Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I write cultural commentary for a variety of journals, both print and online. My topics of interest are music, religion, and culture generally. “Joey Coletta” is my first screenplay, and it has been great fun from start to finish.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
“The Incredible Life of Joey Coletta” is an homage to the classic family situation comedies of the 1950s and ’60s – shows like “Leave It to Beaver,” “Father Knows Best,” “The Andy Griffith Show.” I was raised on those old shows and have always admired their wisdom and charm. My screenplay is about an average young boy named Joey Coletta, who auditions for a family sitcom in Hollywood on a whim and wins the lead role. We follow him as he deals with the trials and tribulations of child stardom in the late 1950s: temperamental directors, unscrupulous entertainment journalists, as well as his parents’ crumbling marriage. The story is full of whimsy and charm, and is at times very poignant.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I rarely if ever write my essays from beginning to end in sequence; instead I piece them together from brief sentence fragments, which gradually coalesce into a coherent form. On any given day I might spend more time studying my subject matter than actually writing. Samuel Johnson once said that a person has to read a whole shelf full of books in order to write one book.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I am particularly inspired by the great writers of the Christian tradition, from the Bible all the way through G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Pope Benedict XVI, and others. Chesterton had a special way of combining lightness and profundity. I suppose the biggest influence on “Joey Coletta” was the family sitcoms themselves, whose whimsical spirit I tried to capture. It is a genre that I believe has not been given its due by serious critics.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a new screenplay. It is a fictionalized account of the life of the great American author Washington Irving and how he came to write his famous tales “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”