Michael Tennant grew up San Diego with a “disdain” for Los Angeles. “You’re taught the Dodgers are the devil,” he jokes. “LA is the worst. Don’t do this. But my brother did a play, I heard him get a laugh and that first hit of dopamine, I started chasing that. I liked the idea of performing.”
In the early days, Tennant wanted to become an actor. “Good Will Hunting was a seminal movie,” he says. “These two guys just got together and wrote something? And Gus Van Sant is directing it? How did these guys do that?”
Tennant says he somewhat lost track of that and focused on acting. “I got stuck in the linear idea of it for a while, but then I fell into producing.” While on set one day, a producer had lunch with Tennant and this somewhat led to work in development. “I saw the sausage getting made and it made me kind of sad.”
Tennant adds, “I was watching people set money on fire, never their own but other people’s money, making movies for the wrong reasons and after a few years reading thousands of scripts, I thought I wanted to give writing a crack. Let me see if can do this.”
Inspired originally by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and more recently by the Duplass Brothers (see the speech, “The Calvary Isn’t Coming”), Tennant knew he needed to take his shot. “I keep asking other people — writers, directors, casting agents — to hand me this creative life that I want and no one is doing it. Why is no one doing it? Because you have to do it yourself.”
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