My Story
Or, how I came to be this way.
Make 'Em Laugh
Some of my earliest, and fondest, memories are of running to the front door early in the morning, so I could get to the newspaper before anyone else, open up the comics page, and read Calvin and Hobbes.
These strips certainly had a profound impact on my sense of humor, but it was Bill Watterson’s writings on his creative process in the C&H collections that taught me why they were funny. I learned very early on that big words are funny, timing is everything, and humor and heart are not mutually exclusive.
The Simpsons further cemented that theme. The series had a reputation for irreverence when it first aired, but it was episodes like “Lisa on Ice,” which is both hilarious and poignant, that truly inspired me.
Finally, there’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show with a love for language and extended metaphors. I suddenly saw that entertainment could be multilayered. Action-packed and quippy, sure, but also about something. A show could espouse a worldview that connected with and improved the lives of its audience.
Interestingly, if you take the characters’ ages from when their respective series started, Calvin, Lisa, and Buffy were all born the same year as me. Though the cartoon characters didn’t age, Buffy went to prom the same fall I did. We graduated high school together and began college the same year, too. I grew up with these characters.
The Horror
You might assume my love for a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer stems from an interest in horror and the macabre in general.
You’d be wrong.
When I was a small child, my dad suffered a heart attack while playing basketball in our front yard. Thankfully, he survived, but he was, of course, hospitalized.
Psychologists tell us that our fathers are our models for God. I saw mine collapse in the driveway, then get taken away in an ambulance. The next time I saw him, he was in a hospital bed, connected to all kinds of tubes and wires, too weak to move.
My mother wanted to spend some time alone with him, so she asked my oldest sister (the one he had been playing basketball with) to take the rest of us to the movies. We were five kids with a twelve year age gap, so it wasn’t easy settling on a movie for all of us.
She ended up settling on a Christmas movie (although it was released in the summer), featuring cute little furry creatures…
For years, I refused to watch horror movies, or anything even remotely horror-adjacent. I wouldn’t even go into the horror section of the video store, because the box art would freak me out.
How did I get over this debilitating fear of horror movies? The short answer is, well, a girl.
My high school crush was very much into one particular horror movie: Scream. She wanted to watch it for, like, the hundredth time, so I stuck it out, too. I was actually hoping we wouldn’t watch the movie so much, but something happened.
I don’t even remember the girl’s name anymore, but Scream struck me in a way few other movies had. For the first time, I thought about the fact that movies are made.
Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t a moron. I knew films were fictional. But I hadn’t considered tropes and deconstruction and things of that nature. The sequel came out in theaters not long after, and I must’ve gone to see it at least a half dozen times.
These were movies about movies. And I had to know what they were talking about. I went to the video store (remember those?) and checked out anything I could find: Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead (which I learned was made by Sam Raimi; more on him later).
Fight On
Film school was the next logical step. I got accepted into USC, which is very expensive. My parents said I could only go if I earned enough scholarships to make it as cheap as in-state tuition at U of M. I think they were as surprised as I was when I actually did that.
I watched movies. Oh, so many movies. Not just feature films in class, either. I worked in the film school archives, which were housed in the basement of the Norris Cinema Theater. Up until that point, records of student films were kept on paper. My job was to watch every single student film, from the 1960s to the present, to catalogue them in the computer. From George Lucas to Rian Johnson, I saw them all.
I also had a job at the school’s sound stages, working for a guy who was so old, he had been on first name basis with Walt Disney himself. USC tried to indoctrinate us into the cult of the auteur, but my boss showed me the ropes working below-the-line.
“Don’t trust your professors,” he’d say to me. “The only reason they’re here is because they’re too old to hack it anymore. Or, if they’re young, they couldn’t hack it in the first place.”
“What about you?”
“Are you kidding? I’m definitely too old.”
The Real World
I’m from Michigan; my wife is from New Zealand. We met in Maine, as you would probably assume…
We were counselors at a summer camp.
After graduating, I had a tough time finding a job. I discovered that camps pay room and board, as well as the princely sum of $2,000 for an entire summer’s work.
My future wife, on the other hand, wanted to be a teacher, so working at a summer camp was the perfect way to work with children and avoid winters in both hemispheres.
After that summer, I still couldn’t find a job in LA. So, I figured, if I wasn’t going to work, I might as well not work in New Zealand. I lived there for about six months. Then, in a fit of romantic passion, I somehow convinced her to come back to America and marry a guy with no job prospects and a useless degree.
As a side note: my time at camp and living abroad led to two of the scripts I’m most proud of.
Below the line
Due to immigration issues, my wife was unable to legally work for a period of time. Faced with the prospect of paying for two people instead of one, suddenly I couldn’t afford to have “difficulty” finding a job, as you might imagine.
The first gig I could find was as an agent’s assistant, followed by a producer’s assistant. From there, I switched to production. I’ve worked on shows you may have heard of, like 24 and Agents of SHIELD, as well as low-budget junk you should be grateful you haven’t. Crazy Girls Undercover, for example, is about a group of women who are spies by night and strippers by… other nights?
The positive outcome of all of these productions, good and bad, is that I met future collaborators. A camera assistant on one show would DP my short, and I would grip for him on another project; an actress would be in one of my films in exchange for headshots. And round and round it would go, all of us helping each other out.
Radio Pictures
Little Toy Boat
When I needed a name for my production company, I thought about the time I refused to watch scary movies. The strange thing is, I did get into Stephen King novels, due to the influence of my older sister. (Yes, the same one who literally gave my dad a heart attack and then scarred me for life with Gremlins.)
It was the first novel I read for fun. At 1,100 pages, it was quite the big bite to chew, but I did it. (Now any novel that’s smaller than a phone book seems short to me.) I was about the same age as the kids in the book, so it left an indelible impression on my young mind. Recently, I re-read it at the adult characters’ age and it totally holds up.
So, when it came time to name my production company, I chose Little Toy Boat, to cover my interest in both comedy and horror. The name conjures up a cutesy image, but the origins are obviously… not.
Debuts
I made my first movie and first child the same year.
After working on many shorts and webseries, I was finally in a position to direct a feature. I had written a script inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, centered on a dating app that unleashes your id. Thanks to my college roommates, I got a wonderful location for free; their real-world startup was a perfect backdrop for the fictional startup, Other Halves.
I re-wrote the script with a friend from my writers group, and together with another producer, we raised funds to shoot.
Not long after we wrapped on principle photography, my wife became pregnant. Both the movie and the baby came out around the same time.
I’m proud of the movie, but I’m even more proud of my daughter, who knows all the words to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Other Halves did get some good reviews, too, though.
First Day of School
I decided to go back to school to earn an MFA. In screenwriting, a masters is a terminal degree, meaning there’s no higher degree, thus giving me the ability to teach at the college level.
Cal State Northridge not only offers an amazing graduate screenwriting program, but they also have a preschool for children of students. The plan was for me to drop our daughter off at preschool in the morning and study during the day. My wife would pick her up in the afternoon, and I would stay on campus for classes. (They were all at night, to allow professional writers to continue working during the day.)
So, my first day of school in 15 years was my daughter’s first day of school ever.
My wife and I decided to pick her up together, just to make sure she was okay and not freaked out or anything. As we were walking into the building, my phone rang. The caller ID gave a Beverly Hills number. I was like, “I don’t know anyone in Beverly Hills,” and let it go to voicemail.
We picked up our daughter, who was totally fine, of course. We only had one car seat at that time, so my wife and I swapped cars. When I got into her car, I unlocked my phone to check the voicemail. I hit play, but nothing happened.
Then, my wife started HONKING her horn! I jumped out to see what was wrong. She rolled down her(my) window, and said, “Play it again! Play it again!”
My phone’s bluetooth was still connected to my car! So, I hit play, and the voicemail began, “Hi, Matt, this is Ron Howard.”
Writing accelerator
imagine impact
A Whirlwind
I had applied to the Imagine Impact writing accelerator a few months previous. The chances were so slim (out of over 4,000 applicants, they accepted around 20 projects), that I had simply put the thought of it out of my mind.
Suddenly, our careful plan for my classes and our daughter’s preschool went out the window. I had to go to West Hollywood twice a week, where we’d meet Mitch Hurwitz, Lindsay Doran, Jason Hirschhorn, Ryan Murphy, Judd Apatow, David O. Russell, Donna Langley, Jennifer Todd, and more, to discuss writing, development, and the industry generally in depth.
For my mentor, I was paired with showrunner Saladin Patterson, whose experience in both animation and live action was invaluable in helping develop my hybrid series.
In two very short months, I made many new friends, grew as a writer, and got my first mention in Deadline.
Continuing
education
At the same time as Impact, I still attended classes at CSUN. In many ways, the experience was very similar. I made friends with classmates, studied under professional writers, and wrote a lot of scripts.
In the second year, I was selected as one of two grad students to teach an intro to screenwriting class to underclassmen. (One of the great things about CSUN’s film program is, every student must take a screenwriting class, regardless of their focus.)
Now that I’ve completed my master’s of fine arts, I plan on continuing to write professionally as well as teach at a university.