III and both Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness. Between 2005 and 2011, Kurtzman and Orci's film projects took revenues of more than $3 billion. 

In April 2014, Orci and Kurtzman announced that they would only collaborate on television projects, and Orci worked on the third Star Trek film, Star Trek Beyond, until being replaced the following December.

 Orci created the television series Matador for the El Rey Network, but after this was initially renewed, it was canceled at the end of the first season. Both Kurtzman and Orci continue to work as producers on the television series Limitless and Scorpion.

 Orci was awarded the Norman Lear Writer's Award and the Raul Julia Award for Excellence, in addition to shared awards and nominations including The George Pal Memorial Award.

Orci and Kurtzman began their writing collaboration on the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, after being hired by Sam Raimi. After actor Kevin Sorbo suffered a stroke, the duo were required to come up with inventive ideas to minimize his appearances on screen. 

Due to this work, they became showrunners at the age of 24. They were also involved in the sister series to Hercules, Xena: Warrior Princess. They sought to move to writing for a network-based television series but found this difficult. 

After receiving a series of negative responses, they met with J. J. Abrams who was starting work on Alias at the time. The meeting went well and resulted in them working on the series. They would go on to work together again on the Fox science fiction series Fringe where all three were listed as co-creators.

Orci's first credit solely as a producer came with the film Eagle Eye, where he worked once again alongside Kurtzman. 

He said in an interview with the magazine Extra that he had previously been involved in productions where the producers had writing backgrounds and had looked to them for help, and he was happy to provide that same support to the writers on Eagle Eye.

 The director of the film, D. J. Caruso, praised the duo saying “What's unusually cool about them is that they have maintained the producer-writer power that they earned in television and carried that over into the feature film area, and that is extremely rare.” Following their work on Eagle Eye, they were executive producers on the Sandra Bullock film, The Proposal.