J.B. White: Writing for Fun & Profit

J.B. White may best be known to Ojai residents as the leader of the Ojai's house band, The Household Gods, but he's a successful screenwriter with a long list of credits, including the Hallmark Film, "Get Me To The Wedding On Time," which will be released later this summer. As a multi-genre writer, he's also adapted a Peter Benchley book, "The Beast," and written the horror film, "House of Frankenstein." Among his recent credits for Hallmark Channel are "A Christmas Miracle For Daisy," "The Christmas Ornament," and "The National Tree." He didn't start out to be a screenwriter, dropping out of Stanford (where he was friends with theater major Sigourney Weaver) to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter. We go deep into the sausage-making of the movie business, where J.B. jokes that if you "strip away the tinsel, you'll find more tinsel." He's having a second wind with Hallmark Channel as it moves away from its strict diet of romantic comedies. J.B.'s mother-daughter story, "The Goodbye Quilt," for example, which he first pitched eight years ago, has been purchased by them. "Big Sky River," a modern romance novel set in Montana, which he also wrote eight years and which the channel tossed him off the project, is also now back in development. After working on the East Coast in the legal trade, he decided to make the leap into screenwriting by writing piles of spec scripts, before a serendipitous turn landed him an agent. He moved to the West Coast in 1993 and soon after moved to Ojai to raise his children with his artist-wife Elizabeth. After writing a script that Andy Griffith liked, he turned that into a flourishing career as a go-to writer with NBC.  We also talked about the music business, "The Matrix," "The Walking Dead," and Ojai's post-pandemic hangover. We did not talk about Babe Ruth's final game, Stanley Kubrick's innovations in camera lens or birthplace of the Indo-European languages.