Check Out Ryan Manley’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Manley.

Hi Ryan, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and I’ve been obsessed with movies for as long as I can remember. As early as two I’d sit with my face to the screen watching movies like The Lion King, Star Wars, and Batman Returns over and over. Rewinding them the second they ended. Mars Attacks! was one of the first movies I saw in theaters and afterward, my dad explained to me that people wrote movies like this for a living, it was called screenwriting.

From that moment on, I knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. LA was always going to be my destination. I listened to commentary tracks constantly as a kid and took notes. I found scripts that were stuck in development hell for years online and read them. I had subscriptions to magazines like Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and Wizard. I buried my face in comic books. All of this was my version of pre-film school. The thinking was that if I study and hone my craft as a kid, by the time I get to college to learn about writing it will just be reaffirmation of what I already know. I took over a decade of studying and wrote my first movie when I was fourteen. Then I wrote another, and another, etc. They weren’t great right away but my rule was that no matter what I had to finish them. Because eventually if I kept at it they would be. I still have them all and plan to make them one day.

I went to Shippensburg University where I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in English with a Concentration in Writing. While there, I was a writer and editor of Shippensburg University Magazine. Interviewing people around campus, going to events, getting scoops, and writing articles, I felt like the real Lois Lane! Through that, I was able to be published for the first time. It was the most eyes I’d ever had on my writing and it felt like the culmination of years of hard work. Writing for a magazine taught me a lot about knowing your audience and how to skew your writing accordingly.

Then in 2017, I won Best Drama at the Oaxaca Film Festival with my feature screenplay called Sleepy Little Town. The title has since been changed to The Real Her. The logline is,

A young teenage girl tries to balance hiding her superpowers at school and her sexual orientation at home; she spends so much time living a double life she wonders when the world will ever get the chance to see the real her.

After the win, one of the judges who read it called to tell me everything he loved about it. He felt I was really talented and asked if I had other scripts of the same quality. When I told him I had a bunch of them, he recommended that I move to Los Angeles ASAP. His exact words were, “You have more great stuff like this, and it’s just sitting on your laptop? If you want to make it, you need to start seriously planning the move to LA.”

This was already the plan since I was a little boy, but his words gave me that last five percent I needed to put it into action. I started saving up and I made that dream a reality when I moved here three and a half years ago in 2019.

I went to as many networking events as I could after landing and soon found work at Kolorful Kids Productions. I met the producer at an industry event and we hit it off. I wrote TV pilots for them for three months and learned a lot about receiving and applying notes.

A month later, I wrote a pilot for Digital Wizards Studios. That gig came about the same way, hit it off with a producer at an event. Through that, I received my first-ever screenwriting check on February 27, 2020. It’s a day I’ll always remember, I still have the check and will never get rid of it. After over twenty years of chasing the dream, I could finally say I was a paid screenwriter. I still get chills thinking about it. Through both gigs, I learned a lot about executing the vision of others, something that’s crucial in the world of TV writing. There is no greater joy than a producer coming to you with an idea and then seeing their face when the finished product lines up with exactly how they imagined it.

More recently, last month I had the honor of speaking at the Candyman 30th Anniversary Panel at the TCL Chinese Theatre alongside two other very talented black creators, Ivotres Littles and Matthew S. Robinson. Like so many other movie lovers, I grew up watching actors be immortalized with their hand and footprints in cement outside. So being able to speak at such an iconic place was very surreal. While this may sound like the end of a journey that started a long time ago, I’m just getting started.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has definitely not been a smooth road. One writing job does not guarantee the next and there can be a long time between gigs. Then there’s the possibility that projects you pour your soul into are never made. For instance, all of the pilots I wrote for Kolorful Kids Productions and Digital Wizards Studios never got made. At the end of the day, it’s for the studios to decide if your project gets picked up. When that doesn’t happen, it’s like all the wind being let out of your sails at once. You ask yourself if the last few months you spent on the project were worth it. But that’s just the nature of this business. You have to dust yourself off and not carry that into your next project. Because at the end of the day, you’re only as good as your last script.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Right now I am making the short film version of my Oaxaca Film Festival-winning script, The Real Her, with my producing partner Chay Crumble. Chay has worked on Don’t Worry Darling, Cobra Kai, and The Shrink Next Door.

The Real Her has been a passion project of mine for years but it took until now to assemble the right team to make it. We are currently looking different places to secure the funding and hoping to get grants from LGBTQ and African American foundations. After that, we’ll be interviewing different directors and actors and then assemble our crew. Ultimately the goal is to take the film out on the festival circuit to attract distributors. With superhero movies being more mainstream than ever, this premise is a great way to hook the audience initially, but the hope is that by the end they’ll walk away with an important message about the sexual identity they weren’t expecting. In our film you will never see the powers, they’ll only be implied because they are a metaphor for the experiences of a closeted person.

In addition to this, I am helping Chay develop and write a drama series called Whittier Boulevard to pitch. Picture All American meets Vida and that’s our show. It follows a teenage poet growing up in East Los Angeles. With this show, we’ll be tackling the subject matter of intellectualism and how it is viewed in urban communities. We will also touch on the gentrification of one of the most culturally vibrant communities in not only LA but the world. The cruising subculture will also play a big role in Whittier Boulevard. Most importantly, we’ll be examining the school system of the intercity and how its lack of funding can change the entire trajectory of bright students who should have just as bright futures.

We essentially want to pick up the baton where the brilliant Tanya Saracho left off with Vida and explore some similar subject matter but through a male lens. It is our dream for Tanya Saracho to be involved with our show. We understand that we follow in the brave footsteps of her show and what she was able to accomplish with Vida, not just in front of the camera but behind as well with the writer’s room, was groundbreaking in terms of representation. There are 27 countries that make up the Latin diaspora so we want to get rid of the LatinX person as a monolith for good. The same goes for any other minority groups. Representation matters.

So I would say that what sets me apart from others is that I write stories that work on two fronts. If you want to just kick back and watch something light for entertainment’s sake with your popcorn, they completely work that way. But if you want to read between the lines and walk away with something deeper that touches on important sociopolitical issues, they will satisfy you too. I’m able to do both without comprising the other and that’s what I am most proud of. You can change the world with creativity, that’s a true superpower.

What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
What I love most about Los Angeles is that every city feels like a completely different country. I’ve lived in three different parts of LA and the people, food, style of dress, and overall culture were all night and day. I’ve never lived anywhere else like that in my life.

With movie studios and billboards everywhere you turn, your dreams always feel tangible. With so many others also pursuing a career in the entertainment industry, you never feel alone in the fight. There’s always someone to relate to and whether they’re helping you or you’re helping them, the reward feels just as sweet.

Contact Info:

• Twitter: @SuburbanRyan