{"id":20413,"date":"2013-07-03T10:22:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-03T18:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/?p=20413"},"modified":"2013-08-27T15:01:46","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T23:01:46","slug":"20413","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/?p=20413","title":{"rendered":"Mike Gray, father of a friend."},"content":{"rendered":"
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My life is filled with regrets about the folks I never got to meet: Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, Teddy Roosevelt….I never got to meet my friend Lucas’s father, Mike Gray, a writer, filmmaker and activist, before he passed away last month. Here is his obituary from the NYTimes:<\/p>\n

from the NYTimes<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n


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Mike Gray, a writer and filmmaker who tackled thorny contemporary issues in his work, including race relations in Chicago, American drug policy and, most notably, the safety of nuclear power plants \u2014 the subject of the 1979 film \u201cThe China Syndrome,\u201d for which he wrote the original screenplay \u2014 died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 77.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/a>\"\"<\/a>The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Carol. <\/p>\n

<\/a>Mr. Gray brought an activist\u2019s passion to projects in a variety of formats. He produced a pair of documentaries \u2014 \u201cThe Murder of Fred Hampton\u201d and, with Chuck Olin, \u201cAmerican Revolution 2\u201d \u2014 that examined race, politics and civil turbulence in Chicago in the 1960s. His magazine journalism included articles for Rolling Stone about a heroin overdose epidemic in Plano, Tex., and for GQ about voter fraud.<\/p>\n

He wrote several books, including \u201cAngle of Attack,\u201d which detailed the failings of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the Apollo space program; \u201cDrug Crazy,\u201d about the history of American drug policy, which he characterized as folly from beginning to end; and \u201cThe Death Game,\u201d about capital punishment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Carol.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Mr. Gray brought an activist\u2019s passion to projects in a variety of formats. He produced a pair of documentaries \u2014 \u201cThe Murder of Fred Hampton\u201d and, with Chuck Olin, \u201cAmerican Revolution 2\u201d \u2014 that examined race, politics and civil turbulence in Chicago in the 1960s. His magazine journalism included articles for Rolling Stone about a heroin overdose epidemic in Plano, Tex., and for GQ about voter fraud.<\/p>\n

He wrote several books, including \u201cAngle of Attack,\u201d which detailed the failings of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the Apollo space program; \u201cDrug Crazy,\u201d about the history of American drug policy, which he characterized as folly from beginning to end; and \u201cThe Death Game,\u201d about capital punishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe China Syndrome,\u201d which starred Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, who was also the producer, was a fictional story about a near disaster at a nuclear power plant and the power company\u2019s attempt to cover it up. It was well researched: Mr. Gray did his homework on the potential dangers of nuclear power. But it was also denounced as alarmist by supporters of nuclear power.<\/p>\n

Then, only weeks after the film was released, the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown, allowing a small amount of radioactivity to escape into the atmosphere. To many Americans, the film now seemed prescient.<\/p>\n

Mr. Gray\u2019s screenplay was changed somewhat \u2014 Ms. Fonda\u2019s character, a television news reporter, had been in his version a male documentary filmmaker \u2014 and two co-writers are credited, T. S. Cook and the director, James Bridges.\u00a0Mr. Gray said he had written the script with the idea that in the rush to embrace nuclear power, the potential consequences had not been thought through. But he was, he acknowledged (to his family, at least), a novice at screenwriting.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore he started, he typed out the whole screenplay of \u2018The African Queen\u2019 to teach himself the format,\u201d his wife said. \u201cAnd he wrote the whole thing standing up, because he read somewhere that that\u2019s how Hemingway wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harold Michael Gray was born in Racine, Wis., on Oct. 26, 1935. His father was a traveling salesman, and the family moved to Darlington, Ind., where young Mike grew up. He graduated from Purdue, where he studied aeronautical engineering, and afterward worked in New York as an editor for Aviation Age.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1960s he had moved to Chicago and formed a film company with a partner, making television commercials and documentaries. It was filming the violence during the Democratic National Convention in 1968 that changed the course of his life. Before that, he said, he had defined himself as a Goldwater Republican; afterward he was angry at the status quo.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a small-town Indiana boy,\u201d said his wife, the former Carol Hirsch. \u201cHe was really transformed. He was motivated by injustice. That\u2019s how he described himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Gray wrote a science fiction film, \u201cWavelength,\u201d which was released in 1983, and produced and wrote episodes of \u201cStarman,\u201d a short-lived science fiction series, in the mid-1980s. He later produced episodes of \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1982, in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, Mr. Gray and Ira Rosen recapitulated the event in a book, \u201cThe Warning.\u201d After his book \u201cDrug Crazy\u201d was published in 1998, Mr. Gray became an activist on behalf of drug-policy reform, appearing at conferences and serving as the chairman of Common Sense for Drug Policy, an advocacy group.<\/p>\n

Mr. Gray\u2019s first marriage ended in divorce. So did his second, to the former Ms. Hirsch, whom he married in 1968, divorced in 1986 and married again in 1996. He is also survived by a brother, Dudley, and a son, Lucas.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe used to say, \u2018We got a divorce but it didn\u2019t work out,\u2019\u00a0\u201d his wife said.<\/p>\n

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You can preview some of his work here:<\/p>\n

The Organizer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The Murder of Fred Hampton<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My life is filled with regrets about the folks I never got to meet: Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, Teddy Roosevelt….I never got to meet my friend Lucas’s father, Mike Gray, a writer, filmmaker and activist, before he passed away last month. Here is his obituary from the NYTimes: from the NYTimes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1392,1393,1394],"class_list":["post-20413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-mike-gray","tag-mike-gray-activist","tag-mike-gray-china-syndrom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20413"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23235,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20413\/revisions\/23235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}