Interview: Michael Steven Gregory

Michael Steven Gregory Independent Filmmaker Interview by David Boyne ©2003 writersmonthly.com All Rights Reserved All Text and Images Copyright Protected All Rights Reserved

Something about Industry Hollywood has always perplexed me:

I’ve been told that it takes a whole lot of smart, creative, passionate people working hard-as-hell in total cooperation to make a film.

I’ve also been told, repeatedly, that the business of making films is cutthroat, vicious, dog-eat-dog, driven by greed and megalomania. (Hollywood is one coordinate on the the Axis of Nasty— Wall Street and Community Theatre are the other two.)

So how is it that a film—any film! — ever gets made?

After talking with Michael Steven Gregory—I can report that not everyone in the business of making films is a blood-thirsty Hannibal.

In fact, Michael Steven Gregory has a secret method for bringing the right people together, keeping them together, and harnessing their talents and energy long enough to make a feature film— he builds professional relationships just like his personal ones—on mutual respect and trust.

But he ain’t no Boy Scout, either. I’ll take a shot at describing this guy in Hollywood Speak: Michael Steven Gregory is like the Tom Hanks character in Saving Private Ryan. He’s a regular enough guy in civilian life—but in the hell of war (filmmaking)—he has that unfakable quality that makes people under intense stress turn to him, depend on him to get them where they have to go, and trust him to get them back alive, in one piece, and in position for their next career move.

When I meet Michael Steven Gregory he is sitting at a desk supporting a thick spread of papers, a computer for writing, and another computer for editing film. On a corner of the desk there is a small black statuette of a bird— a replica of the infamous Maltese Falcon. I heft the statuette, and Gregory quotes the great line written by another writer--filmmaker, John Huston, "The stuff that dreams are made of."

Behind that desk covered with computers and papers, there is a large metal machine. I ask a perspicacious question, "Uh...What’s that thing?"

"It’s a Movie-Ola," Gregory says. He goes on to explain that it’s a machine from the earliest days of filmmaking, a piece of technology that D. W Griffith would have been familiar with. As Gregory shows me how the antique machine works, I’m surprised to learn that he created his first film, Blood—the 1990 story of a gangbanger who accidentally kills his own brother in a drive-by shooting—on a Movie-Ola. "Steven Speilberg still edits his films on one of these monsters," Gregory says. "There is definitely something about handling the film, the feel of it in your hands."

I ask more questions...

WM: Did you write, do art, or make films, stage plays, etc., when a kid?

MSG: I'm an only child and my dad was in the military, so we moved around—St. Louis, Chicago, Virginia, D.C., Oceanside. We ended up in Oregon, then finally, the town of Sherwood, between Portland and Newberg. I literally lived in Sherwood Forest. Read voraciously. Didn't start writing until the age of thirteen or fourteen. I was watching a movie, some old Hammer gothic horror thing where there was this scene with skeletal ghost riders charging through the Moors on horseback at night. I kept thinking the music was all wrong, it should be the Beatles' 'Eleanor Rigby.' It occurred to me right then that I could write that movie and write it better. I’ve probably been trying to re-write the same movie ever since. It might help if I could
remember what it was about!

WM: So you were writing at 13 or 14—but you didn’t want to be a writer?

MSG: I wanted to be a conceptual artist, a model maker. In fact, I got offered my first job at a special effects shop on the Paramount lot in 1979, while I was still in high school. During summer vacation an older friend of mine and I drove down from Oregon. He was a special effects make-up guy looking for a break... I was a kid looking for any excuse.

WM: Just how and when did you get on the path to being a writer?

MSG: Back in high school, in Portland. This writing teacher gave us an assignment to write about someone we knew, a kind of character sketch. I wrote about this drifter guy I knew who hung around Pioneer Square, lived on the streets. The teacher gave me an F—insisted that I had made him up, hadn’t followed the assignment, which was to "write about someone you know". Pissed me off. So I submitted the piece I had written to a scholastic magazine—and they bought it for 25 bucks! Nobody undoes more writers than creative writing teachers.

WM: But you weren’t "undone". In fact, you made a sale on your first submission.


At Sundance Film Festival

MSG: Yeah. But that wasn’t what turned me toward writing. It was more how I began thinking that I wanted to realize my own dreams, not somebody else’s dreams. So I thought more about writing, and less about becoming a conceptual artist.

Near the end of my high school days I sent a query letter to some national magazine, maybe it was Oui magazine, I can’t remember. I don’t even remember what the idea for the article was, but it involved Southern California. The editors wrote back, said it was a good idea, that I should write the article. They didn’t offer any money, or promises, but I started my research and made a ton of notes for writing the article. Writing the article seemed a great excuse for packing everything I owned into my car, and driving from Oregon to San Diego. So I did. I put my notes in a cardboard box in my car, and I figured I would just do the rest of the research down here in San Diego, and sell this article to pay for the move.

Well, I arrive in San Diego and I park in Fashion Valley and I go in a store to meet a friend that works there and to interview for a job. While I’m in there interviewing for a job (which I don’t get) my car, along with everything I owned and the notes for my article, is stolen.

So here I am—standing in this parking lot with no job, no car, nothing— just two-hundred bucks in my pocket and the clothes that I’m wearing. Well, my friend, she suggested we get drunk. I was all for it. I got wild drunk. I woke up not knowing where I was. I realized that I was lying in a bed, fully clothed, and my friend, she was lying next to me, also fully clothed, but on the other side of me was this perfect God-like blonde, tanned, California guy—totally naked and with a morning erection! And I remember thinking, What a crazy town this is! So I decided I would stay.

Two weeks later the cops find my car. It’s completely stripped, of course, and worthless. Everything I had in it, all my clothes, everything I owned, was gone. But tucked under the seat was the box of my notes for the article. It was obvious that the notes had been read through, but they had all been put back in the box, and the box had been carefully sealed and tucked under the seat.

WM: Did you ever sell the article?

MSG: I never even finished it.

WM: But you kept writing?

MSG: All the time. I started writing screenplays. I wrote a script for the television show Hill Street Blues because I thought it was a great, great show. Still do. One of the best ever. And I sent that script and a query to the show’s story editor, and also sent a copy to Steven Bochco, the guy who created the show.

The story editor—his name was Jeff Lewis—writes a long letter back to me, telling me my idea was good, but going through it and pointing out weaknesses, offering better ideas for how to handle situations. Over the next two months I kept rewriting that script, and writing other scenes and ideas and sending them to Jeff Lewis. He would critique them, send them back.

WM: Did he buy any scripts?

MSG: Nope. Never sold one.

WM: But what a great education.

MSG: Totally. And the funny thing is, after Jeff is so generously giving me all this coaching and working with me, after two months the first script I had mailed to Bochco comes back to me—unread—with a form rejection letter saying they don’t accept unsolicited scripts!

WM: Did you ever meet Jeff Lewis, the story editor who had helped you so much?

MSG: It wasn't for another 20 years, when a friend of mine who was a producer on Hill Street Blues, put me in touch with Jeffrey Lewis. Now he's going to be in We, The Screenwriter. My one way to thank him.


Silver surfer

WM: By then you had managed to break into television?

MSG: Yeah. Episodic assignments, and staff writer for four series. One was Silver Surfer, a terrific animated show that I'm very proud of. The writers were great; Harlan Ellison, D C Fontana... And I was brought on to Spiderman, Unlimited, a not-so-hot show that was in trouble and that they were trying to turn around.


Silver Surfer
WM: But you didn’t stay in television. Why?

MSG: When you're in television, you live and breathe television. 20 hours a day. You have no life. You do TV for the money, and because in television, the writers really call the shots, literally (CUT 'deciding camera placement, etc.')

But television destroys so many writers. I did it for a couple of years, then got out.

WM: And all the time you were writing feature film scripts? What was the first screenplay that you sold?

MSG: The first feature script I wrote. It got optioned in the early
Eighties, but was never made.

WM: What was it about?

MSG: A summer love affair. Guy loves girl; girl loves guy; then guy
discovers girl used to be a guy. Very tragic...

WM: How did you live while building your career as a writer?

MSG: I drove a cab. I drove all night in the early Eighties, taking the fares and risking the trips a lot of drivers wouldn't. Beyond it being a Harry Chapin thing, I felt driving a cab in the underbelly of San Diego would be vitally important to my writing career somehow. Ultimately, I think, it proved invaluable. 'Hair of the Dog,' a series of dispatches I wrote at the time, was popular... I did a script that was optioned and never made, and some other stuff. It was a prolific time. I turned in around six in the morning, slept a couple, three hours, then wrote the rest of the day and started all over again come nightfall. Of course, I was never shy about giving a good hood dance every now and again.

Eventually I had written a lot of scripts. And I was making a living, but in one 9-year stretch, not one of the scripts I wrote and sold ever was made into a film.


On the set of Blood

WM: Is that why you moved into Directing?

MSG: I became a director, to finally make a film! Now I’m an independent filmmaker.

WM: So it’s possible to make films without having to live in Los Angeles?

MSG: It can be done. I live in San Diego so I can say, "No". No to Los Angeles. No to doing things I don’t want to do.

Hollywood's only two hours away. I work primarily in features, versus TV (which mandates being in L.A.), and my decision to remain in San Diego has been rooted in my belief in a breakthrough vehicle.

WM: What do you mean by "a break-through vehicle"?

MSG: I mean a high-quality picture that truly demonstrates the potential of filmmakers living in San Diego by exploiting the talent and terrain already here. It would enable us to do locally what Spike Lee did for Brooklyn with 'She's Gotta Have It,' or Barry Levinson did with 'Diner' for Baltimore—

WM: And that is?

MSG: And that is to earn the confidence of the studios to invest in us and sustain consistent, quality feature production independent of L.A., here in San Diego. This is what my company, Random Cove, is all about.


Armageddon Jones

WM: A key to Random Cove seems to be your partnership with another writer, Anna Gilson. How do you and Anna collaborate?

MSG: Collaborating with another writer can be excruciating or it can be fun. Coming out of episodic TV, I've experienced both.

Anna and I hooked up at the Southern California Writers' Conference in February and hit it off. On April 14th, I had an idea that was really nothing more than a logline—what if this dispirited entrepreneur makes a deal with a rum bottle genie to get one wish by fulfilling the wishes of three strangers, but falls in love with the one whose wish he can only grant by forfeiting his own?

Anna agreed to partner up and we immediately worked out the broadest beats. I wrote the first thirty-odd pages and kicked them to her while I went off to shoot interviews for We, The Screenwriter. She wrote the next 40-some pages and passed back to me, and then we just went back and forth honing. By the time 'Wish' sold to Pendle View in early November, we were already on second draft of our Valentine Carol spec and finishing the beats of 'Armageddon Jones,' which we're on deadline to turn in at the end of February.

But with Valentine Carol and Armageddon Jones our approach has been different. We beat out both V.C. and A.J. far more thoroughly than ˇWish’ before getting on script. With V.C., Anna had first pass at the script top to bottom, then tossed to me, while I'm taking first pass in its entirety on A.J., then will toss to her. Unless I get stuck. Then she gets only all that I've got, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody!

WM: So you really have no single set way of working together?

MSG: Whatever works best at the time seems to work for us. Though we're both pretty e-mail intensive, we tend to talk a lot on the phone (she's in L.A., I'm in San Diego) kicking around stuff, eliminating bad ideas rapidly that we might otherwise waste a week or two independently trying to wrestle by ourselves, asking questions about our characters, looking for holes, etcetera. Plus, I tend to fixate on particulars and get morose over not being clever enough, not being exceptional enough, or being predictable and not rendering a scene or line in a way we haven't seen before. So if she doesn’t get me on the phone, there's always the fear I've been sucked into the abyss! Our next project is a feature called 'Crab Legs Come Broken.' We may approach that entirely different.

WM: What do you consider the best product from Random Cove, so far?

MSG: A screenplay called Long Came Charlie, which my literary agent recently got optioned by actor Dustin Hoffman's company. It tells the true story of a black man who was once recognized as the Oldest Man in the World by Guiness, and remained America's Oldest Citizen until the late '70s.

In the writing business, there are good days and bad years. For me, this has been a year with a few good days. On the book front, I just completed my first nonfiction title, which is out from Trellis next year. It's called Disc Golf: All You Need to Know About the Game You Want to Play. On the screenplay front, there's 'Long Came Charlie, of course, but also the first script my writing partner Anna Gilson and I wrote together was picked up in November. It's a romantic-comedy called Wish.

Armageddon Jones, a property we sold on pitch in September, I'll be directing next summer. And 'Valentine Carol,' which we're in re-writes on now, has a list of people waiting for us to pop it out. And 'We, The Screenwriter,' the follow-up to my 'We, The Writer' documentary, is being edited.

WM: Do you teach?

MSG: Teach, no. Guide and facilitate, yes. Screenwriting, for instance, at UCSD Extension came up unexpectedly. They'd asked if I would be interested in being an instructor. The WGA [Writers Guild of America, which is the screenwriters union] was gearing up for a strike. I reckoned to be out of work and accepted. Though everybody argues different, I think it's far more beneficial for me than most any participant! Beyond that, I run the Southern California Writers' Conference, which takes place in San Diego each year during Presidents' Day Weekend, and it's sister event outside L.A. in October. With the conferences, however, the emphasis is on books, providing hands-on troubleshooting of manuscripts brought to the conference. We've facilitated nearly $3 million worth of book and screen deals as a result of it, so I'm very proud of that.

WM: What advice can you offer to others who are beginning creative careers? And to those who are already pursuing creative careers, but need encouragement?

MSG: There is only one difference that distinguishes a successful writer (that is, if one's definition is being paid to write and being published or produced) from a non-successful writer in my book. The successful writer respected the craft, pursued its execution and never, ever quit.

Writing is the only career we measure our success by the quality of our rejection. But each and every rejection, at least for me, fuels the fire. If you run out of passion, write for spite, baby!

WM: What is the best thing about the life you’ve chosen, the career you’ve built?

MSG: Who can think of the Civil War without seeing Scarlett O'Hara stumbling over that field of dead and dying in Gone With the Wind? Or Vietnam without hearing Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now? Or speak of Arabia without first picturing Lawrence of Arabia? Movies communicate and educate; they stir emotions and express for others what so many are unable to express for themselves. It's the literature of cinema that spans borders, language, religions, races, to elevate spirits and invigorate minds. Movies give us permission to dream and witness things never imagined.

All stories are about love. Hedonism, narcissism, boy meets girl, it’s all about wanting and pursuing, getting what you want, losing what you want, it’s all about love.

Southern California Writers' Conference
http://www.WritersConference.com

Random Cove
http://www.RandomCove.com

Armageddon Jones
http://www.ArmageddonJones.com

Anna Gilson
http://www.AnnaGilson.com

We, The Writer and We, The Screenwriter
http://www.WritersConference.com/WeWrite/

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