February 9, 2010

Times Are Changing for J. Michael Straczynski

by Andrew Gnerre | Published October 23, 2008

J. Michael Straczynski is several decades into a lucrative writing career in which he’s managed to work on pop culture mainstays like “Murder, She Wrote” and “He-Man,” lend his talents to a revitalizing run of The Amazing Spider-Man comics and create the sci-fi series “Babylon 5,” scripting close to 100 episodes over the show’s five seasons. Somehow, at this moment in his writing career, he’s managed to become even more successful.

With the release of Changeling, Straczynski’s first feature screenwriting credit and the latest directorial effort for Clint Eastwood, starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, Straczynski has turned into a wanted man in Hollywood. His list of upcoming collaborators reads like the guest list at a Steven Spielberg dinner party: Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, Paul Greengrass, Tom Cruise, the Wachowski brothers. In between working on numerous scripts for these (now-fellow) A-listers, Straczynski took a break to speak with MM about his transformation into an in-demand Hollywood scribe and the challenges of trying to make the truly unbelievable real-life story of Christine Collins and her lost son seem believable.

Andrew Gnerre (MM): When I heard about the story I assumed that it was a well-known case to many, but that is clearly not true. How did you come across the material?

J. Michael Straczynski (JMS): I’d been a journalist for a number of years and at one point after leaving that to go into television, a source mentioned this case to me. After I got the initial hint about the story, I had to wait a number of years until I could really follow up on it.

After leaving “Jeremiah” for Showtime, I went off on my own and dedicated a full year to doing research and, you’re right, there are no books on the subject at all. I mean, there’s not much in the contemporary record at all. Usually the screenwriter who takes on the task of telling a true story, they have a book to work from. Here, I was literally down in the stacks and in the archive offices of city hall, county courthouse, criminal court house, the morgue, just going through thousands and thousands of pages of material. After I was done I had about 6,000 pages of documentation.

MM: When you say you dedicated an entire year to the script at that point, did you have any backing?

JMS: Oh, there was no backing at all. I always tend to go where my interests are going and to follow my interests and passions. I found out what this case was about. I thought that whether it’s a book or a screenplay or whatever, somehow this story must be told. So when I finished [the research] I let it sit for a bit and finally the story cracked as a screenplay. That’s how I wrote it and it ended up being sold almost immediately.

MM: How quickly was it sold?

JMS: Massively fast. I got it to my agent, he went over to [producer] Jim Whitaker and he handed it over to Ron [Howard] and they made an offer; it couldn’t have been more than three weeks, four weeks. It went almost immediately into production, which was even more bizarre.

MM: How many screenplays had you actually written before then?

JMS: Depends on what you mean by that question. I had worked in television for 20 years and during that period of time I made it a point to avoid the movie industry. I had been given the opportunity to write for them and I never did it just because film was always a crapshoot. You could spend years in development hell and never see anything ever get made, while with television it gets made; if you order 20 episodes you shoot 20 episodes and I liked that aspect of it.

I had written screenplays for myself and, this may sound weird, but I write just for myself, so I had about a dozen screenplays that I had written that no one will ever see that I just wrote to amuse myself. So I knew the form and when I finished up the screenplay, which was the first one I really had taken out, this was the result. It’s kind of remarkable to have your first screenplay get this kind of result.