[6]: 162  After a year of college, Turner moved back to New York, studying at Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop and then with acting coach Paul Mann, where she met fellow actor Vic Morrow.

[6]: 54  She and Morrow wrote a TV movie called Willie Loved Everybody; they adapted it into a musical that they tried pitching with Elmer Bernstein, but were not successful in selling the concept.

During filming, Turner met her second husband, producer and director Reza Badiyi, who encouraged her to write an adaptation of a Mira Michal short story from The New Yorker called "At Lake Laguna", which she brought to Altman to possibly make, but that fell apart right before production was scheduled to begin.

[7][8][9] Turner, Vic Morrow and Reza Badiyi were close friends and collaborators with the director Robert Altman, who later directed Leigh in Short Cuts (1993) and Kansas City (1996).

Her teleplay for the TV movie Freedom (1981) was based on her daughter Carrie's experiences in the 1970s as a teen runaway, played by family friend Mare Winningham.

[19] At the time of her death, Turner had written the script to the not-yet-released Candice Bergen-produced film titled Knock Wood: Charlie McCarthy Project, a movie based on Bergen's 1983 memoir of the same name.

[20] The story, produced by James Francis Trezza and Pam Widener (who Turner worked with on Pollack), unfolds from the perspective of Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen's famous and hugely popular wooden puppet.

[21] Other long-time adaptations that were not produced but had been active in Hollywood were scripts based on Jane Smiley’s book Barn Blind, Michael Frayn's Headlong, and Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels.