Malcolm MacRury

Dr. robert gardner is a professor of media writing in the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto.

Let’s face it. All of us have started a screenplay. We start them when times are tough, when the boss has been particularly nasty, or when it looks as though our career is in a nosedive. Teachers and advertising copywriters; dentists, lawyers, and housewives; almost everyone has written a few scenes of bad dialogue based on questionable plotting.

But what if something we wrote actually made it to Hollywood? What if the phone rang and it was l.a. on the line? That’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Malcolm MacRury lived that dream and I had a chance to speak with him. He had agreed to speak at a Master Writers’ Workshop hosted by the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson Polytechnic University. Prior to his speaking engagement, we met for lunch. He had just emerged from an incredible adventure.

Teddy bear

Malcolm is a big teddy bear of a man in his mid-thirties. My wife had seen him on television and had admired his ‘intellectual good looks.’ He had that badgered appearance that Canadian writers seem to affect. Rather like a Rodney Dangerfield ‘I don’t get no respect’ syndrome. He also seemed eternally surprised that all of this was happening to him. I had the sensation that he was standing outside himself watching his instant celebrity. It was as though he wanted to let the world know that he was around, but felt uncomfortable with the idea of being so visible.

I took an instant liking to the man. He was completely down-to-earth and mildly suspicious that his success with the script for The Man Without a Face was all an accident, or as he phrased it, ‘a lottery.’

By now you probably know part of Malcolm’s story: a young Canadian writer with a few good credits writes a screenplay that catches the attention of Mel Gibson. Gibson produces, directs and stars in the story, and the film manages to win commercial and critical success.

Any hope

But where did this rumpled young man in the sweater, jeans and running shoes come from? Is he, at 36, a wunderkind? Is there any hope for the rest of us who have shared the fantasy? Is he an ordinary guy who lucked out? What does he know that might help other aspiring writers?

As a kid he wrote heroic dog stories. But no one in his family really believed that anyone actually made a living from writing. He went to university, thought of being a lawyer, but that vague idea ended when he slept through his lsat exams. Instead, he went into a Master’s program at a small Christian university and wrote a 300-page thesis that no one – not even his wife – wanted to read.

Like the rest of us dreamers, he insisted on being impractical. With friends he started two humor magazines. One was called cow (a takeoff on now) and Yorker (based on New Yorker). Both lost massive amounts of money. His money.

He talks about it all good-naturedly, almost as though he were detached from the entire process: ‘The first job I ever had writing for tv was for a show called Dynaman. A guy who used to work on sctv had this idea of taking a Japanese series (a la What’s Up, Tiger Lily?) and dubbing it into English. Malcolm sat in a room with three experienced sctv writers who completely ignored anything he had to say.

Went to Street Legal

He took his Dynaman tape and a few magazine articles and went to Street Legal at cbc. ‘I went in and met them, got the story bible (I’d never seen one of those before), and read it and reviewed a couple of their scripts and wrote a proposal about 10 pages long, which was a story idea for an episode with an a story and two subplots woven in.’

To his surprise, he got an interview. The story editors liked what he had written but thought it was totally wrong for the show. But they gave him a ‘couple of grand’ and told him to go away and rewrite it. He wrote two outlines. One show, about a standup comedian, was produced, but it has never aired in Canada.

`Nightmarish’ year

He had a ‘nightmarish’ year as one of a team of writers on Street Legal, writing 12 episodes and then staying on to do a lot of rewriting. It was an educational experience.

Not long afterwards he did a proposal for a show called Pray for Me Paul Henderson, which still gets nods of respect and approval from experienced Canadian writers like Bob Carney and Wayne Grigsby.

He wrote for Bordertown, and penned two films, The Girl From Mars and Curse of the Viking Grave. It looked like the same old Canadian story: talented writer working on shows that don’t really stretch his abilities.

Then it happened! Toronto producer Bob Schultz had optioned a young adult’s book by Isabelle Holland called The Man Without a Face. He wanted a screenplay and he called Malcolm to do the job. Malcolm recalls things this way: ‘I wrote the first draft, got paid very little for it. In some ways I thought, `Maybe that’s the end of it.’ But the thing had a strange life of its own.’

Uncommercial

Everyone thought the story was uncommercial. Then the screenplay got into the hands of a literary agent in New York. ‘She’s in her mid-twenties. She herself admits that she doesn’t have a social life so she works like crazy. She sort of made it her mission to get this made. She showed it to everyone – Norman Jewison and the guy who did Risky Business, but no one was interested.’

Finally, the script came to the attention of Mel Gibson’s company, Icon Productions. Gibson was looking for a character-based, relatively low-budget vehicle. ‘Not only did Mel like it,’ says Malcolm, ‘his wife really liked it, too.’ That clinched it. ‘I went down to Los Angeles for my first meeting with Gibson’s people. I was very nervous. It was the first time I’d ever been in that city, and the first time I’d been on the back lot of Warner Bros.’ It was quite an adventure.

At any moment he was convinced that the bubble would burst. Malcolm walked into the room where the meeting was to take place. He introduced himself to Gibson and sat down, waiting for some inevitable disappointment.

‘They didn’t like the original ending in my script, and that’s a big deal if you don’t like the ending (the character eventually played by Gibson committed suicide in his first treatment). I had to suggest alternatives. But as the meeting was going on Mel Gibson kept grimacing. He was obviously in real pain. I thought he just didn’t like me, but apparently he’d hurt his back on the movie The Bounty and occasionally it acts up. I thought the meeting was a disaster, especially when they had to call in a chiropractor to help him.

‘Anyway, the next day we carried on with the meetings and fortunately Mel’s back was in better shape. We had sort of a verbal commitment at that point that they were going to produce the film.’

Malcolm, like a good Canadian, persisted in his skepticism: ‘Even when we had the nice meetings I thought, `Well, they’re not really gonna do it. And if they do go ahead they’ll hire somebody else to write it, because that’s standard procedure.’ ‘ He was certain he would be bought out and they would hire a so-called `a-list’ writer to rewrite it. But they didn’t. They stayed with Malcolm.

The next crisis point was when no major star wanted to play in the piece. It was given to William Hurt and Jeff Bridges, but they turned it down. Then the impossible happened. Mel Gibson, one of the major stars of the decade, agreed to cover half his face with hideous scars. Everything was in place. The dream was becoming a reality.

Malcolm found himself going back and forth to l.a. for two- or three-day meetings. At first he adopted the strategy of just staying quiet. He said he felt ‘like a fraud.’

Then he realized that ‘surprise, surprise, they were hiring me because I knew what to do and they didn’t. These were very high-powered people and they were looking to me for answers. That was really exciting, and once I got over the nervousness, I could sort of debate with them just like I did on Street Legal or the Farley Mowat project or whatever.

‘It was just another step in the very same process that I’d been going through for years. You write something, then you defend it, because that’s what it is. It’s give and take. You have to defend your work, or at least what’s essential about it, because if they’re buying it from you, that’s what they want. That’s what you’re there for.

‘I write very long and the script was about 120 pages. Then I went away and I was supposed to cut, but instead I ended up writing 140 pages. I handed that in as a second draft. That was partly an attempt to show off. I was saying, `I’m going to impress these people.’ They sent back a script that was about 100 pages. They had gone through my script on their own and chopped out about 40 pages. I was shocked and appalled and thought, `Oh no! This is just going to ruin it.’ ‘

Again he felt the whole project would be derailed, but at Christmas he went down to l.a. and stood his ground. ‘I would go through each cut and say, `Well, you can’t take that out. Maybe you could take that scene out and combine it with this. If you take that particular scene out, it’s like building a house, the whole thing is going to fall down.’

‘Gradually through the debate we put scenes back in. Then I went away and rewrote the scenario and came back with a draft of about 120 pages. That’s about the length of what they shot. The movie is just under two hours long.’

Malcolm is a brilliant writer. He knows dramatic theory and he has a gift for dialogue.

What he accomplished seems miraculous, because Malcolm strikes the observer as just an ordinary guy. On a second look, however, he is a man intoxicated with images and words. This was no fluke. Malcolm MacRury is a major talent.

in the next article in this series on Canadian writers, Dr. Gardner meets with multi Emmy award-winner paul haggis to trace his career from London, Ont. to his current status as a sought-after executive producer.