Behind the Scenes 
Film
Easy Writer
For Tim McCanlies, working out of his home in Rosanky hasn’t just reduced his stress level. It’s made him a Hollywood hotshot.
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As the son of a military man, McCanlies grew up all around Texas. He attended elementary school in Lubbock, spent summers in Cisco with his grandparents, went to high school in Bryan, and took courses at the University of Texas at Austin. A would-be writer, he spent two years at U.T. before he realized that neither he nor his fellow students had much to write about beyond student life. Hungry for a bit of real-world experience, McCanlies moved to Dallas, looking for what he calls a “Hemingway-esque adventure.” He discovered that he could enroll in the police academy and apply the training credits toward a criminal justice degree, which he eventually earned from Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University). In the mid-seventies he enrolled in the master’s film program at Southern Methodist University, and after graduating, in 1978, he moved to Los Angeles. McCanlies first worked on projects for Disney, then Columbia and Warner Bros. During this time he also met his wife, Suzanne, and in 1988 the couple decided to move back to Texas, where they lived on Lake Travis before finding the ranch.
Unlike the stereotypical Texans who have loped across movie screens over the years, McCanlies speaks rapidly and with a nondescript accent that betrays little of his roots. “I feel very much at home here,” he says, “and the sensibility here is my sensibility.”
“I love the fact that he has found a way to live in Texas,” says Chris Castallo, the director of creative affairs for Tollin/Robbins, the Los Angeles-based production company for which McCanlies is developing his first television pilot. Featuring a teenage Bruce Wayne, before the mask and cape, the script has Batman fans buzzing excitedly on the Internet. Castallo credits McCanlies’ “normal” life in Texas as a stabilizing force that allows him to seek out new creative challenges, but he also thinks the writer-director’s age and experience give him a competitive edge. “It’s not like he’s some kid who sold a couple of hot spec scripts to a big studio and now wants to write a TV show,” Castallo says. “There’s a certain level of maturity and sophistication to Tim.”
Scott Bernstein agrees. He is the senior vice president of production and development for Ignite Entertainment, the company that produced Dancer, and the two men currently are in talks about McCanlies’ directing two of his own scripts. “You rarely see writers who stay in a career for two decades,” says Bernstein. “In the past five years Tim has created a stronghold for himself.”
Of the many scripts McCanlies wrote in the mid-eighties, “Thai Pirates” and “Louisiana Run” were particularly significant. Neither was made into a movie, but the fast-paced stories earned him an agent and a reputation in the industry as an “action guy.” McCanlies eventually grew tired of the label, so he wrote Dancer, which he shot three summers ago in Fort Davis. He was already in production on The Iron Giant, and on Sundays, when he wasn’t directing Dancer, he would make changes to the Iron Giant script.
“The drama of real life is something I can identify with more than I can chasing a terrorist through the World Trade Center,” McCanlies says dryly. “Even in Dancer, although nothing blows up, there’s a lot at stake for those guys.” Then, alluding to the movie’s mixed critical response, he says with a shrug, “Some people got that, some people didn’t.” McCanlies says he once heard Dancer described as the “anti-Sundance” film, a reference to the festival known for showcasing independent, edgy movies. “It wasn’t groundbreaking. There wasn’t a lot of angst or drug use or lesbianism or fill in the blank,” he says. “It didn’t push any envelopes except that it was all about people, but that pushed envelopes in a way.”
He is known in the industry as a writer who creates compelling and realistic characters, and The Iron Giant’s characters are what distinguished it from other animated movies released last year. “Tim brought a fresh pair of eyes that were not all about animation but were all about storytelling,” says Allison Abbate, who produced the feature. “He’s got such sensitivity, such truth and simplicity. He really helped shape our characters.”
McCanlies believes there are many interesting stories to be told about Texas, but he’d rather wait to direct his own script than make someone else’s movie. “I’m not driven to be a director, like a lot of people,” he claims. Then, sounding like a screenwriter, he adds, “Very few directors really bring a lot to a film. That’s the big secret of Hollywood that most high-level executives won’t admit.
“I’m doing work that I like,” he insists. “It’s such a painful, long process to spend sixteen-hour days on a set as a director. I don’t necessarily want to do that for somebody else’s script.” McCanlies says that Barry Levinson, who is known for making movies about his native Baltimore, is the kind of director he’d like to become: “I’d love for every other film I write and direct to be one of my ‘Texas’ movies.”
Since the release of The Iron Giant, McCanlies’ reputation has undergone an unmistakable if subtle shift. He admits that he can be choosier about new projects now, but he also believes in keeping a number of balls in the air. “My agent points out—and it’s true—that there’s a lot of downtime if you just take things sequentially. You’ll finish something, and then you start looking for the next gig.” These days he spends much of each afternoon on the phone to Los Angeles. “Writers are like actors,” he muses. “They have to audition quite a bit.”
Which brings McCanlies back to his pet peeve, the myth of the idle screenwriter. “It’s a lot of work to maintain relationships and keep writing better. Nobody ever hires someone to write a crappy script. Sometimes scripts become crap,” he says with a knowing laugh, “but nobody sets out to do bad work.
“I run a career,” he says as he gazes out at the ranch from an airy sunporch. “There’s not going to be a time when I suddenly have all this time to go putter in a garden. Writing is what I do now, and this is what I’ll always do.”
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