J. Michael Straczynski - Early Years

Early Years

Straczynski is the son of Charles Straczynski, a manual laborer, and Evelyn Straczynski (née Pate). He was raised in Newark, New Jersey; Kankakee, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Chula Vista, California, where he graduated from high school; and San Diego, California. Straczynski's family religion was Catholic, and he is of Polish ancestry. His grandparents lived in the area which today belongs to Belarus, and fled to America from the Russian Revolution; his father was born in the US, but lived in Germany, Poland and Russia.

Straczynski cut his teeth writing plays, having several produced at Southwestern College and San Diego State University before finally publishing his adaptation of "Snow White" with Performance Publishing. Several other plays were produced around San Diego, including "The Apprenticeship" for the Marquis Public Theater. During the late 1970s, Straczynski also became the on-air entertainment reviewer for KSDO-FM and wrote several radio plays before being hired as a scriptwriter for the radio drama Alien Worlds. He also produced his first television project in San Diego, "Marty Sprinkle" for KPBS-TV as well as worked on the XETV-TV project Disasterpiece Theatre. While in San Diego he became a journalist for the Los Angeles Times as a special San Diego correspondent and also worked for San Diego Magazine and The San Diego Reader. In 1981 he landed a contract with Writer's Digest to write a book about scriptwriting.

He and Kathryn M. Drennan (whom he met at San Diego State) moved to Los Angeles on April 1, 1981 (they would marry in 1983). He worked on his book while planning a transition to television. The book's first edition was published in 1982. In Los Angeles he worked for The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Reader, TV-Cable Week, and People Magazine. He quit journalism after working for People, and in 1983, he wrote a spec script for the show He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and the producers of He-Man bought it as well as other scripts and then hired Straczynski as a staff writer.

According to the jacket bio for the first edition of his scriptwriting text (see Print below), Straczynski had a play produced when he was 17, a sitcom produced when he was 21, and sold his first movie script when he was 24. (It should be noted, however, that these first two credits were for volunteer public radio, and not professional script sales.) By 28, his credits included television and film scripts, radio scripts for Alien Worlds and the Mutual Broadcasting System, a dozen plays, and more than 150 newspaper and magazine articles. He taught his craft for years at lectures and seminars in California and elsewhere.

He spent five years from 1987 to 1992 co-hosting the Hour 25 radio talk show on KPFK-FM Los Angeles with Larry DiTillio.