Danny Strong (Getty Images)
We were at the Four Seasons during The Observer’s 25th anniversary party, when a colleague pointed to a short, slightly nebbishy-looking man standing among notables like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Katie Holmes and Spike Lee.
“I know that guy,” he said. “Where do I know that guy from?”
We suggested various TV shows, including Mad Men, but nothing stuck. “No, I think I know that guy, like, from real life,” said our co-worker. Perhaps he did. The matter was almost dropped when Harvey Weinstein came barreling up to our subject.
“Danny,” he said. “Look, I really need to talk to you.” The two walked off together, with Mr. Weinstein’s giant paw dwarfing the other man’s shoulder.
If anything, the whole ordeal left our colleague even more confused about who this guy was, why he looked so familiar and why one of Hollywood’s biggest producers would require a meeting with him in the middle of a party.
Not that it’s unusual for Danny Strong, 39, to get recognized; he played supporting characters on cult shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls and Mad Men, even if only in a “hey, that guy!” way. But while playing scenes against ’90s-era Sarah Michelle Gellar might get a person mobbed at Comic Con, the same can’t necessarily be said for a person who is an Emmy-winning screenwriter for the HBO adaptations of Game Change and Recount; has penned the new Oprah-Forest Whitaker vehicle, Lee Daniels’ The Butler; and is finishing future installments of The Da Vinci Code and Hunger Game franchises.
Yet as Mr. Weinstein’s actions will attest, Mr. Strong is one of the most in-demand writers in Hollywood at the moment—a moment for which he couldn’t be more perfectly positioned.
Recently The New York Times came out with a trend story about the moneymaking successes of “next-wave nonfiction,” proclaiming that “reality-based narratives” were on the upsurge once again. One only has to look at A-listers like Ashton Kutcher playing Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks playing Captain Richard Phillips (the Navy SEAL who was captured by the Somalian pirates) and Benedict Cumberbatch dying his hair blond to become Julian Assange—or anything that Aaron Sorkin has directed in the past two years, for that matter.
In 2012, Mr. Strong helped HBO dominate the awards field with the movie Game Change, directed by Jay Roach and based on a portion of a nonfiction book about the 2008 presidential campaign that the network optioned before Mark Halperin and John Heilemann had actually written it.
Danny Strong in Mad Men and Buffy (insert).
“There’s always that fear that somebody is going to take your work and well ... you know how Hollywood people can be,” Mr. Heilemann, who fondly referred to Mr. Strong as “the angry jockey,” explained. “But Danny treated our story as the assignment and then went out and did his homework.”
“He’s a real journalist,” Mr. Roach recalled, noting that it’s not unusual for the writer to spend six months to a year researching and chatting up sources. “During Recount, he’d be interviewing senators, I don’t want to say which ones, and he’d be correcting them about the facts.
“Not in a mean way,” the director quickly added. “He just needed to know what they were thinking at the time.”
When it came time for the duo to work together again on Game Change, that lack of meanness (of taking the easy, cruel joke) worked in Mr. Strong’s favor. “For Palin, he didn’t want to do the Tina Fey thing, because Tina Fey already did it,” Mr. Roach said. “He went out and interviewed everyone who had interacted with her on the campaign that was willing to talk to him about what she was like—everyone. And what he came back with was this portrait of a woman put in a situation that was like an anxiety nightmare: having to cram to go against Joe Biden with only a couple weeks’ training. I couldn’t do that. I don’t know anyone who could do that.”
In fact, there’s a heartbreaking scene in Game Change when Sarah Palin (played by Julianne Moore) watches Tina Fey’s impression of her with a shell-shocked expression, which is why it would be a mistake to confuse Danny Strong’s writing with reporting. The biggest bylines at The New York Times would have a hard time creating this kind of compassionate stories about their subjects. The reason for going out and doing months of sourcing is less about his finding out the facts—being a voracious political junkie, he already knows them—and more to do with his drive to find out what these people feel as they become part of history, if only as a footnote.
“I spent so many years as a working actor, keeping employed with plays, working on TV shows,” Mr. Strong told The Observer over breakfast in the West Village. “Now I’m coming at [scripts] from a perspective of going through the material in terms of character, how to make the dialogue work for an actor.”
Still, it’s hard to imagine that Lee Daniels’ The Butler wasn’t a new kind of challenge. The film is based on a 2008 Washington Post story of White House butler Eugene Allen, a black man who worked in the White House in eight administrations and spent the majority of his life—and the entire civil rights era—cleaning up after the most important white men in the country. It’s the kind of difficult story that is neither heartwarming nor necessarily of interest, at least on the surface. Even when Wil Haygood wrote the profile of Allen in 2008 (the year Obama won election to become the first black president of the United States), he declared his subject to be “a story from the back pages of history. A figure in the tiniest of print. The man in the kitchen.”
It took Mr. Strong eight months to write the first draft of a fictionalized account of the real-life Allen, who passed away between the time of the original article and The Butler. After four years of labor, the result is a movie that’s so instantly recognizable in spirit that both its star Forest Whitaker and several critics have begun referring to it as “the black Forrest Gump.” That had to be a daunting prospect for a white Jewish man from Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Mr. Strong maintains that race issues played no factor in his decision to take the project. “The only hesitancy I had is the same hesitancy I have with everything I ever write,” Mr. Strong explained. “Which is panic, fear—oh my God, how am I going to do this?”
Though Mr. Strong admits racial tension was an important element of the film, he said he was more interested in portraying “the totality of the family experience.” Which is a long way from where he was at when he started shopping scripts in his late 20s. By then, he’d established a solid reputation as an offbeat character actor by appearing in everything from Seinfeld to 3rd Rock from the Sun and Pleasantville.
“In some ways, [the writing] was almost like a hobby to help me deal with the pressures of an acting career,” he said. There was interest in his romantic comedies—“vehicles for myself, really” —and it got him a manager but not a deal. By the time he had his fourth script, he was fed up. “I had this sort of mini breakdown when I was probably 30 because that’s when one does these sorts of things.” A lifelong California boy, Mr. Strong moved to New York to get serious.
“I had this kind of life epiphany moment,” he said. “I was looking at all the scripts on my shelf, and I thought, What am I doing wrong? And then it hit me: none of these movies are movies I would go see. I’m not writing anything that interests me personally. I made a declaration to myself: I’m not going to write anything until it’s a movie I would actually go see.”
So what DID Mr. Strong want to see in movies? Even he wasn’t sure, until watching a performance of David Hare’s Stuff Happens, about the buildup to the Iraq war. The experience was, as they say, a game changer.
Mr. Strong came out of the theater with a conviction that he should be writing about politics. “He came into my office with a plastic toy version of a voting machine,” recalled Len Amato, president of HBO Films. That kind of showmanship and confidence, combined with Mr. Strong’s extensive knowledge on the subject, convinced Mr. Amato to look at the kid’s script, titled Recount. And boy, is he glad he did.
“I can’t say enough amazing things about him,” said Mr. Amato, who is not the only big name to have gambled on Danny Strong only to find himself with a winning horse (or jockey).
“Danny is just one of those true friends,” said Gilmore Girls creator and executive producer Amy Sherman-Palladino, who offered Mr. Strong a role in her highly rated Emmy-winning show in 2003 (without an audition, mind you). “It’s amazing that he’s not too big that he’s still accepting my phone calls.’
Mr. Heilemann said it’s no secret that he’d love to work with Mr. Strong and Mr. Roach on HBO’s adaptation of the next book he is co-writing with Mr. Halperin, for which the network has once again optioned the rights, sight unseen.
But perhaps the biggest testament to Danny Strong’s abilities comes from a former video store clerk who worked at the avant-garde rental place in his neighborhood. The “spazzy guy who loved movies” singled out a 9-year-old Mr. Strong to gift with his encyclopedic knowledge of films. It was at this man’s feet that young Danny learned about the ’70s classics of famous directors like Hitchcock and Kazan, where he first saw Chinatown and Prince of the City. When Year of the Dragon came out to his idol’s rave review, 10-year-old Danny Strong got himself kicked out of the R-rated feature three times trying to sneak in to see it.
It got so bad that people started calling Mr. Strong the “little” version of his hero video clerk.
In January after Game Change won its Golden Globes, Mr. Strong went to some post-party event where another award winner was holding court: the former video store clerk.
“‘You people don’t get it, okay?’” Mr. Strong recalled the inimitable Quentin Tarantino yelling at the assembled crowd, from which the Django Unchained director had singled him out. “‘This is Little Quentin, all right? Little Quentin just won a Golden Globe! Okay?’