Will Success Spoil Joe Strazcynski?

Ecce Homo: ambitious 18 year-old (above) and middle-aged blowhard. (right.)

The 1972 Chula Vista High School "Smile committee:" BACK: Diane Vranes, Joe Straczynski, Mel Hallam, Kelley Dupuis. FRONT: Karen Martin, Mary Falk.



Herman Wouk's now-forgotten 1962 novel Youngblood Hawke begins with the words, "Did you ever know a famous man before he became famous?"

Well, yes I did. But I part paths with Wouk's next assertion, which is "chances are he seemed like anyone else to you."

No, the guy I'm thinking about never "seemed like anyone else" to me.

Once upon a time there was a very ambitious boy. At a very young age he had already decided upon his calling: he wanted to be a writer.

So far I could be talking about myself. But this story gets far more interesting than anything I could tell you about me.

The boy in question refined his ambition early and stayed true to it. He would wander in numerous directions while in pursuit of his ultimate goal, but he never lost sight of it.

He wanted to be a great science-fiction writer. Besotted with tales of the bizarre and the otherworldly, he dreamed not just of becoming the next Gene Roddenberry, the legendary creator of Star Trek, but of outdoing him. Writers like Rod Serling, H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury were his models.

Yes, to J. Michael Straczynski, as he likes to call himself, (friends and enemies alike call him "Joe," and when he was young he used the nom-de-plume "Jay Stark" for a while, presumably to cover his tracks while publishing cheap pulp fiction in trashy sci-fi magazines--it was all part of the grand plan) writing science-fiction stories was only the first rung on the starlit stairway. Even when he was barely out of high school, his eyes were already on the ultimate prize: Television.

When I was young we used to talk about the importance of "rising above our environment," which to my little circle of friends meant getting our butts out of Chula Vista, California and moving on to bigger and better things. Joe was born in New Jersey but spent most of his formative years in southern California. It goes without saying that he was set upon rising above his particular environment. He did so. As relentless in his own way as any other individual obsessed with achieving great things in this world, (think Lyndon Johnson, Hitler, or J. Pierpont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying ) Joe, through hard work and persistence, transcended his environment step-by-step. He "made it," as we Americans like to say.

He paid a price of course, and from an early age. I'm talking about high school, of course, which is where I first met Joe. He was a member of the Chula Vista High School Class of 1972. I was Class of '73.

Joe was something of a "perimeter fence" character on campus, by which I mean you did not see him going out for track or running for student council. He was usually seen walking about the grounds with a volume of Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov tucked in among his schoolbooks. He was very tall and lanky, wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a stubborn shock of hair that was always falling down over his forehead. The glasses and the hair earned him the nickname "Jerry Lewis" from his classmates. His idea of a witticism was to describe himself as a "Transcendental determinist with atheistic tendencies," which he did, often.

In short, Joe was what was known on campus in those days as a "nerd."

I know whereof I speak, by the way, not only because I knew Joe, but because I was something of a nerd myself. I didn't share Joe's fashion habit of combining button-down short-sleeve shirts with basketball sneakers, but like him I was a somewhat marginalized character, not given to extracurricular activities like sports, (although I did sing in the choir and, during my senior year, was on the speech team) noteworthy, if at all, chiefly for my ambition, which somewhat resembled Joe's. Like him I wanted to be a writer. The main difference between us lay in what Tim O'Brien might have called "the things we carried." Joe lugged around Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke; my authors were guys like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. In short, Joe wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be an Author. His was the more realistic ambition.

I remember how we met. It was in the winter of 1972. Joe's senior year, my junior year. Some misguided soul on the student council had decided that something was needed to "break up the third-quarter blahs." That something, the student council decided, would be called "Smile Week." It would be a week of jokes read over the P.A. system every morning during homeroom plus other assorted frivolity, the whole thing culminating with a Friday-morning assembly in the gym devoted to a comic skit which would be performed in front of the entire student body. I was dragooned by my creative-writing teacher, Mrs. Joanne Massie, into participating on this committee along with a group of fellow students which also included Joe Straczynski. Now it can be told: I, Kelley Dupuis, actually performed in one of Joe's earliest productions. He wrote the skit for the "Smile" assembly, and I appeared in it doing my imitation of the late sportscaster Howard Cosell. (Impressions were the hot thing in stand-up comedy in the early 1970s.)

The assembly's climax came when my friend Johnny Keersmaeker, appearing as the school vice-principal, a fascistic moron named Richard Armbrust, demanded to know who the author of this "skit" was. Joe Straczynski arose from the audience, and Keersmaeker, using the pistol they used to start track meets, "shot" him in front of the whole student body, after which two guys carried Joe, the dead body, out of the gym. Big yucks.

About this time, Joe, the self-proclaimed "transcendental determinist with atheistic tendencies," just happened to develop a huge crush on a girl named Cathy Williams, who was one of the campus Jesus freaks, as they were known in those days. Unswervingly true to his principles, Joe dropped the atheistic pose and became a Jesus freak himself, presumably in the hope of getting Cathy's attention. I wouldn't mention this petty detail were it not for the fact that Joe remained a dedicated born-again Christian for the next three or four years. Even after he'd gotten over Cathy and graduated, he continued to make a pest of himself pitching Jesus left and right. He didn't have a lot of friends and he clearly wanted to be friends with me, which was perfectly all right with me except for the fact that his relentless salesmanship for Jesus in those days made me uncomfortable, and not inclined to want to be around him for more than a few minutes at a time.

Now, Joe might launch a counterattack to this screed and point out that when we were boys, I shunned his friendship because I was jealous of the fact that he was having more success getting published and noticed than I was. Well, I've already admitted the truth of that in a blog posting I put up nearly three years ago. And it is true: I was jealous of Joe's early successes. That's because at 18 I didn't know any better. I didn't have enough perspective to realize that Joe was writing for a clearly-defined market, the sci-fi market, a market with a built-in audience. I was dreaming woozily of becoming the next James Joyce. Not much percentage in that.

He was talented; no question of it. Very talented. And he was placing stories in pulp magazines when I was still experimenting around at my desk trying to whip up something that would make the world recognize me as a genius. My ambitions were hopelessly lofty. Of course Joe had more success than I did, in the way that most of us define success. But I had lost interest in science fiction when I was 15. Joe was mining a vein that I'd abandoned. I wanted to write mainstream fiction. I wanted to write Literature. Joe just wanted to get published and make money. Viva Joe.

But jealousy wasn't the whole story. If I shunned Joe's company in those days, I did it as much for his relentless campaigning for Jesus as for the fact that he was getting published at an age when I was getting ignored. I just didn't want to buy what he and his friends were selling.

Joe and I attended Southwestern College together, and then later, San Diego State University. When we were students at Southwestern, circa 1974-75, I would occasionally give him lifts home from school in my car. On one of these afternoons he took me into his room, where he showed me some documents he acquired from God-knows where. He had them hidden in a drawer and bound up with wire. But he brought them out, undid the wire and shared.

They were documents relating to the study of theurgy, which, as he explained to me, is the craft of summoning up demons and evil spirits without putting your own soul at risk.

Oh-kay. I got out of there as quickly as I could that particular afternoon.

About this same time, Joe wrote an indignant letter to our college paper, the Athapascan. Seems there had been some sort of Jesus concert and some college rowdies had been making noise, destroying the mood, so to speak. Joe was highly indignant, indignant enough to write to the paper.

In fact Joe spent a lot of time in those days being indignant. He took a dislike to one of his teachers, wrote the poor man an exhaustively long hate letter, and slid it under his office door. Talk about bold courage. Talk about ego; I mean, imagine writing somebody a ten-page hate letter and then assuming they're going to read all of it.

Joe did the same thing to me once. In those days writing hate letters was his idea of being boldly assertive. Somehow he got the idea that I had "cut" one of his stories from the San Diego State University magazine, Montezuma Life, when I was majoring in journalism and served on the magazine staff one semester. In truth I had no such authority on the magazine; on that issue I was merely a copyeditor. I didn't decide what went in and what didn't.

Which didn't stop Joe from writing, and mailing to me, a meticulously typed, single-spaced ten page hate letter telling me in great detail what a son-of-a-bitch I was. I read the first sentence of this rant and threw the rest into the wastebasket. But Joe, I'm sure, went around for days strutting around like a rooster, chest thrust out, thinking he had really told me. I'm sure he did think I'd read through all of his venom. More's the pity.

Oh, and by the way, the Jesus thing eventually did a 180. Joe next surfaced in the public eye (if you want to call this surfacing in the public eye) when he went before the local city council demanding that it remove the Bible from the shelves of the public library. He identified himself for the newspaper as a representative of the San Diego State University Atheist Students' Union. Knowing Joe as I did, it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that he was the Atheist Student Union's entire membership. Slaloming back and forth between whoopee-for-Jesus and self-proclaimed militant atheism: I'll leave it to the reader to decide what that might suggest about someone's emotional stability. But it was the seventies; we were young, and when you're young you're enthusiastic, yea or nay. But anyone could see that the boy who described himself as a "transcendental determinist with atheistic tendecies" in high school was back, i.e. the nerd was back.

Joe and I didn't speak again until the mid-1980s. By then we had both decided to let bygones be bygones, I guess. We were grown men now, in our late twenties both of us. Joe called me up one night when I was living in Vacaville, California, where I worked as a newscaster on the local FM radio station. Joe was at that time writing for a kid's cartoon show called He-Man and the Masters of The Universe. He had realized his ambition of making it into television. I was pleased for him and said so.

Shortly after that I left radio and went into the Foreign Service. I sort of kept track of Joe's progress through my mother, who informed me a few years later that Joe was writing and also producing episodes of Angela Lansbury's show Murder, She Wrote. Mom cited one script Joe had written which she thought especially clever, in which the skullduggery afoot involved a computer.

I next spoke on the phone with Joe in 1993. He told me he had a new project in the works: he and a partner had cooked up a scenario and a script for a new science-fiction series they were hoping to get into syndication, Babylon 5. As I said before, I gave up science fiction when I was a sophomore in high school and I've never watched Babylon 5. But in the years that followed I congratulated Joe on its success plenty of times.

The spring we had this telephone chat, I was on my way to Moscow, where I'd been assigned to the American embassy. Joe had just a few months earlier attended his 20-year high school class reunion. Mine was coming up. I wouldn't have made it in any case because I was to be in Russia when the reunion took place, but Joe advised me strongly not to go, even if I were able to. Then he told me a funny story to explain his advice.

"If I expected to be greeted as some kind of conquering hero, you know, the guy who became a successful television writer and all that, I was to be disappointed," he told me. "Hardly anyone even remembered me. After a while I went to a pay phone to call my wife and tell her I was coming home. When I got off the phone, I looked down and noticed that my fly was open. That was it, boy. The high school nerd had come back to haunt me. I got in the car and drove straight back to L.A."

With Joe active in Hollywood writing for TV and all of his other projects, and me working for the government now, we were pretty much out of one another's orbits. He lived in Sherman Oaks somewhere; I was back-and-forth between overseas and Washington.

Circa 1996, when I was in D.C. but getting ready to decamp for Europe one more time, Joe and I swapped a few e-mails. He gave me his personal e-mail address and told me to use that one to communicate with him rather than the one that the Babylon 5 fans used, which apparently always had a very full in-box. I congratulated him once again on the success of B5, and he told me he had another series in the works of which, if anything came of it, I never found out.

In 2006 I posted a blog essay about having known Joe when we were young and how proud I was of his successes. Jealousy was long past; I enjoyed "bragging on him" to friends. I learned later that he was aware I had written this essay, but never said anything to me about it. I suppose I should have considered that a red flag, a hint that at 52 the boy might be getting too big for his britches in the sense of accepting praise and kudos as simply his due.

And so it was with pleasure that I e-mailed Joe again early in November upon reading in the newspaper that he had just written his first big-budget Hollywood movie, Clint Eastwood's Changeling. He had come a long way from He Man and the Masters of the Universe, and I acknowledged the fact. We chatted a bit about the difficulties of his profession. I even asked him why he was still working. Years earlier he had once told me that he wanted to "Get out of the Hollywood rat race, retire to England and just write novels for the rest of my life." Well, I would think that the success of B5 and all of the subsequent franchising that went with it had made Joe quite a wealthy man by 2008. But the dream of the English countryside had apparently been tabled, at least for now. Who could blame him, for a chance to work with Clint Eastwood?

Joe was friendly enough that I didn't think there would be any harm in including him occasionally on distribution for some of my blog musings. I mean, what the hell? If he didn't want to read something I sent him, he could delete it. And if he didn't want to be included on distribution for my stuff, a polite I-don't-have-time-to-read-everything-people-send-me would have sufficed.

Instead, imagine my surprise when I opened an e-mail from him in mid-November and found his tone so screechy that I could almost see the spittle on his computer screen. "I did NOT give you my personal e-mail so you could send me your every errant thought!" he practically screamed, and then peremptorily requested removal from my distribution list.

So much for good manners, and by the way, a pretty strong indicator that the boy known as "Jerry Lewis" to the Class of '72 had indeed gotten too big for his britches. Hob-nobbing with folks like Clint Eastwood and Mick Jagger had apparently convinced the one-time geek who dabbled with theurgy in his bedroom at his parents' house that he was now a Real Important Guy, and much too busy to be bothered with all of these pesky hangers-on and autograph-seekers.

Oh, and by the way, he hit "reply to all" when he sent me this very curt diss, so everyone to whom I had sent my blog posting also got Joe's little nastygram, which prompted inquiries like "Who the hell is this guy?" "What's his problem?" and "Who IS this asshole?"

By then the reviews of Changeling had begun to appear in the newspapers, and it occurred to me that they might have played some role in Joe's foul mood. The reviews I saw ran from fair to poor; the Washington Post, Washington Times and Wall Street Journal were of one mind that the film wasn't up to Eastwood's usual standards, and at least a couple of them singled out Joe's script as part of the problem. The movie review website Rottentomatoes.com has given Changeling reviews that run about 59% positive and 41% negative. Not terrible, but not exactly your average Christmas blockbuster either.

Stung by Joe's rudeness, I replied to his nastygram, suggesting that perhaps Changeling's less-than-superlative reception by some of the critics was what was making him crankier than a nauseated wolverine that weekend.

He replied within moments, practically yelling in print that the reviews were overwhelmingly good (whose?) and suggesting quite strongly that I should never darken his doorstep, electronic or otherwise, again.

Well, okay. No problem. With friends like him I don't need big-headed celebrities, do I? And by the way, you would be surprised how many Babylon 5 fans don't know who Joe Strazcynski is. I mean, who watches the credits, right?

And then of course there's the old joke about the blonde who comes to Hollywood intent on stardom...and promptly sleeps with a writer. The low place of writers on the showbiz totem pole is the stuff of legend.

But don't try to tell that to J. Michael Straczynski, hometown boy who made good. He seems to think that he REALLY made good. Good enough to make him too good for the rest of us. So. Has success spoiled Joe Straczynski?

Let's see what the fan mail says.

Oh, yeah. He's also a welsher. In 1974 I bet him five dollars that he couldn't read Finnegans Wake. He couldn't, and he has yet to pay me my five bucks.