Filmmakers Making A Social Impact: Why & How Filmmaker Screenwriter Jared Egol Is Helping To Change Our World
When my manager and I parted ways before COVID, I realized that my career would largely be guided by my own volition and grit, because it showed me that reps aren’t the solutions to careers, but rather sounding boards with occasional connections. One needs to connect themselves, as the likeliest of colleagues for me, at least, have come out of authentic friendships where shared visions were the fourth or fifth things we had in common. Baseline humanity is the most predictive compatible trait amongst the creatives I’ve been privileged to know.
As a part of our series about “Filmmakers Making A Social Impact” I had the pleasure of interviewing Jared Egol.
Screenwriter Jared Egol studied Creative Writing at the University of Florida with the intention of entering medical school. He instead went on to Chapman University, where he received his MFA in Screenwriting, studying under Julie Kirkham, Tom Mankiewicz, Larry Gross and Ron Friedman, who subsequently hired Jared to assist in the writing of his memoir: “I Killed Optimus Prime.”
GOOD WILL HUNTING producer Su Armstrong as “a tour de force.” 2023 Beaufort International Film Festival, where PLANET ORSON won “Best Screenplay.” At one point in time Jared had one of the largest vintage Transformers toy collections in the United States, but his daughter didn’t want them, so he decided to sell them to make a movie about Orson Welles.
Thank you so much for doing this interview with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit. Can you share your “backstory” that brought you to this career?
When I found out that I was going to be a father at 21, I forewent the boon of medical school to pursue the destabilizing trajectory of a screenwriter, as I felt that no matter how threadbare my career might ultimately be (and knowing I’d find a way to provide for my daughter no matter what), I would do a better job of parenting if for work I was doing the second thing that I was put on this Earth to do, which after being a father — far far far near-infinitely behind in second place — is writing.
With this conviction in hand, I pursued my MFA in Screenwriting from Chapman University, and upon completion of the degree (and the connections it made: Julie Kirkham, Tom Mankiewicz, Larry Gross and Ron Friedman tell you you’re good at what you’re doing was worth the tuition) I returned to Florida to be near my daughter. I took a job teaching while writing in my free time, and eventually after enough work for hire was able to quit teaching and write on the side, until I began winning festivals, placing on the Black List site for well-regarded screenplays, and finally securing a literary manager after one of my scripts, CLAY TOMMY, scored 9s and 10s on the Black List (a site where an 8 gets you noticed by the industry, while 9s and 10s get you noticed exponentially more, presuming the logline provides intrigue).
My literary manager had me focus on writing a biopic, and for over a year I researched Orson Welles, selling the Transformers toy collection I had amassed since childhood to support my daughter while being free from work for hire. After two drafts of the script, my manager enthused about attaching certain A-list directors. My management company had sold the Michael Jackson stop-motion biopic, BUBBLES, written by Isaac Adamson, and with Taika Waititi directing, at Cannes for ~$20 million, so I had trust in my team to sell my equally preposterous story — one where Orson Welles tells his life story the Transformer he voiced at the end of his life — presuming Hollywood would be risk averse enough. Turns out they weren’t and before COVID everyone my team had gone out to passed.
I pivoted to sending the script out on my own, with its high-scoring Black List review attached. I got a read and response from GOOD WILL HUNTING producer Su Armstrong, and with that endorsement reached out to noted animation producer Eric Calderon, who envisioned the project as a stop-motion feature film. He connected me to Open The Portal, one of the preeminent stop-motion outfits today, and they became fast friends who designed concept art for PLANET ORSON as they envisioned, and with Eric’s assistance we ultimately created a crowdfunding campaign that raised enough to not only bring awareness, but to begin the process of making the film by developing the script as a graphic novel, which has since been used in its early phases as inducement to bring other film attachments on board. And that’s where the project stands today: an array of high-level elements revolving around a growing, percolating nucleus of a project.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It’s only funny in retrospect, but the mistake that both slowed me down and probably took years off my life was taking rejection to heart, or even personalizing a non-response or a negative response as an indictment on the project’s quality. I now have fostered a sense of assurance in my work, and view reaching out to people not so much as inviting them, but offering them the chance to be part of something that has been well-crafted so as to bring awareness to an area that the world has otherwise ignored as a void.
What makes it funny, now, is imagining what might’ve caused the rejection: the script could’ve been read by a production assistant who had just ordered Chipotle. He’s about to eat half of it before he digs into my screenplay, when a fly lands on one of the pinto beans in his burrito bowl. Disgusted and afraid of contamination, he throws the bowl out and force feeds himself the Muscle Milk protein shake he’d been avoiding in the fridge for the past two weeks. It tastes as advertised, but now he’s not hungry, only nauseated, and as he reads my script, he comes across the description of the main character’s car: a Ford PINTO. He does everything in his bandwidth to not punish the writer for reminding him of the fly on his pinto bean, but some punishments, fates and pains never make themselves known in cause — and invisibly, even invisibly to himself, he’s finding that the script is working less and less the more he goes on, and by page 42 and the second mention of the Ford PINTO, our reader is implacable, and this script just doesn’t have “high enough stakes,” or the characters are “uncompelling” or the prose “unclear.”
Would it have been the same if the fly had landed on someone else’s food, and not the pinto bean? Would it have been different if the character had driven a Toyota Corolla instead of the pinto? These stories make me laugh, for I’ve had enough endurance in the industry to know that it’s often half right, but what is 100% right is that we can’t take rejection personally. We can take notes, we can take suggestions, but the reason something of yours may not work may never be known, and the energy spent ascertaining a cause will waste you.
Who are some of the most interesting people you have interacted with? What was that like? Do you have any stories?
I’ve interacted with many interesting, sincere people in the industry. Ron Friedman is one of the most interesting, and also happens to be my friend and father figure. Ron wrote the original Transformers and GI:Joe cartoons after being hired away from television. He was incomprehensibly prolific (have a look at his IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0295357/ ), and I was fortunate to have him as my professor. My story would be related to being a father — while I was in graduate school, and away from my daughter and feeling the pressure of making it as a screenwriter, I almost dropped out several times and nearly went on disability, because I was in chronic pain from head to foot. I would’ve failed out if Ron had not been so kind: he went out of his way, despite over a hundred students, to see what was within his power to help my pain. He even reached out to his daughter, then an executive at Pfizer, to see if there was an innovation that could help me. While the pain was ultimately stress-related, this forged a lifelong family bond to Ron and his wife Val, so much so that I’m now helping him raise money for his cancer treatment. One of the most famous TV writers of all time, who wrote TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE, is now needing to reach out for funds, and has currently raised less than what a graded Optimus Prime figure, the figure he made famous, goes for on the aftermarket.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/tv-legend-ron-friedman-with-medical-expenses
Which people in history inspire you the most? Why?
Welles and Galileo were two mavericks who had their integrities corrupted by the inertia of the immutable minds they were doomed to grow up with: first, Welles with his antiracist progressivism that he tried to elevate awareness for with works like his Harlem-based production of MACBETH, to the transparency of racism and race relations he sought to connect in IT’S ALL TRUE, which prior to being shifted to South America, was to plot the history of Jazz as a function of the transatlantic slave trade. He stood by his convictions up to his death, and of course, secondly, Galileo was punished for his attempts to decipher material reality at a time when reality was not a priority.
Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview, how are you using your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share with us the meaningful or exciting social impact causes you are working on right now?
My goal with PLANET ORSON is to show the equivalency between intelligence and antiracism, how one tends to beget the other in otherwise healthy individuals. I believe that by telling the story of Orson Welles via the entry point of the relatively insipid toyline he voiced at the end of his life, TRANSFORMERS, that you can interact and educate an audience that would have no interest in understand racism if that was the topic announcing the film. Instead we have a film that features Transformers cartoon characters filming and interviewing Orson as a means to get him to face his past (similar to A CHRISTMAS CAROL), and in the process divulge the struggles even Orson felt after CITIZEN KANE (at the height of his powers), and witness how his efforts to make an anti-racist film ultimately destroyed his reputation in spite of his fame, forcing him for the rest of his life to take any money-making roles he could attract, ultimately ending with his curtain call as a cartoon monster.
In essence: if a man as intelligent and timeless as Welles sees race hate as a “disease” (his welcome words), and even despite his brand of omniscience STILL sought out the opinions of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others on his work, then no one should feel above the minds of others based on their skin colors.
Therefore, in an ideal world, the viewer of PLANET ORSON would: 1. learn about how Orson’s antiracism helped progress his reputation of a someone terrible to work with, and 2. discover the scope of Orson’s genius, and how that genius still sought out the opinions of minorities, and therefore invalidating racism as anything thoughtful. I hope most of all to do this by exciting people about watching a film featuring transforming cartoon characters, none of which should have anything to do with these topics in the mainstream world.
Many of us have ideas, dreams, and passions, but never manifest it. But you did. Was there an “Aha Moment” that made you decide that you were actually going to step up and take action for this cause? What was that final trigger?
When my manager and I parted ways before COVID, I realized that my career would largely be guided by my own volition and grit, because it showed me that reps aren’t the solutions to careers, but rather sounding boards with occasional connections. One needs to connect themselves, as the likeliest of colleagues for me, at least, have come out of authentic friendships where shared visions were the fourth or fifth things we had in common. Baseline humanity is the most predictive compatible trait amongst the creatives I’ve been privileged to know.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
I cannot, because the film hasn’t been made yet.
Are there three things that individuals, society or the government can do to support you in this effort?
Seek out independent film or art that aligns with your morality, vision and heart; 2. increase subsidies to filmmakers, particularly those who aren’t well-represented, so that stories about all people can be universalized and internalized without discretion or thought; 3. increase access to benefits and subsidies that would allow artists to be artists, something Orson was denied for much of his career, and therefore had to voice characters like Unicron in TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE to make ends meet.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I’ll tell them what I tell my daughter: we live in an era of self-inflating, self-collapsing preoccupation with image. Pretty and photogenic are characteristics that have become currency for influencers, and everyone wants to be one. When you take away looks, are you left with someone with a rich inner life, or someone who is a husk of validation who has no identity beyond likes and comments on Instagram? All our looks will fade: what will be the passions you’re left with that will keep you going in those chapters of your life when looks mean nothing, because none have them? I feel this is a good litmus test to see both your level of empathy for others, as well as your buoyancy as an observer and interactor with the world. If you have causes you’re passionate about, you’re never working a day in your life. And when they improve the world, you’re extending the number of days people have with less suffering. It’s hard, but that’s because the world doesn’t know it wants what you have until you’ve announced it.
We are very blessed that many other Social Impact Heroes read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would like to collaborate with, and why? He or she might see this. 🙂
Barry Jenkins changed the face of film with MOONLIGHT. He is the modern-day James Baldwin, one who has both adapted Baldwin and inscribes poetry, only on celluloid instead of paper. He speaks to everything that Orson — a white and famous man in a time when the only men who could be equitably famous were white, and who wouldn’t have been Orson Wells if he hadn’t been white — could hope to dream of. Since Orson can’t make that collaboration happen post-mortem, then the dream falls to the man who is dreaming of getting Orson Welles right on film — me. I would be as breathless as I would be honored to work with Mr. Jenkins.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“If you’re going through Hell, keep going.”
— Winston Churchill
The entertainment industry, when one is trying to say something above industry with their entertainment, is hell. Imagine a world where a hundred of times a week you hope to hear back from someone, only to never — and extend this sense of invalidation across decades. That’s Sisyphus. And many of those you emailed, despite clout, will have no idea who Sisyphus is. But one might.
How can our readers follow you online?
Website https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/planetorson/planet-orson
Use this for socials https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-egol-1b425654
This was great, thank you so much for sharing your story and doing this with us. We wish you continued success!
Filmmakers Making A Social Impact: Why & How Filmmaker Screenwriter Jared Egol Is Helping To Change… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.