A Hollywood career born in Connecticut
MALCOLM GRAY BREAKS DOWN THE CRAFT OF MAKING MOVIES
When Darien native and movie producer Malcolm Gray was growing up, his parents thought of a “very good system” when it came to watching movies.
“On Friday nights, my three younger brothers and I could rent whatever movie we wanted and my parents would watch it with us. On Saturday nights, we would watch a movie that they chose with them,” says Gray, 34, who is coproducer of the movie “21 Bridges.”
That tradition, which took Gray through his “most formative” years, “really taught me that stories were stories and it doesn’t matter if the movie is new or old or in color or black and white,” he said. “I fell in love with the medium more so than any particular film.”
“21 Bridges” is a cop action thriller starring Chadwick Boseman, of “Black Panther” fame.
Gray, who now lives in Los Angeles, has held several other positions in the movie industry over the years, including assistant to the senior vice president of production at Spyglass Entertainment, where he worked on “The Tourist” starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.
He also worked at MGM Studios, where he was involved with “Skyfall” and “Robo Cop.”
As a creative executive at Sketch
Films, he developed the TV series “Sleepy Hollow” and as a film executive at TriStar Productions, he helped oversee projects including “Money Monster” and “Baby Driver.”
“I grew up renting movies from Roxy Video, which no longer exists, right by the Noroton Heights train station,” says Gray.
The local movie theater in town reopened when he was around 10 years old.
“Because we lived close by, it was very easy for me and my brothers to walk down.”
He also rented many movies from the Darien Library.
“We live right behind the old location for the public library, which had a pretty good film collection,” he says.
When Gray was 11, his mother’s college friend who worked in Los Angeles as a location manager, came to visit his family. She explained all the jobs to him in the movie business.
Gray said this was the first time he learned there were other types of jobs aside from acting.
“I didn’t have the patience for writing or directing,” he says. “I wasn’t a great actor.”
However, when the friend described to Gray what a producer does, “at the age of 11, I knew I wanted to do that.”
At 16, Gray went to Los Angeles for the summer and worked as a location scout for “Spanglish,” “Alpha Dog,” “13” and “Envy.”
He later went to Northwestern University in Illinois, graduating with a degree in film.
After moving to Los Angeles, Gray says he focused on getting his foot in the door.
“I took whatever jobs I could, even if they were unpaid,” he said. “I slept on a couch for a year, of very, very generous people.”
He added that the movie business is one that’s “predicated on apprenticeship — paying your dues, working hard finding your way in — and I put that into practice.”
“21 Bridges” is “really well made on a technical aspect,” Gray said, reflecting on his latest credit.
“Everything works well and looks amazing,” he adds. “You will be on the edge of your seat the entire time.”
As a producer, “we tend to focus on story and character first,” he said. “We tried to prioritize characters who felt very real, who feel very much like they have flaws and dealing with moral complexity.”
He has learned how to look at filmmaking as a series of stages.
There’s an “adage in Hollywood that you make a movie three times: writing it, shooting it, and editing it,” he says. “Those are three different movies, and that is the definite case in this one.”
According to Gray, a producer’s job is to help push a movie forward “down the best path possible and then to find the right actors to embody those roles, and to find the right director to realize our shared vision of the movie,” he said. “That’s my job — to guide the process through rewrites and develop and package it around talent.”