BIO     

[The Bio that follows below turned into a feature-length production. If you need a condensed version, click here.]

     My doctor told me I was going to live for a long time. She said this very casually and apropos of nothing in particular. I’d only gone to see her about my nose and hadn’t expected to hear anything like that. My father died young. My father’s father died young. And when my father’s mother died years later I was told at her funeral that ‘yeah, the Morton men, they all die young.’ All?!...

     I had a few years of that swimming around in my brain before my doctor came along with her new spin on it. I’d been in LA for a few years by that point. It was my second stint there, the first stint having been spent as a feature film editor. That second time out I went hauling the MFA in Dramatic Writing I’d just gotten from NYU. This was soon after my grandmother’s funeral but how long I might or might not live wasn’t on my mind, or at least not on my mind in a way that I noticed. I was too busy trying to turn myself into a working Hollywood screenwriter.

     It was also from New York that I had left for LA that first time. I’d been working in children’s TV at Sesame Workshop but was determined to turn myself into a feature film editor. I hustled and worked hard in LA, creating a bit of luck for myself, and soon I was doing just that, cutting features. The business of finding two shots that can be combined and made into more than the sum of their parts can keep me happy for hours. That’s a big part of success – enjoying what you do. None of the films I’ve edited so far will be regarded as classic but I learned a lot and worked with some wonderful people. I would have stayed at it and had a big editing career by now but I had other plans. I had first stepped into an editing room because it was a good place to learn about the whole process of filmmaking. The next step was always going to be writing.

     So, I put editing aside and started writing. I was going to give myself three years. I can’t find the exact quote now but Mark Twain said that if after three years of trying nobody is calling you a writer then you should probably stop trying.

     Close to the end of those three years I was encouraged to consider NYU. From my NYU application: “I gave myself a young and early exit from a promising film editing career to take a serious stab at writing or Never Rest Easy. Since then, I’ve written some scripts, plowed through all the good screenwriting books flooding the market and many of the bad ones, and learned what it means to stare at a blank piece of paper. I’ve also learned Why We Tell Stories, or tried to at least. Having lived through Hollywood shitstorms that could shake the strongest vision of Why We Make Movies, I wanted to understand that vague but strong human need to tell stories. I did this in my own blind and stumbling way, trying to pare it down to charts and pithy epigrams, hoping to gird my loins against those foul but necessary beasts of commerce and vanity and deadlines that beset the creative soul and muddy the way. And the end of all these pursuits? The knowledge that a good story is worth all the sweat and stupidity and groaning that it takes and the discovery that the best way to learn how to write is to write.”

     They invited me to join their program. I don’t know how Mark Twain would have felt, but that seemed like affirmation enough to me. So, off I went on the second of what would turn out to be a series of three-year stints: the not-quite-three years of writing before school, the not-quite-three years at school, the three years of peddling my writing wares in Hollywood and then the three-year stint that started suddenly when my doctor made her prediction.

     The three years of peddling my writing wares was coming to an end and I had written a script that lots of people were loving. I’d worked hard on it and poured everything I’d learned at NYU into it. I’d even started studying Chinese to get the details of one character just right. A close friend of mine with old and deep Hollywood ties had established himself as a good nose for a good script with his friend who was a ‘big macher’ (as he put it) at one of the biggest agencies in town. He got my script into that agency with strong recommendations and things were looking good. But it went no further than that. Big Macher said I was a great writer, which was nice to hear, but the basic Hollywood-ish reasons why the actual script went no further finally made it clear that, at this point for me, what I wanted to do would not be satisfied by any success I might achieve in Hollywood. A strange and difficult realization, especially so considering all the years of work and dedication it took to realize only that.

     What do I do now? I wondered. Or, more specifically, what do I have time to do now? Suddenly, I was thinking a lot about what I’d learned at my grandmother’s funeral.

     Then my doctor opened her big beautiful mouth and it was as if someone walked up to me and said ‘here, have another go around.’ And it’s not like I was begging for a second time around nor in the normal scheme of things was it even close to time for one but that’s what it felt like when my doctor gave me her prediction. I decided that for the second time around I was going to be Chinese.

     Or able to speak Mandarin, at least. After all, I had lots of time now. I could do it. And once I’d done it I’d be able to take advantage of everything that would come with it: the ability to live and move around freely in China, a trove of new stories, a deeper understanding of another culture and a better understanding of my own culture from that new perspective. Good things all for somebody going around calling himself a writer. And I had the passion to do it. The work I’d done on that screenplay sparked a deep interest in Chinese language and history and culture that continues to grow for me even as China grows in importance. There are a number of reasons for that passion but certainly one is that the world is more linked today than it ever has been. I think this is far more good than bad. I like being part of that and I worry that the latest economic turmoil could turn nations back onto themselves, trailing terrible consequences of the kind that the previous century knew too well. Lack of knowledge breeds fear and insularity. Stories, in whatever form, spread knowledge. I’ve been fortunate to learn a lot about editing and writing. With an ability to speak the official language of one of the most important regions of this new century and with that passion for storytelling, I can be part of keeping that turning back from happening, to help prevent that turning away from connection.

     I’m no longer marking time in three-year stints. I’m now taking all that I’ve learned and putting it out there in that big connected world. I spent most of last year in Beijing and have a solid base in the language now and can carry on a good conversation. I plan to build on that as I work in China and in New York in the coming years, making stories, making connections.