James Gunn's Weird-Ass Toy-Obsessed First Novel

Woven together with that are stories from "James Gunn"'s childhood?his friends, his dysfunctional family, his superhero fantasies, his increasingly antisocial behavior?as well as contemporary stories from his life outside the toy collecting world, which mostly consist of disastrous affairs, drugs, alcohol and violence.

It's one of those novels that's at turns funny as hell, heartbreaking, grim, bitter, even terrifying. And then funny as hell again.

Gunn was born in St. Louis in 1970, the oldest of six children. He dropped out of college to play with his band, the Icons, worked as a hospital orderly, finally got his BA and moved to New York to attend Columbia. While there, he began working on his novel?and began working at Troma, where he wrote and acted in Tromeo and Juliet and went on to cowrite Lloyd Kaufman's autobiography. After what he describes as "a spiritual awakening" at Cannes at few years ago, he quit Troma and moved to L.A., where he wrote the screenplays for The Specials and the live-action versions of Spy vs. Spy and Scooby-Doo. He's currently working on a romantic comedy called The Newlyweds.

Given the number of parallels?his protagonist's name, the fact that his protagonist works as an orderly, the fact that Gunn himself collects robots?I asked him how autobiographical he considers the novel.

"For me, everything in there is true in one way or another of something about myself," he said. "So I think the book is emotionally true. However, there's a lot of fictitious stuff in there."

He did admit, however, that most of the characters were based on real people. His little brother in the novel, Tar (who can cry on cue), was based on his real brother Patrick (now vice president of Artisan Entertainment).

"I'm somewhat self-aware," he told me, "but I swear to God, I didn't think that The Toy Collector was autobiographical at all when I was writing it. I thought I was making it up. But since then, it's a very strange experience to all of a sudden have all these people writing me letters, saying, 'My God, that was this time, wasn't it?' or saying, 'God, you captured yourself so perfectly.' I thought I was writing a much more asshole version of myself."

I asked why he thought he, his characters and so many other adults carry with them this?what some might call unhealthy?obsession with the pop culture of their youth.

"I think it's a really normal thing," he told me. "We were pretty much left to our own devices [as kids], and most of our cultural education came from television and Alice Cooper records. That's where I learned how to be an adult... I think in the book, James' religion is his past?the time before high school. His vision of what's a perfect world is childhood. So those toys are like the sacred objects of that religion."

Although he came to New York specifically to become a novelist, Gunn says The Toy Collector just sort of happened after several other attempted novels had been aborted.

"I started writing these prose poems. Very, very short little prose poems. They were, for the most part, things from my life with my friend Bill and my girlfriend at the time, and different things that would happen on the streets of New York. They were very strict in terms of how I went about creating them?which I found to be a real opening experience for me, in terms of a super-minimalist style."

As time went on, however, and he kept writing the prose poems, he found that they were becoming increasingly long.

"They ended up being huge stories," he said. "[And] at the beginning, toys had nothing to do with them. At some point, the toy stuff started coming in, and I remember?it was the first chapter, 'The Greatest Toy in the World'?that's when I started writing about the toys."

Five years later, after arranging, rearranging, revising and rewriting hundreds, even thousands, of those poems, The Toy Collector finally came out to rave reviews on the West Coast and in national magazines?but to an unearthly silence around New York. There were virtually no reviews, no mention of the book in any local publication.

Perhaps it didn't matter much?Gunn is philosophical about the silence, the book still sold?and besides, by that time, he had already found himself an in-demand Hollywood screenwriter.

"I don't like being a screenwriter," Gunn admits. "I never planned on being simply a screenwriter. It gets kind of repetitive. I like writing screenplays, but to be only a screenwriter would be a very uncomfortable thing, I like screenwriting insofar as I'm able to write a screenplay and then be involved with the film?which is what both Tromeo and Juliet and The Specials were like. Aside from my problems with how the movies came out, those were really pleasant experiences for me. In terms of being a novelist, that's what I came to New York to do, but I sort of got sidetracked. But I don't differentiate a lot between creating one thing and creating another thing, as long as I'm able to do what I want."

And to a certain degree, working for Warner Brothers has been conducive to that. They gave him a lot of freedom with his first script, Spy vs. Spy. But Scooby-Doo, he says, "is an extremely strange experience, because it's so huge, and people have so much invested in it."

While he would like to write more novels, and hasn't yet made up his mind on the idea of a Toy Collector movie, he says he has to get his current workload out of the way before considering anything new.

"What happened was, I wrote Spy vs. Spy and all of a sudden, everybody liked that script. I was hot, so I went and sold a few other things. Now I'm working on things that I sold a year ago that I'm only getting to now?and keeping my interest up in those things has been difficult. So I'm thinking about completely reorienting myself toward this work and not doing that kind of crap anymore. Just doing what's next."