Interview (Part 1): John Gary
There are several reasons I have wanted to interview John Gary for some time. First and foremost, he’s a talented screenwriter. Second, he has a unique vantage point about the craft as it exists in today’s Hollywood. John has been outside the system, worked inside it, achieved some success, then hit a rough patch, made some key personal decisions and acted on them, which has led to his current situation in which he’s writing two studio projects, one for Lionsgate, one for Paramount. He’s also smart and has a keen understanding of the business side of screenwriting. Finally, John is the person who coined the phrase The Hope Machine as it relates to the whole cottage industry of screenwriting ‘gurus’ and consultants. So I was pleased to be able to grab an hour or so of John’s time recently for what turned out to be an insightful conversation.
Today in Part 1, John talks about his background and how he wound his way to Hollywood:
Scott: Where did you grow up, and how did you find your way into writing as an interest?
John: I grew up outside of San Francisco, in the East Bay, this little town called Orinda. I went to Northwestern where I was a theatre major. I’d always had an interest in writing, but when I originally went to school I thought I was going to put up plays and maybe run a theatre company when I got out of school.
I always felt like movies were where big stories got told. That attracted me. I gravitated towards getting into film more in college, and in my junior year I entered the Creative Writing for the Media program. It’s two years long, 12 students are selected each class, and you run through a variety of disciplines — short films, one act plays, features. That was my boot camp.
Scott: Yeah, I’m familiar with that program because we have something similar at University of North Carolina called Writing for the Screen and Stage. Did you enjoy your time at Northwestern?
John: I did. Yeah. It was a great program. Like it probably is at your school, it’s a workshop program.
Scott: Yeah.
John: Workshops can be great, forcing you to evaluate your own thought process, how you approach your material. We were all very young, though, and workshops depend so much on who is in your class and how much you’re all pushing each other.
My sense has always been graduate workshop programs can often be a little better because people are a little more mature, a little older and can confront the other students and their entrenched ideas a little more readily. Undergrads, I think we’re still trying to figure out how our pants fit.
But I did get a lot out of it. Mostly the thing that really stuck with me was, how do you write every day? How do you take criticism? How do you ingrain that in your process? One great part about our program was that they would bring in working professionals to teach. One stand-out professor was Richard Chapman, who’d worked on Simon and Simon in the 80’s and had done a lot of feature work in the 90’s and it was just great to be taught by a guy who, when he wasn’t in class with us, was writing movies that were getting made.
Scott: By the time you got done with that program at Northwestern, were you already thinking, “I’m going to go to LA”?
John: Yeah. By junior year, I knew I wanted to move to LA. I was also friends with a lot of people in the film program at Northwestern. My dorm was filled with journalism and film majors. I had a lot of older friends who had already moved out here and many of the people my year were also planning on moving, so we all kind of came out here together.
Scott: Does the Northwestern subculture in L.A. actually benefit you in terms of connections and work?
John: I think that there are two ways that alumni networks work for students. The first is, like you say, networking. If you know someone who graduated a year before, they can help you get a leg up and all that stuff. Certainly, I benefited in some ways from some of that. Although I would have to say, I don’t think it really helped me a ton, on a concrete, A to B to C level.
The thing that is more powerful that I don’t think people talk about a lot is psychological. You see the people around you doing well, and you model their behavior. “I know that person. I have spent time with them. I went to school with them. I had classes with them. We went for pancakes on Thursday morning, cutting class when we were 20 years old together. She is now creating a television show. So I can do that, too.”
Scott: Interesting. I’ve never heard that, but I think that makes a lot of sense.
John: It’s subconscious, it’s subtle. You see what they do. They’re around you, and you’re like, “I have an idea that I have that in me, too.” It feels doable. It feels like something you can accomplish.
Scott: As I recall, didn’t you work for an agency for quite some time?
John: I interned for a few months when I first moved out here. A family friend put me in touch with an agent at William Morris, a guy in the music department, and he told me to fax sample coverage in to the story department and he’d tell the head of the department to keep an eye out for my material. So I faxed in the coverage and got an interview but turns out the head of the department just thought I was some random kid who’d sent in a blind coverage submission and hired me because he liked how I wrote.
Scott: What was your gig at William Morris?
John: I was a freelance story‑reader. I was there for 12 years. I started at the bottom and I read 5 or 10 scripts a week at 50 bucks a script at the beginning. By the end of it, I was reading 15 or 20 scripts a week, and it was 75 a script. The money ended up being good and sometimes I’d get rushes, which were double and books, which were a lot of money.
Scott: You’re probably the perfect person to ask then. How important is reading scripts to learning the craft of screenwriting?
John: That is a twofold answer, because on the one hand, it is crucial to read scripts, and a good amount of them. But don’t read shitty scripts. Only read the good ones. And at some point, you have to stop reading and start writing. Procrastination won’t help you write.
Some of that is the career of the script‑reader. It is very easy to get stuck with velvet handcuffs when you’re pulling in good money for work that is pretty easy, not all that time consuming, you’ve been doing it for awhile and you’re getting the good scripts and you have some respect at work, and you’re complacent and it’s easier to read another script than it is to write something of your own. But in the end, you have to write.
Scott: What was the best script you read while you were there?
John: Was it the John Sayles draft of “Alamo”? Or the Franzoni draft of “Gladiator.” Or “Inglorious Basterds,” or Karl Gajdusek’s “Pandora.” Sorkin’s “Studio 60” pilot was fantastic. What was great about that script is when you were reading it, you didn’t really realize it wasn’t funny — it was just this wash of amazing characters and dialogue. But of course once it got up on screen, the whole thing kind of fell apart.
But what’s interesting about being a script‑reader for so long is that I started to realize that what made a good script was not necessarily what made a good movie. I started reading things and seeing them go up onscreen eventually. I was like, “Oh, that script was great. What the hell happened?” It’s because there can be a disconnect between what reads like butter but just isn’t a great blueprint.
There are some writers who get that, who know how to write scripts that end up great movies. And being able to read a script and think of it not as just a script but rather as a blueprint for making a film is something we often get away from as writers — our focus is so much on how to write the perfect screenplay, when what we really need to focus on is how to write the perfect movie. And those two things can be different.
Scott: Is the converse true, where there are some writers who know how to write for script‑readers but not necessarily how to write movies?
John: I think that happens a lot to young writers.
Tomorrow in Part 2, John talks about his years as an agency script reader, how he segued into writing, a down cycle in his career, and how he dealt with that.
John is repped by ICM Partners and The Gotham Group.
Twitter: @johngary.
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