UNLV College of Fine Arts

FROM THE EDGE: THE ABSURD HUMANIST Screenwriting

WORLD OF TEX GRESHAM

Our story opens with a momentous announcement, a glorious ending that is also a beginning. It has its roots in Spring, Texas and a gang of boys who spun out their dreams on mini digital videotapes while they forged lifelong bonds with one other.

In the center of that adventurous and indelible world was Thomas “Tex” Gresham, now in his third year as a Master of Fine Arts candidate and teaching assistant in the Writing for Dramatic Media program in the Department of Film at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

The exciting news is that Tex Gresham’s work has been recognized with a top screenwriting prize. Humanitas has named Gresham the 2020-2021 winner of its $20,000 David and Lynn Angell Comedy Fellowship for Fix Daddy, a stunningly quirky, unforgettable feature-length script that takes its readers on a mind-bending road trip with a determined man and the only father he has ever known.

Humanitas is a non-profit organization established in 1974 that honors and empowers screenwriters whose creative output promotes human dignity and freedom. The annual prizes that Humanitas has granted to writers in television and film for nearly half a century have the stature of highly prestigious accolades in other disciplines, such as the Nobel or the Pulitzer. Humanitas awards celebrate work that boldly explores the nuances of the human condition by challenging us to confront the consequences of our choices, and by entertaining us with fully realized characters and elegantly crafted narratives. “Our overarching goal,” proclaims the Humanitas mission statement, “is to promote peace and love in the human family one story at a time.”

In Fix Daddy and Tex Gresham, Humanitas could have found no more worthy script or writer to acknowledge.

I recently spoke with Gresham about his development as an artist, his approach to the craft of writing, and his current and future projects. The absurd and vital humanism that distinguishes his entire oeuvre as a novelist and screenwriter has its roots in his rough-and-tumble Texas childhood.

Suburban Borderlands

Gresham grew up in southeast Texas just north of Houston in a mid-sized town that straddled the divide between suburban and rural. “There was a cow pasture right across the street from my house,” says Gresham. That boundless threshold served as fertile ground for Gresham and his friends, an energetic group of boys who reached their teens in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They loved watching movies, either at the theatre or on VHS. Over-the-top action-adventure or sci-fi films were their favorites: Freaked (1993), Speed (1994) Independence Day (1996) Godzilla (1998). Soon they began attempting remakes of their favorite scenes, or even parodies of entire films. They would get together on weekends and shoot whatever inspired them.

Gresham had VHS and mini-DV cam-

By Heather Addison

corders, and no shortage of ideas for their next masterpiece. He’d declare, “Let’s do this thing!” and they’d jump into action, pulling in their core group plus any other friends they could recruit. Their epics included a remake of the entire finale of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and a 25-minute Reservoir Dogs (1992) parody called “Reservoir Dolls,” a twisted web of blackmail and deceit in which a demented Mr. Blonde tortures a Tickle Me Elmo plush toy.

Those early forays into filmmaking were seminal for Gresham as an emerging artist. “We didn’t get any parental interference on anything; we were what you might call ‘a little bit wild.’ A part of me thinks that that was important. In my adult life, I’ve done what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve pursued my dreams. Without my childhood experiences, I don’t know that I’d be able to do that. What we did together cultivated my confidence. It gave me strength to follow the next idea, wherever it might lead—to develop it and see it through to completion.” Dreams of Writing

What Gresham most wanted to do was script a film that would get produced, but the path to success was not clear. After high school, he wrote movies and music and had the notion that he would sell a screenplay and leap to acclaim. Writers and directors who had succeeded young provided exhilarating examples: Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Richard Linklater.

But as time passed, it seemed that youthful success would not be his. Self-doubt crept in.

Gresham stepped away from his ambitions and got a succession of jobs involving manual labor: plumbing supply, an air conditioning warehouse. He didn’t write for two years.

But then one fateful evening he found the script for a horror movie he’d penned and sat down and read it. He thought, “This isn’t too bad, but it feels like a book, not a script.” And in that instant, he decided to begin work on a novel. He hunched over the desktop computer he had on the floor of his tiny Austin apartment, and started writing. He cranked out twelve thousand words that very night. And then he set about reinventing himself not just as a screenwriter, but as a writer.

He thought, “No one will take me seriously unless I have a degree,” so he attended Texas State University. At TSU, he took a graduate-level creative writing class and his professor, Deborah Monroe, encouraged him to continue his education, telling him that his writing was good enough that he “could and should” apply to an MFA program.

Inspired by a biography of David Foster Wallace written by D.T. Max, Gresham applied to San Diego State University, where he was accepted into the MFA program in Creative Writing. During his time at SDSU, screenwriting was on the back burner for Gresham. “Prose fiction was my thing,” he says. He honed his unconventional approach to constructing offbeat, intensive narratives, and produced his first novel, Heck, Texas, published in 2020. It paints a vivid, darkly humorous portrait of a divided town and its inhabitants. Werner Herzog has called it an “unruly book” whose anger ingeniously expresses “the mood of our times.”

Perhaps more importantly, Heck, Texas is a potent example of Gresham tapping into the rich experiential vein of his East Texas upbringing, just as William Faulkner famously employed an apocryphal Mississippi county, Yoknapatawpha, to plumb the depths of Southern life.

While studying creative writing at SDSU, Gresham started working on a multi-character film script called Austin, Texas. When classmates and friends responded positively, he submitted it to the Nicholl Fellowships, a major international screenwriting competition. It got into the top 20% and earned Gresham a spot in CineStory, a screenwriting retreat. That was another turning point. “I need to get back into this,” Gresham told himself. He started splitting his time between prose and screenwriting. MFA Program at UNLV

With one MFA under his belt, Gresham found himself yearning for another—this time focused on screenwriting. That is when he discovered the Master of Fine Arts program in Writing for Dramatic Media in the Department of Film at UNLV. “I searched for programs that would allow me to immerse myself in screenwriting. I love the idea that this program pushes its students to produce as many completed scripts as possible.”

Gresham also appreciates the expert mentorship he’s received in the Department of Film, particularly from Professor Sean Clark, the Graduate Coordinator, and Professor Charles Burmeister. “I learn more in 5 minutes with Sean than in any other screenwriting class I’ve ever taken. He trusts ideas and our ability to run with them. He’s very into ‘you do your thing and I’m going to help you.’ And Charles—he absolutely cracked open television for me. I did not understand it. After one or two lectures, I had grasped the ‘equation of TV’ and was able to craft an effective pilot.”

The origins of Fix Daddy—as a screenplay—can be traced to Gresham’s first semester at UNLV.

Fix Daddy’s initial narrative was loosely inspired by My Life (1993), a feature-length film in which Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman play a couple expecting their first child. They unexpectedly and tragically learn that he has terminal cancer, and that the only way he’ll be able to communicate with their

unborn child is by recording video messages. The film’s concluding scene of the son watching a tape from his dad made a strong impression on Gresham.

What if the only way a child knows their parent is through pre-recorded tapes? Intrigued by this proposition, Gresham began working on a novel that explored media influence and identity. He got about 90 pages in, but it wasn’t going well. He decided to reconceptualize it as a screenplay, and to start from scratch. He pitched the idea in FILM 722, the Graduate Screenwriting Seminar, in the fall of 2018.

Gresham describes Fix Daddy as a “raised by wolves” scenario. If a child is raised by wolves, they believe the wolf is their parent. A baby duck imprints on the first creature it meets as its mother. What if a boy imprints on a television as his father?

It’s a premise that leads to absurdity, which Gresham relishes. “I like to let the absurdity be the humor. I make moments that are directly ridiculous but presented ‘straight.’” That kind of ironic gravitas is both the charm and beauty of Fix Daddy, and Gresham deftly employs it to confront our reliance upon technology for maintaining everyday relationships and even our sense of self.

David, the hero of Gresham’s tale, is looking for love and connection inside a lonely existence. How does technology both comfort and limit him? Gresham pushes his character to step from a cocoon of safety into the “real” world, a painful yet ultimately rewarding journey. “With technology as our buffer, we risk nothing,” argues Gresham. “In face-to-face communications, we are at risk. We are vulnerable. What we say—and what we hear from others—holds weight.”

The first person to read a complete draft of Fix Daddy was V, Gresham’s life partner and a published poet with a book of celestial poetry dealing with the struggle for identity in the face of eternity, In Stories We Thunder, forthcoming in 2022. “They are always very supportive and encouraging of my work,” says Gresham. As V finished reading Fix Daddy, “I walked in on them crying.” That reaction was pivotal for Gresham; it gave him confidence that David’s narrative arc, though preposterous, packs emotional power.REALVEGASMAGAZINE.COM

Fix Daddy’s sharply humorous, poignant take on the values and dangers of communication technology has arguably been made even more timely by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has isolated many of us in our homes, limiting our interaction with others to emails, social media posts, and video conferencing apps.

As we struggle to maintain and build our personal relationships during this trying time, as we ask ourselves what our COVID-19 hibernation has taken from us and what possibilities it may have created, Fix Daddy offers a brilliantly conceived and executed vision for retaining and enriching our humanity.

On the Horizon

After the major recognition of a Humanitas prize, the looming question for any recipient is, “What’s next?”

To date, Gresham has had success as both a novelist and a screenwriter. “The form I employ depends on the story I’m trying to tell,” he explains. “With prose, I can go in whatever direction I want, and I can tell everyone everything. With screenwriting, I need to consider what is filmable.”

His big writing influences are virtuosic, inscrutable figures: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Janicza Bravo, Charlie Kauffman. Like them, he enjoys putting peculiar characters in unorthodox, intense situations. “I’m always going to do something like that. I want to write about characters that people may not relate to in their day-to-day experience but can connect to on an emotional level.”

For aspiring screenwriters, Gresham emphasizes the importance of reading and watching everything. “Watching movies is something we should do all the time. If you’re writing movies and not watching them, what are you doing? And read. Reading is just as important as watching movies because you learn language. Good writing is essential to a good story.”

He’s into violence, not as a sensational device but as the harbinger of sudden change that characters must confront. “I don’t like to preach,” Gresham asserts. “I like to present extreme situations and have characters and audience members explore their ethical framework.” Through uncomfortable moments, he believes, we can find our moral ground and clarify our values and principles.

In every waking moment—and even in his dreams—Gresham pursues his craft. “I am a writer. I write, whether it is prose or screenplays. That’s all I do. I write.”

The volume and range of Gresham’s work in the pipeline lends credence to that statement and makes him an attractive prospect for literary agents in New York and talent agencies in Hollywood. He has aspirations to be published by a big press and to direct one of his own scripts, perhaps someday soon.

Sunflower is a speculative sci-fi absurdist novel that he’s been writing for several years. A satire of cinematic storytelling about a veteran film projectionist and a millennial screenwriter who discover a screenplay that predicts the end of the world, it features an intermission that is 21 pages of the same sentence.

Austin, Texas, another project that hearkens back to Gresham’s East Texas upbringing, is a script that he describes as his “Crash and Magnolia rip-off.” It’s a shifting mosaic of interlinked characters experiencing failure, desperation, violence, and redemption over the course of one night in Austin. At the center of it all is a bag of cash, a lottery ticket, and a kidnapping gone wrong. “If I could find an interested producer,” says Gresham, “I’d be ready to direct this film tomorrow.”

He’s also scripting an LGBTQ revenge acid western about a mute artist battling a town of religious zealots called Sometimes the Devil Wins; a 70s-style action thriller about an anything-goes errand man named “Get” who teams up with a special effects makeup-artist-turned- professional-thief in order to stop a military-trained serial killer called “Get Gone”; a coming-ofage dramedy about a music-obsessed girl told through four vignettes from her life called Her Song; an absurdist low-budget monster movie called DAM! about an asteroid that turns a harmless lake fish into an ever-mutating beast that terrorizes a small town; and a TV pilot called Jack Rabbit he’s co-authoring with writing partner Kurt Kroeber about an actor who desperately wants to be famous and wakes up as a cartoon bunny.

“But,” says Gresham with a wink in his eye, “My real secret weapon is Cat Night, a screenplay about a small town trying to survive until the sun rises when a lunar phenomenon causes every feline on Earth to become ravenous for human flesh.”

“Ravenous” may be the best word to describe Gresham, a voracious reader and writer who will not stop, who simply cannot stop, because writing, for him, is life.

All the world is his stage, and he’s just getting started. REALVEGASMAGAZINE.COM