Interview: Patty Jones (2013 Nicholl Winner) — Part 1

I only have anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me the Nicholl Fellowship does not often select a comedy script as a winning entry. So when Joe Banks won in 2013, I was excited to reach out to its writer: Patty Jones. The script is funny. Very funny. And as would be expected, so is Patty.

Today in Part 1, Patty discusses her longstanding interest in writing and the unusual manner in which she made her first foray into Hollywood:

Scott: So let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

Patty: There’s an area near Vancouver called North Burnaby. I grew up at the foot of a mountain, where there’s a big university at the top called Simon Fraser University. I grew up at the foot of it, which sounds like it was in the middle of the woods — and for a while it was.

Scott: You’re still in Vancouver?

Patty: I live in downtown Vancouver for now. I’m doing the LA commute, because we all love to commute, right?

Scott: When did you discover your interest in writing?

Patty: This is going to sound like the cliché thing, but reading will get that going. I’m the youngest of five kids. I had surprisingly nice siblings who were kind to me. The oldest ones would read to me. I remember my oldest brother reading The Hobbit to me when I was about four. We would sit on his bed and he had a poster of Middle Earth and I remember thinking, “Who are these creatures?” I was trying to comprehend this world.

It probably started there. I read a lot. Even in kindergarten, my mom would put a stack of books on my bed. She would lie down for a nap ‑‑ having five children ‑‑ and I would be tucked into mine with this whole stack of books. I was a pretty heavy reader. Even if you fall off it when you’re a teenager and you get into other pursuits and bad behavior, the stuff you read as a kid forever resonates.

I was always reading the British stuff, CS Lewis and Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome. There’s something about the way British authors write, where they don’t distill it for kids. It’s the good, the bad and the ugly. They don’t try to make it safe or nice. I remember being fascinated by all the adventures.

I went to school. Initially I did a Bachelor’s in music. I didn’t complete it, mind you, but I started that way. Then, somewhere in there I segued into creative writing. It was my lovely parents who said, “What about writing?”

Scott: You also got a Master’s in creative writing.

Patty: Yeah, this was at the University of British Columbia. I went straight into a Master’s from the Bachelor’s. My thesis was in short fiction. I got a scholarship for fiction. I was submitting stories. I remember getting a really nice letter from The New Yorker and some other magazines that were saying, “Hey, let’s pursue this. Send us another story.”

I lost interest in short fiction for myself, in terms of writing it. But I took one screenwriting class in my Bachelor’s and another in my Master’s, and I remember thinking, “This is something you can learn.” Whereas I thought with short fiction, you either have an instinct for writing or you don’t and you have a feel — with screenwriting I thought, “You can learn this because you can learn structure.” That was interesting to me.

Scott: Had you always been a fan of movies?

Patty: My first memory is, literally, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly one Saturday afternoon on TV. There was the Ennio Morricone soundtrack and there was Clint Eastwood. I had a crush on him when I was about four years old.

You couldn’t have a more different genre from say, for instance, Woody Allen. I’m a big fan of Woody Allen. Yet, I love these Sergio Leone movies — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly being my favorite, then, of course, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. The whole atmosphere and the fact that they shot them in Spain and all the dubbing of the Italian actors, that captured me.

I started seeing Kubrick films. It’s probably more directors that affected me when I was younger than writers — then writer-directors, obviously, like Woody Allen. But I love Kubrick. Dr. Strangelove probably takes it. When I was a kid, I saw a lot of Peter Sellers. When you’re in Canada, you tend to watch Monty Python and take up all that British humor. I remember a lot of silliness.

But what initially clicked was Woody Allen — Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, Annie Hall and Play It Again, Sam. And there’s no one better to say Woody’s dialogue than himself. I wrote one script in university that was almost entirely Woody Allenesque dialogue. I wrote that in about a week because I was late.

The whole New York thing — I had all these romantic ideas about the city. The black-and-white images in Manhattan, the voice-over, the Gershwin soundtrack, “Rhapsody in Blue” — all that captured me. I still seem to have the writer-directors in my head, like Noah Baumbach, Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson and, of course, Billy Wilder. And I love the Coen brothers. But it all started with Woody Allen.

Scott: You’d been writing for something called the Georgia Straight. I gather that’s a weekly publication in Vancouver.

Patty: Yeah, I fell into that, I fell into journalism. I was helping them out, editing for them, and proofreading — there’s not a lot that gets past me, except in my own script, of course. And I fell into feature writing. I did a lot of movie junkets, where I was interviewing actors.

Then, also on the side, I was being a script reader for the Canadian government film‑funding arm, which is called Telefilm Canada. They started recommending me to production companies. I started reading for them. Occasionally, I’d do a dialogue polish.

There was a point where I thought, I want to write my own stuff. But in the middle of that, my boyfriend created a board game and I wrote everything on that for him. I wrote the back of the box and I wrote the instructions — with collaboration, of course, because I was the hired gun. The game got out there and the next thing we knew, we had a call from CAA and they wanted to turn it into a game show.

You see, the game was getting a lot of press all over the place. There were a lot more game stores then. We had game stores in New York that would say, “Oh, celebrities are buying it. Susan Sarandon is buying it.” Amazingly, Susan Sarandon still plays it every Thanksgiving from what we can see online. She and her daughter, Eva Amurri, mention it. And I remember when Cher’s assistant called us up to buy a case and we could literally hear Cher in the background saying, “We pissed our pants laughing” playing the game. The game is called “Wise and Otherwise”, by the way.

Scott: No way! My family plays that!

Patty: Do you?

Scott: Absolutely.

Patty: I’m not the inventor. My boyfriend is the inventor. But I typed every game card.

Scott: Are you serious?

Patty: I’m not kidding. For the printing company to print it, I typeset all the layouts.

Scott: You know what’s funny about it to me? You hear all these stories about how people wind their way into Hollywood agencies, but I’ve never heard of anybody finding their way into CAA via a board game.

Patty: I remember how amusing it was because they found us and called us up. It was a young agent. He thought I was a secretary. We thought, “Well, that’s funny. We’ll let them think that I’m the secretary.”

So they pursued us. We wrote pitches. We were new to it. It hasn’t become a show — yet — but it was a lot of fun. We had a “Playboy After Dark” idea about it. We pictured all these celebrities playing it while drinking cocktails. [laughs] This is definitely still on our brains to develop for cable or online.

Scott: In the midst of this, at some point, you studied online through the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting.

Patty: Yes, I did. You’re a very good journalist. I wasn’t exactly looking for learning or teaching. I was looking for a regular expectation of pages. So I thought, “Well, UCLA is close to the industry. I’m going to do that.” That’s where I started “Joe Banks”.

Scott: What was that online education experience for you?

Patty: My classmates were lovely. My teacher was great. The important thing was, I had to turn in the 10 pages every week. That was what it accomplished. I did a first draft of “Joe Banks” in that class.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Patty reveals what inspired her to write “Joe Banks” and her take on some of the story’s key characters.

Here is Patty’s acceptance speech when she was presented the 2013 Nicholl Fellowship Award:

Patty is repped by Benderspink.

Twitter: @heypattyjones.

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