Interview (Part 2): 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 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:

Scott: What was your first writing gig?

John: The first time I got paid for it was a script called “The Cellar,” a contained character-driven horror set in Scotland. By this point, I’d had a couple specs go out and not sell, I’d signed with but after a time fired agents at William Morris and then later CAA, and I’d pivoted to start writing smaller material I could control more readily because my manager back then had found some success doing this with other clients.

A trio of young producers optioned “The Cellar” and paid me to do some work on it, and then we embarked on a three year long odyssey trying to get the movie made, but that’s a whole other story involving AFM and the Lowes Santa Monica and foreign tax credits and gap financing and some bad, bad choices on everyone’s parts.

Scott: That seems like a segue point because I remember reading one of your tweets where you said at some period of time, you described you were writing “shitty horror movies for weird no‑fly producers.” Was that that time period?

John: That was that time period. The guys who were trying to make “The Cellar” were not no‑fly producers, they were good partners who stuck with the project for many years, but that was in that era, yes. I worked with some other producers on a couple other projects, the checks cleared, but this was all work for non-WGA signatories, so the money wasn’t great, and I was still reading scripts at the time.

This was around the time when I’d signed with a new manager and everything seemed bright and full of promise and then six months later she announced she was moving to Las Vegas. Which is not a good sign.

Scott: One thing people ask me ‑‑ I’m sure they ask you it all the time ‑‑ “Should I move to L.A.?” I tell them is, L.A.’s a great place to be when you’re working, but when you’re not working, and you walk the dog at night and see the searchlights for movie premiers, or you run into friends who have gigs, or you see movies shooting on the street, it’s like you’re constantly reminded that you’re not working or things aren’t going that good.

You had a nice splash, but this period of time where maybe things weren’t going so well. How did you survive all that?

John: Mostly my wife, who supported me financially and emotionally through the worst times, and was and continues to be incredibly supportive. This was just after our first child was born, and my wife had gone back to work and I was staying home with our kid and William Morris had just merged with Endeavour, so I’d lost my job. It was dark times.

Scott: How did you transition out of that?

John: The key thing was ‑‑ this actually comes back to the Northwestern question ‑‑ I looked around and saw other people, other friends, and they were finding some success, so I knew there was a way in. I took a step back, and I said to myself, “What am I missing here?” and the thing I was missing was I was writing what I thought I should write, instead of what I wanted to write. I’d been listening to too many other people, and I’d stopped listening to myself.

I fired my manager. I joined a small writer’s group. I needed to get back to what works for me creatively. I needed to figure out again what I liked to do. I’d forgotten by then. I’d gotten too wrapped up in chasing the machine, pining for success. But writing what you love is only half of the equation. Writing what Hollywood loves is the other half.

I have this theory, and it’s a theory about who you are as a writer and what Hollywood does. It’s a Venn Diagram. There’s one circle — what Hollywood does. There’s another circle — what kind of writer you are. And this includes what you like to write and what you’re good at and what kind of writing really lights you on fire. The intersection of those two circles: that’s what you should write.

Scott: Did you find it?

John: So far, so good.

Scott: I’m assuming you wrote another spec script at some point.

John: Yes. I wrote two specs. One was a sci-fi noir about the first murder in space, and one was a grounded action-thriller set against the backdrop of the financial services industry.

I used those two scripts to query. I think I’ve talked a little bit about querying on Twitter. The querying ended up going well, and a lot of the people that I was querying were people whom I had some relationship with or contact with in the past. That was helpful.

Scott: I can include a link on that for your Twitter ‘rant’ which is on the site.

John: Totally. Then, I also reached out to literally everyone I knew and was like, “I’m looking for a new manager.” I had a bunch of people help me out, Young Il Kim, Scott Frazier, Chris and Charlie Frazier, among many others. Chris and Charlie sent my stuff to Jeff Portnoy, who was an assistant at Gotham, and he passed my specs up to two of the managers at Gotham, whom I ended up signing with.

Scott: That’s great. Thanks for that background. Let’s jump to your script, “Sarah,” which it’s at Lionsgate. Is that right?

John: Yeah.

Scott: What’s your elevator pitch for that story?

John: Sarah is about a girl who goes to college and gets drawn in to the world of an artificial intelligence professor, starts working in his lab, becomes friends with the professor’s grad students, and discovers that they’ve developed the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world and they’re keeping it extremely secret. What she doesn’t know is that her parents may be using her to get to the professor’s AI.

My manager originally pitched me this idea about a girl who goes to college but it turns out she’s been put there for an ulterior purpose, and he had some other ideas about the character, sort of Manchurian Candidate goes to college, and I thought it was pretty crazy but then I was thinking it through and figured out an angle and wrote the spec while I was doing generals off of the action-thriller they’d signed me off of.

ICM signed me off of the script and then Lionsgate picked it up when we sent it out a few months later.

Scott: Had you written a female protagonist before?

John: Yes. I’m trying to think in how many scripts. A couple of my very first scripts were female protagonists. Then, I had always worked on making sure that I had strong women in my scripts, interesting, complex women, although a lot of that is just because I’m interested in interesting, complex people. Of course, women go along with that.

When George RR Martin was asked how he writes women so well, he said “You know, I’ve always considered women to be people.” I subscribe to that philosophy.

Scott: Sarah is strong. She’s smart. She’s very scientifically oriented. She’s very tactile. She likes to build these stuff, these machines, robots and things. Yet, at the same time, she’s got this little stuffed animal thing, too. She’s like an adult child type of a character. How would you describe Sarah?

John: She’s 18. Is there any better description? She’s 18. For me, the script is about a child becoming an adult. It’s about that moment in your life when you leave home for the first time, and you have to understand how to navigate the world on your own, without Mom and Dad. That’s a scary, strange, weird time for everyone.

Everyone has to go through it at some point. I just wanted to see what it was like for her and how she dealt with that and how she became her own person.

Scott: Interesting. It’s like an extreme form of becoming an adult in compressed time.

John: The maturation process.

Scott: Maturation process, yes.

John: One of the other conceits in the script, as you know, is that artificial intelligences only have 88 days to live.

Scott: Let’s talk about that. There’s a quote there from this professor she goes to work with. “Like everything, we all die, and the light that burns brightest, burns fastest. 88 days. That’s how long the longest artificial sentience has sustained.” Where does this 88 day thing come from? Is that real or made up?

John: Totally made up. I have been so happy that three or four executives have said to me, “Is the 88 days thing, is that real?” It was like, “No, but I’m really glad you thought it was.” The 88 days thing was made up.

Scott: Why did you make it up?

John: It’s a McGuffin. I needed a piece of technology that limited the AIs in the script, and it also became a limit for the scientists to break.

Tomorrow in Part 3, John delves more deeply into his script “Sarah” which is set up at Lionsgate.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

John is repped by ICM Partners and The Gotham Group.

Twitter: @johngary.

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