Mikko Alanne ’97 always knew he wanted to be a part of Hollywood, but when he spoke up to legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone, he inadvertently had his first chance at screenwriting professionally.

“My first job was as a researcher and then story editor for Oliver Stone,” he said. “We were developing a film about the atomic bombings, and I talked to Oliver about where I felt the writer was taking the script in the wrong direction. And he just listened to me and then said, ‘You write it.’”

Alanne was admittedly a bit hesitant to tackle such a story as his first writing assignment, but Stone gave him strong encouragement. He fell in love with writing from that point forward, but, as is so often the case in Hollywood, the movie didn’t get made. Still, Alanne’s subsequent work endeavor offered him a powerful experience as a historical content supervisor for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the world’s largest collection of oral histories from Holocaust survivors.

Five years later, Alanne left the foundation to become a screenwriter full time, and eventually his scripts found the screen, his most well known being The 33, starring Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche and Antonio Banderas, about the Chilean miners who were trapped underground.

This past fall Alanne made his dramatic television debut as creator and showrunner for the National Geographic Channel miniseries The Long Road Home, based on the book of the same name by journalist Martha Raddatz.

“While so many Hollywood movies are about the special forces soldier, the ‘super soldier,’ this is about the everyman soldier. These are the people who actually make up the majority of our armed forces,” he said. Alanne was particularly drawn to the families’ experience, interviewing and meeting with all the principal real-life people several times, ultimately speaking with almost 70 soldiers. One thing was universal: “There’s something about saying goodbye to someone for a full year knowing they’re in mortal danger for that entire time. This show gives us a chance to explore the hope, anxiety, and true heartbreak of that.”

The Long Road Home takes place in early 2004 just as the U.S. was rotating in its second round of troops into Iraq. The series recounts the shocking ambush of 19 American soldiers and their interpreter in Sadr City, Baghdad, on a Sunday afternoon on April 4, 2004, and the brutally costly rescue that followed, events that became known inside the U.S. Army as “Black Sunday.” Among the cast are Kate Bosworth, Jason Ritter, and EJ Bonilla.

“My hope is that this will be the most realistic and intimate portrait of what it is really like to go to war for the first time for American soldiers and for their families,” Alanne said. “Too many war stories focus on only the commanders and the survivors. I wanted audiences to get to know those soldiers who never came back. This is our only chance to preserve their memory.”

Alanne, who was a recipient of the Kristan Landen Film Scholarship and the Mark Mazura ’81 Video Production Scholarship, credits his film studies at Ithaca College as vital. But he was surprised to find that his sociology major had an even greater impact.

“I joke that sociology is the subversive cousin of history,” he said. “It’s the story of why things really happen. Having a focus on criminal justice and studying societal injustice really informed my tools, both as a student filmmaker and today. Dr. Elaine Leeder, who was my professor and advisor for my minor at Ithaca, is someone I still keep in touch with on a regular basis. I think of her as one of my most important and influential mentors in life. Elaine focused her career on illuminating the origin of societal problems, fearlessly exploring the true faces of things, and understanding and seeing the humanity in the ‘other’—all things I feel became a part of my work.”