Meet J. Michael Straczynski. 54-years-old. Veteran writer of everything from “Babylon 5” to that “He-Man” cartoon in the 80s (I know, I got excited when I saw that on his resume too.) And overnight success story?
Admittedly it’s more than a little odd for publications like Variety to call Straczynski -- a scribe with an IMDB listing as long as they come -- as one of their ten screenwriters to watch. But that’s just what his screenplay for the new Clint Eastwood film, “Changeling,” has provoked.
“It’s proof that the Hollywood fairytale still exists,” Straczynski told MTV News this week. And listening to him tell the story of how the film came to be makes it hard to argue. “Changeling,” tells the true story of Christine Collins, a single mother in Los Angeles in the 1920s who had her abducted child returned to her by the LAPD only to find that it was not her son at all.
Straczynski learned of the little known story from an acquaintance working at City Hall who came across a transcript. “It was testimony in the case of Christine Collins and it took me a while to figure what it was all about,” admits Straczynski today.
Flash forward years later and the completed screenplay of “Changeling” found its way into the hands of Clint Eastwood who wanted to make the script his next directing effort (oh and Angelina Jolie would star.) Forget what you may have heard about the ruthless Hollywood process chewing and spitting out screenwriters by the dozen. Asked how his shooting script was changed by Eastwood once he signed on and Straczynski marvels today, “They shot the first draft. They changed one word in a scene that was cut.”
For Straczynski, suddenly one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood (he’s writing films for Paul Greengrass and Marc Forster among others), it’s done nothing less than change the course of his career. “This has transformed my life. In everyone’s life there is an ‘it.’ You get married. You get divorced. You lose a kid. There’s a life before it and a life after it. This was ‘it’ for me.
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