Tuesday, January 02, 2007

J. Michael Straczynski


This is an odd bit of news here.

I don't know how many of you know who J. Michael Straczynski is, but he created and wrote the brunt of the Babylon 5 series and written a number of top notch comics (Supreme Power, The Amazing Spider-man, Fantastic Four, etc.). I really like his work in comics (I actually haven't seen Babylon 5 although it's been highly recommended to me repeatedly) and so when I had the opportunity to go to a writing seminar he was holding at Comic-Con I had to go. Whenever I'm at events like that I always have to go to the screenwriting seminars just to see if there is anything about anyone else's method that I can learn from. In Vancouver, I went to a presentation Neil LaBute did, in High School I did three weekends of training under Orson Scott Card in lecture format... Needless to say I like that sort of thing.

Anyhow, I went to J. Michael Straczynki's and explained to him where I was professionally as a screenwriter and he told me, sarcastically, to get the hell out of there, I didn't need anything from him, I sounded like I was doing just fine already.

He led an interesting seminar, but it would have been twice as interesting if I would have known this.

He posted to his message board system the movies he owns and counted among them is "This Divided State."

I could have had a much more interesting and in-depth conversation with him had I known he was a fan of our work. (Maybe he's not a fan, maybe someone gave it to him and he hasn't seen it and doesn't care to, who am I to guess?)

I guess you just never know.

I would ask him what he thought about it, but apparently you have to be some type of hip member or something to comment.

CLICK HERE FOR AN UPDATE

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No, you don't have to be a "hip member", but the newsgroup where JMS posts is moderated. When you post for the first time, you'll automatically get a form in email with the rules that you need to agree to and return (therefore it needs to be a valid email). For the first twenty posts or so you'll be on hand moderation which will cause a small delay in your posts showing up but moderation usually is done several times a day. You can post to the newsgroup via Google Groups and the newsgroup is rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated

JMS doesn't answer every question but does answer quite a number. I remember your question at the writing seminar.

Nate Dredge said...

JMS is pretty awesome.