James Gunn: Interview
By Eric Wittmershaus

James Gunn has been a busy man. The Los Angeles-based writer released his novel "The Toy Collector" in May. His second film, a low-budget superhero spoof called The Specials, was released last weekend in New York and Los Angeles. And in between, Gunn has moved into a new house and finalized his wedding plans. He's getting married in just over a week.

Nevertheless, Gunn found time to take a trip to the Bay Area for a friend's performance at the Fringe Festival and sit down for an interview at a San Francisco cafe.

Gunn, 34, began his screenwriting career with B-movie studio Troma Films, where he wrote Tromeo and Juliet, one of the studio's best-known cult titles. After penning a non-fiction account of his time at Troma, Gunn began to work on his two current projects.

"The Toy Collector," which took several years to write, was borne out of a somewhat unusual process.

"I was in Columbia, at grad school, and I had been trying to write a novel," he said. "I wanted to write my first novel, and I sat down and wrote the whole novel in two weeks....It was a mess.

"So I got my first novel out of the way and said, 'I have to write a second one,' and I kept trying and trying, and it wasn't going anywhere. And then, out of nowhere, I started to write these little prose poems."

"Everything that was important about them seemed small, Gunn said. "They were like an 8-point font. They were very short sentences."

He also had a peculiar blueprint.

"I had extremely rigid rules about the whole process. I think the only punctuation I was allowed to use was a period. Semicolons came along shortly thereafter because I'm a great lover of the semicolon. But the main thing was philosophical...I wasn't allowed to infer causation. I wasn't allowed to use metaphor. I was only allowed to state exactly what was."

Gunn toned it down a bit for the final version of the book, which features metaphor, causation and plenty of commas.

It's a broken, edgy, flashback-filled narrative that elegantly weaves its protagonist's dysfunctional childhood with his equally dysfunctional adult life. Its anti-hero, also named James Gunn, resembles the author more in name than in behavior.

Like the author, James the character grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York. While a few other life events are likely similar, the character is a self-destructive, mixed-up product of an unraveling suburban family. In his twentysomething trainwreck of a life, he filches pharmaceuticals from a clinic where he works and sells them to a pair of drug dealers in Central Park. He and his roommate Bill Sinewski (named after Gunn's roommate at the time he was writing the book) use their illicit earnings to finance their own addictions to vintage toys — the same ones they played with as kids.

Along the way, James repeatedly comes face-to-face with shots at redemption, through both his reformed brother Tar and a young woman named Evelyn, whose relationship with the Jekyl-and-Hyde James becomes the novel's narrative core.

Much like Evelyn, Gunn's reader can't help but get caught up in James' twenty-car-pileup life. The guy's really messed up, but it's too hard to look away. On the other hand, it's quite easy to get caught up in Gunn's skilled writing and go along for the ride on James' manic-depressive seesaw.

Gunn the author said readers shouldn't confuse the self-destructive, immature, fictional James Gunn with the flesh-and-blood version. At least, not entirely.

"There's a lot of stuff that's different," he said. "To be honest, I get off on that. There is a very thin line between fiction and lying.

"'60 Minutes' is like that. These guys have a point of view, and they just mine all the stimulus to make it seem...real. Maybe they have a good point, but they're creating the truth. I like that.

Not that Gunn claims to be a master spin doctor who cunningly crafted an alter-ego. "But that wasn't at all my intention [at the time I was writing]," he said. "I was just thinking it was more interesting to put my name [in the book]."

Perhaps in a small way, the book has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the aid of his brother Patrick, on whom the fictional James' brother Tar is loosely based, Gunn has become something of a toy collector himself.

"Patrick's been buying these toys from the book," Gunn said. "He bought me the Strange Change Toy (called Scrunch 'Em, Grow 'Em Dinosaurs in the book).

"He's getting into eBay just so he can collect all the toys from the book. Last time I went up to New York to see him, he gave me Dan Occansion (a key toy in the novel). I bet I'll get Rom (Spaceknight, the fictional James' favorite toy robot) when I get married."

But before the wedding, there's the matter of The Specials, a film Gunn wrote that opened Sept. 22 in New York and Los Angeles. The movie's tagline — "Not as good as regular superheroes, but slightly better than you" — just may be the best of the season.

"That was [director] Craig [Mazin]," Gunn said. "He wrote that before he was even hired."

The low-budget comedy chronicles the adventures of America's seventh-best superhero team, which is about to have its own line of action figures — the ultimate heroes' tribute.

While the idea of Atomic also-rans may sound a bit like last year's box office bomb Mystery Men, Gunn is growing tired of the comparison, particularly since that film helped wreak havoc on the plans for The Specials, which Gunn conceived well before he'd ever heard of Mystery Men.

"I had written this script and [given] it to Miramax [who originally optioned the film]," Gunn said. "And right after they optioned it, I learned that there was this movie at Universal called Mystery Men about a group of ne'er-do-well superheroes. I was really bummed out."

Despite the initial disappointment, Gunn is excited about the film, which he took back from Miramax. In its current incarnation, the film stars Rob Lowe, Jamie Kennedy (The Scream movies), Thomas Hayden Church ("Wings"), Melissa Joan Hart ("Sabrina, the Teenage Witch") and Gunn, who plays a character called Minute (as in small) Man.

Not surprisingly, Minute Man is also the voice of the hilarious The Specials' website, whose material was written entirely by Gunn.

"I sat down and started writing and wrote it all very quickly," he said. "I was amusing myself. Some of it was kind of crappy, but it ended up being, like, 40 pages of stuff when I [finished].

"When I think about it, that's another half a script. I always do my best work when I don't give a shit, and that's very similar to where I was with that. But I knew anything I could have someone else write would be terrible."

But Minute Man wasn't always the original choice for the role of The Specials' website content producer.

"I was originally gonna play Laser Man [who was renamed The Strobe for copyright reasons]," Gunn said. "When we optioned [the script] to Miramax, they wanted to get a big-name guy [Church] for Strobe.

"And I kind of went ahead and re-played with Minute Man...And of course the part got larger. He has a lot of lines now...and suddenly [he's] kissing a girl."

Despite his tinkering, Gunn can't dispel the Mystery Men comparison, which seems unfair, in a way, since The Specials differs from that $80 million dud in more ways than its $1.2 million price tag.

"Mystery Men is an action movie as a comedy, and our movie is a bunch of guys sitting around talking," Gunn said.

Much of the film's humor comes from Gunn's playing with the notion of what superheroes do in their downtime, and the film's audience doesn't really get to see the characters in full effect, which makes the sting of Mystery Men's bad box office even greater.

"We were dead meat after Mystery Men [flopped]," he said, not holding back. "[Director] Kinka Usher screwed us up.

"Then X-Men came out, and all of the sudden (The Specials) is getting a little more press. We're still hurt. We were not so far behind those guys in terms of filming, and I really wish that we had sped up the process."

One process Gunn can be relieved went slowly is what in all likelihood will be his next feature film, a live-action Scooby Doo. Warner Bros. had numerous writers take a crack at the script over the past several years before seemingly deciding upon Gunn (in the studio world, nothing is certain), who had previously written Warner Bros. a script for a movie based upon the Mad magazine comic strip, Spy vs. Spy.

Gunn said the Scooby Doo screenplay is his best, and if all goes well, the film should be out .

"It's gonna be a great movie if [Warner Bros. doesn't] freak out and try to make it like The Flintstones," he said, adding that, like The Specials, one of the things that interested him about the film was exploring what the gang did between its eerie escapades.

But before all that, there's the matter of getting married. Gunn will marry actress/cartoonist Jenna Fischer on Oct. 7 in St. Louis before the couple goes on honeymoon in Hawaii. Is Gunn a little worried about leaving the mainland shortly after the release of his movie?

"I have so much stuff going on right now, and then to be going away, it's frightening," he said. "As if everything's going to fall apart [while I'm gone]. I will come back, and someone will have taken my place."

E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at ericw at flakmag dot com.

— graphic by Jeffrey Avila