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The Winner: Who is this guy Pete Jones?
It seems a simple story. Boy meets girl in elementary school. Girl and boy have an innocent crush. Boy asks girl to prom. Boy and girl get married after college, and start a family. Boy wins a national screenwriting contest and receives $1 million to direct his script for Miramax Films.
Pete Jones' "arrival" into Hollywood is anything but simple, but his passions, writing and family, have been clear to him for a long time. So how did a health insurance salesman from Deerfield, IL who married his high school sweetheart end up directing Hollywood actors in a Miramax film? With a good script, a great wife, and a touch of luck.
The 31 year-old Jones grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, in a large Irish Catholic family, and just a few blocks from a young girl named Jenny Mandel. The couple met in elementary school, but waited until they were a little older, 10th grade, to start dating.
"It was like a six-year courtship, but we have been together ever since," said Pete, a good-natured guy with a boyish face and red hair. Pete and Jenny married in 1996.
After high school, Pete enrolled at the University of Missouri, where he declared himself a journalism major. He worked as a weekend sports reporter his senior year. Pete admits, "I wanted to be the next Bob Costas."
After graduating, Pete had trouble finding decent work as a reporter. "The jobs were either in G-d forsaken places like Billings, Missouri for $15,000 a year, or the station managers thought I looked like I was twelve. At one interview, I was asked if I was there for the high school internship. I knew then that I did not have a face for television."
So, failing to find work as a reporter, Pete took a job as a highly paid corporate health insurance salesman in Chicago. Life was good for the Jones family with a house in the 'burbs, food on the table, and the promise of many children for all the nearby grandparents to spoil.
But Pete had an itch that needed scratching, an itch that resurfaced when he and Jenny went to see Ed Burns' "The Brothers McMullen," in 1995, the story of an Irish Catholic family that turns to one another in the face of life's challenges.
"I remember telling Jenny, 'Ed Burns stole my life.' Her only response was, 'The only difference between you and Ed Burns is that Ed Burns has balls.'
Where we are from, an honest living and a big family is what you do, and there is nothing wrong with that. But I had other passions."
A year later, Pete quit his comfortable sales job, wrote a screenplay and a "Seinfeld" spec script, and Jenny and Pete were on their way to California. "I wish I could say that I came home one night and said, 'Honey, pack the car, we're going California. Really, it was Jenny who encouraged me."
The two drove out to Los Angeles, where Jenny resumed her career as a schoolteacher, and Pete, now in his late twenties, took a job as a production assistant for a set of reshoots for the film, "Primary Colors."
"I stood over [director] Mike Nichols' shoulder for seven weeks, and that was my film school. In fact, one day, I was standing right behind him, so taken in by what I was watching, I did not notice John Travolta waiting for me to move out of the way so he could talk to the director."
From there, Pete continued to toil around as a PA, until he landed a job as a researcher for "The Roseanne Show." When not on the clock, Pete would write, and spend time with his family. Pete and Jenny welcomed their first daughter Molly, in 1999.
But Pete had few connections in Hollywood, and felt himself going nowhere fast, having taken only a handful of meetings in two years. One day in mid-July of 2000, he offered Jenny an ultimatum: Pete would quit his day job and write full-time for one year. If nothing has happened after one final, serious shot at this, they would return to Illinois, and he would go back to selling health insurance.
"By not working, Jenny and I were about to go into serious debt. I contacted my old company [in Chicago], and they offered to advance me money against my salary until I went back to work for them. I turned them down.
So I became a stay-at-home dad with kid in daycare."
A few months into his stint as a writer on unpaid leave, Pete got wind of a screenwriting contest that was being conducted online. "ESPN.com was the extent of my experience with the Internet, but friends were calling me and saying, 'you're a loser, you have nothing else going on, this contest is perfect for you."
Incidentally, Pete had been working on a small screenplay, set in 1970's Chicago, about a young Irish Catholic boy named Pete, who tries to get his dying Jewish friend admitted to heaven. Within a few weeks, Pete had finished "Stolen Summer," and had submitted it to Project Greenlight.
"I always thought the first step, making the top 250, would be the most difficult. After that, the contest felt less arbitrary, and I thought I would have a better chance."
Indeed, the Project Greenlight community responded favorably to Pete's script, as did Miramax and LivePlanet executives, and Pete found himself, Jenny, Pete's brother, at the Top Ten weekend in Los Angeles last February.
"By that time, I was exhausted with everything, and also resigned to the fact that this was my last shot. If it didn't happen for me, I would still return to Chicago feeling good."
On the final night of deliberations, all three finalists were called separately into the "jury room" for a round of 11th hour questioning. Like a man with nothing to lose, Pete walked in and sat across from some very powerful Hollywood decision-makers. Bleary eyed and nearly on the brink of insanity, Pete gave an impassioned plea for the jury to do the right thing by picking the very best script, not the best ending to their little contest. The jury members looked on speechless.
Deep into that same night and just months before he and his wife would pack up and return to the Midwest, Pete Jones received word that, in fact, he was the winner, the one chosen to direct his own screenplay for $1 million.
For now, Pete and Jenny can keep the winter coats packed away; there is no plan to return to Chicago.
"I never saw this as an opportunity to just win a contest, but a starting point for a career in films."
Time will tell if Pete has the staying power of a successful Hollywood director. But one thing is clear, if Pete is able to put the same passion and resiliency into his films as he has in jumpstarting this new stage of his life, audiences are likely to respond.
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