![]() ![]() He spent a season on Smallville, three seasons on Greg Berlanti’s Everwood and had a brief stint on Berlanti’s short-lived Jack & Bobby. The Sex and the City gig led to more jobs. “Darren had an idea that he wanted to give someone their first job, and HBO said, ‘Hey, if you like this new kid you want to take a shot on, why don’t you just give him a script?’ He’s like, ‘No, I want to make him a staff writer.’ I have taken on that on every show I work on, I try to give someone their first job.” “It changed my life,” Green recalls between bites of his omelet. But when creator Darren Star told him it was a dating show, Green sent a few of his Stanford columns over to Star’s apartment.Īnd just like that, he had his first TV credit - a season one episode about how everyone isn’t getting laid. “I didn’t even know what the show was about,” he recalls. He signed with an agent, WME’s Ari Greenburg, and a year later, in 1998, Green was meeting with the creator of a new comedy being launched at HBO: Sex and the City. That’s when he started making piles and realized he had a flair for dialogue. ![]() “It took me a while to figure out what writing meant.” After graduating, Green came back to New York and hustled his way into a junior development job at HBO, where he spent his workday reading other writers’ scripts. “I didn’t go to college thinking that I would be a writer,” he says. At that point, writing screenplays wasn’t high on his to-do list, but he did script a romantic comedy stage play and contributed to the homecoming musical. ![]() His life veered even further toward the secular when in 1991 he enrolled at Stanford University, where he wrote a column about his dating life for the campus paper. In high school, he secretly installed cable in his bedroom so he could gorge on stand-up comedy shows and TV series like Northern Exposure and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. At 11, he discovered the joys of Spider-Man, kung fu movies and Knight Rider. A lot of his school friends weren’t allowed to consume pop culture, but Green’s parents were more lenient. Green grew up just north of the city, in Westchester County’s Mamaroneck, where he spent his childhood studying the Talmud at a Jewish religious school that his Israel-born mother insisted he attend (his father, a real estate developer, was more agnostic about his son’s religious education). And yet, unlike such showboaters as Joe Eszterhas and Shane Black, Green has managed to churn out all these pages while keeping a remarkably low profile. You have to go all the way back to 1960 - when Billy Wilder had The Apartment, Ninotchka and the original Ocean’s 11 come out - to find a comparable streak. In fact, Green, 44, may well be in the middle of the best year any Hollywood screenwriter has had in decades, with credits on four of 2017’s biggest features - Logan, Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049 (with footage premiering at Comic-Con) and Murder on the Orient Express - not to mention a part in creating Starz’s new hit show American Gods. Twenty years later, there’s a third stack - his own produced screenplays - and it’s getting taller all the time. “But back then, the ‘better than me’ stack was a lot higher than the ‘worse than me’ stack.” “I thought I could start to tell where I ranked as a writer,” he recalls. There was a pile for scripts he thought were better than what he himself was writing and another for scripts he believed were worse. When he finished a screenplay, he’d toss it into one of two piles. Snyder, and special photographic effects supervisors Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich, and David Dryer.When Michael Green first started out as a screenwriter, he read every script he could get his hands on.
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