The Lawrence Gray Experience

ABOUT ME

I'm a screenwriter, director, novelist, blogger, lecturer and international movie bit part walk on extra! See me being myself in Oliver Stone’s movie “Snowden” where I play a man running up a flight of stairs pointing wildly at a man he thinks he recognizes. It is a stretch of a role, but I pull it off magnificently.

I've got a few literary, screenwriting and film-making prizes to my name. I won't name them because of modesty, a faltering short term memory, and knowledge that nobody actually cares, as every writer is an award winning something or other nowadays. There are also credits for various UK and Singapore TV series that I've written that similarly have come and gone. And I've spent most of my adult life in exile, surrounded by people who do not speak my language, who have rather mixed feelings about my culture, with governments that actively discriminate against me. Though as an Englishman, I rise above it despite always being tagged, regardless of my accent and condescending manner, as Australian, Canadian, or American. In short, I am not a breast implant surgeon, a dead Hollywood movie star, nor a Maltese singing sensation, though I am sure those are the Lawrence Grays that you googled. Maybe we all look alike.

Notice how, even in prose, I roll my eyes because I have had far too many conversations about who I am, what I do, and where I am from and still people assume that I make silk screen prints, write sub-titles for the news, and come from some obscure mid-western town in America while at the same time bearing the burden of the iniquities of the British Empire as well as being told how much better things were when the British were in control. With the internet one would assume that people are better informed and capable of understanding nuance and subtlety, but instead one just learns that there are people who have never heard of England, think the world is flat, and somehow if only you believe, the universe will magically make you famous and fabulous, or sainted and eternally basking in the glory of whatever it is that makes basking tolerable. Why it would want to do that, I do not know, but apparently it has nothing better to do.

To conclude then, after being one of Hong Kong’s sought after screenwriters and all round script fixer uppers, I am now Johor Bahru’s most sought after screenwriter, documentary maker and lover of three word descriptions. Granted that in a world woefully pleased with its geographical ignorance, my addresses usually illicit the WTF response from Hollywood, I, however, like to think of them as enriching my experience. In a world where shallowness and egotism is shockingly rewarded, this may or may not be a good thing. So, if nothing else, please check out the books and films and buy them, or poke around the site for my insightful blog, a few short stories, and a few articles on the art of screenwriting.