[Hello everyone!!! My, my, my! It has been a while since I dusted off this blog! Before I get into today’s feature, I need to confess that I did this interview with Guy in September of 2021, and it is now March of 2022 (?????) I am so sorry, y’all. Life, the pandemmy, changing jobs, changing proverbial seasons. It happens. I am so excited to share this chat I had with Guy. He is truly one of a kind and has a heart of gold. Onward!!!]
“I was given 24 hours to live when I was a kid. I had caught encephalitis and by the time they found me, my brain had swollen, I had gone into a coma, and they said, ‘well, he’s probably not going to make it.’”
Guy sits across from me virtually from his home in his beloved state of Louisiana. I first caught wind of Guy when I attended a virtual table read of Southern Fried, his comedy about what it means to come back home.
“I ended up living, and New Orleans became an escape for me. I’ve lived in Miami, Aspen, and a couple of other places, but New Orleans has always been what runs through my veins. All different cultures blend together here, and it creates a really unique place. You see movies all the time that are set in New Orleans, but what they rarely ever do is attempt to capture the reason why people come from all over the world to see the city. I tell people it’s the perfect mixture of history, commerce, and sin.” Guy goes on to detail how after his recovery, he realized his brain had changed.
“Before the incident I was left-handed – completely. And afterwards I did some things left-handed, some things right-handed. It wasn’t ambidexterity. It was like the wiring in my brain got tangled. The one thing that got me out of it was I would sit in front of the TV and rewrite TV shows in my mind. New Orleans saved me in a way because I would travel around, and I didn’t feel as weird because there’s so many different people, so many different types of living, and I was just another weird one – which didn’t make me feel any different at all.”
In the majority of Guy’s writing, there is a supernatural element present. “The veil is thin in New Orleans due to all the waterways, and that makes it easier for the spirit world to swirl around.”
Guy tells me about a historic bar in New Orleans called Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. Jean Lafitte’s was built around 1722 and has a hefty history with the dealings of pirates. It has been argued that this bar is one of the oldest in the history of the United States in use today. Jean used the building as a blacksmith shop while he and his brother Pierre secretly used the building as a front for their rum smuggling operation. They helped to bring goods into the city while avoiding paying tax on the goods. Now a bar, it is famous to the tourist crowd for its “voodoo” grape daiquiri. Guy informs me that after dark, the bar uses no electricity and is candlelit only.
“Many years ago, I was there at Jean Lafitte’s, and it was Marti Gras, it was misty out, probably early morning and this woman came through the door. It felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. All the candles flickered, and as she passed our table, her hand brushed my shoulder. We heard her say, ‘we’re not always on the salt.’ When we turned around, she was gone. It’s a small bar, there was nowhere else she could have gone.”
Jean Lafitte’s is known as one of the most haunted places in the United States, with many people having spotted this female ghost —and Jean Lafitte himself— in the small corners of the bar. This encounter gave Guy inspiration for his now critically acclaimed feature, The Fifelot. This story details the real legends and myths surrounding Jean Lafitte’s treasures.
“Now, to answer your question, what am I working on now? I just finished the second draft of Grave Justice, it’s a one-hour supernatural pilot that takes place in New Orleans, it deals with a cop, a woman, and the world of the supernatural. The crime solvers have help from spiritual beings on the other side. It’s either justice in this world, or justice in the next. It features places like Voodoo Alley.” Once during a pitch, Guy has received the question, “why are the people in New Orleans not afraid of the ghosts?” He had a good answer:
“If you sell real estate here, when you post the listing, you have to note if the place is haunted or not. People here accept that, it’s a part of the life. If a person here ever sees a ghost, it does not come with much paranoia or fear, no one’s freaking out or anything. It’s just how it is.”
Guy used to be a “cube farmer” at a fortune 500 company. Never having heard of cube farming myself, I asked what that was. I assumed it was some sort of new cryptocurrency or something. I can never keep up with all the new forms of investment management these days!
“I call it cube farming because if you look at those executive office floors, you will see cubicle after cubicle down the row. To me that always reminded me of a farm where you see rows and rows of crops.” After a lifelong series of close to death incidents, Guy decided he wanted to finally pursue his lifelong dream of being a writer.
“A few years ago, I was involved in a car wreck, and they had to cut me out of the car and I woke up in the hospital. I said to myself ‘I don’t know how many lives I have left.’ I am going to do this, and I’m going to go all in, I’m not going to play around with this. And it’s been so fun, I’ve met a lot of amazing people on this journey. The WRAC Group I interact with on Twitter, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for them in 2017. The first industry contact I ever had was from through the WRAC List.” The WRAC Group is an online screenwriting support group that helps members reach goals throughout the year. WR is short for writer and AC is short for accountability. At the end of each year, the completed works are compiled into a PDF and then distributed.
Guy has also been featured on The Bitch List, a list of screenplays that pass the Bechdel Test (to pass this test, two women in a movie scene must be in conversation with each other talking about something other than a man. It’s more difficult to pass this test than you’d think…) Guy has had people reach out to him solely on the fact that he is a man who writes women characters with integrity and purpose. Guy was the only male identifying writer to have a script place on The Bitch list in 2020.
In his comedy Southern Fried, the story deals with the protagonist coming back home from the big city and her trepidations about introducing her girlfriend to her small-town southern family. “People ask me, ‘how did you come up with a story about two women like that? You’re a straight white dude.’” Guy laughs as he explains that his youth spent running around New Orleans showed him that there are multiple ways to live your life, and each of them are beautiful and should be universally accepted.
“People are people, love is love. It’s not unnatural for me to bring these types of people into my work because they are already a part of my world. One of the first things I did when I wrote Southern Fried was reach out to the LGBTQIA+ community. I said, ‘Here, read it. Tell me if it’s OK or if it’s full of shit. I was amazed at the generosity of the feedback I received.’” We concluded our conversation talking about diversity in film and what we need to do to get more voices heard.
“I write what I want to see. When I see award shows like the Emmy’s, when they show the studio heads, they’re all white. If we allow more of our stories to reflect the world we see today, the more diversity will show up on the screen, behind the camera, and in the executive offices. Where I come from, there is this gumbo of people from all walks of life all around, but for others, they may come from a place that isn’t so diverse. Where I am from, you can’t avoid it. Where I grew up, it not about how much money you make, it’s about how you treat your neighbor.”
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