Tony DuShane: Novelist, Screenwriter, and Podcaster

On being young and penniless in Paris, leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses, and making a life in L.A.

The WGA strike has ended, and writers go back to work today! May the SAG-AFTRA, L.A. Hotel Workers, and UAW strikes be resolved equitably and soon. 🪧

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Tony Dushane and I met in January 2019 when he attended a reading I participated in with two mutual friends—Michael Marcus (#1 Son and Other Stories) and Allan Macdonell (most recent book, Now That I Am Gone: A Memoir Beyond Recall). Punk rocker and writer Jack Grisham (newest book, The Pulse of the World) also read with us that night.

Among the attendees was an elfin guy who worked with Allan at Hustler (Allan’s memoir, Prisoner of X, chronicles his years there). Unprompted, he told me he’d once been married to a porn star. (The porn star’s mother, in a surreal coincidence, was a big fish at the San Francisco Zen Center where my partner Adam lived for a couple of years in the late 1990s).

Once the porn star’s ex left, I had a chance to talk with Tony, a fellow novelist. Since then, over breakfasts often at Loupiotte Kitchen in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood, I’ve gotten to know him better, and as you’ll see from the interview below, he’s an extraordinary guy.

Christine/Bookish: Your first novel, Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk (Soft Skull, 2010), was a critical success (starred review from Publishers Weekly!) and was made into a feature film directed by Eric Stoltz, based on your adaptation for the screen. How did this collaboration come about? 

Tony Dushane: The option ran out with another production company where I was working with them to put together the TV series based on the adult characters. That fizzled, and then I found out Eric was reading my book and looking for a first film to direct. That news alone was the height of my career because I’m a huge fan, and I still say that in the present tense. Once we got revving, we had meetings, he wanted me to write the script, I worked my butt off for a year or so praying that he would still be interested….as I had my previous experience knowing these projects can fizzle any step of the way. So, I’m very lucky it didn’t fizzle and Eric was so utterly gracious and a true storyteller, keeping me on board throughout the process to stay true to the story. It was an honor.

CS: You’re a former Jehovah’s Witness and Confessions chronicles some of your experiences growing up in that church. You found your way to a literary life in spite of the serious constraints placed on JW church members in regard to access to books and other art forms. Another “how” question: How did you manage that?

TD: Good question. The first time I left the JWs I took radio classes at a college radio station and got really involved, though I still believed in the JWs. I was confused, and as a college radio DJ fanatic, I got to work at KFJC, a station I had listened to since I was 15 years old, and meet DJs who were my idols. I had no idea I could just take classes, learn, then put an audio tape together to audition for training, and actually get a time slot.

Then, about a year later, fearing Armageddon would do me in for being such a heathen, I went back to the JWs and they spent many months trying to get me out of working for KFJC, and they finally accomplished that. So I was a full-fledged JW again.

Later, a friend of mine was disfellowshipped from the JWs and killed himself. It gutted me. I was also having suicidal thoughts because my uncle had killed himself a few years earlier, and I didn’t know what to do with the feelings. I asked the elders for help, but they told me that since my friend Gibby was disfellowshipped he was already dead in the eyes of Jehovah. It was like they were mad at me for grieving him. And I had been shamed for grieving other people, and was hanging on with a very thin rope to life, so, instead of going to the Kingdom Hall three nights a week for Bible studies, I went to the library to read psychology books to figure out why I shouldn’t kill myself and how to grieve Gibby, my uncle, and other tragedies.

Tony Robbins books helped me, along with Wayne Dyer. It may sound silly, but it was exactly what I needed. What was interesting was how close the psychology section in the library was to the poetry section, so I sat in the stacks night after night just reading poetry I didn’t understand, and that didn’t really move me, until I read this anthology, which I wish I could find today. I think it was called Black Jazz Poets of the 1920s. 

With those books I also checked out jazz records and played them on my turntable while reading them. Somehow that turned me on to James Baldwin, so the first novel I really read was Giovanni’s Room, and it changed my life. I couldn’t believe the emotions conveyed. I felt spoken to. 

Then next up was Henry Miller. Mind blown again. I started writing in a journal, then one day I found out about this weird thing called a Beat generation, and I read Kerouac, and that’s when I planned a trip to Paris. I had no money, so I ate rice and beans for months and saved up just enough for a plane ticket and crashed on the floors of other JWs, but I wasn’t there to be a missionary or to preach….the story was that I was thinking about it, so when I went to Paris and slept in the corner of two missionaries’ apartment. 

There was only room for a twin bed, so they slept in shifts, one worked nights, and one worked days, and I slept in the corner and without money, just had my Metro card, Carte d’orange, I think it was called back then, and just roamed the city for three weeks, reading Bukowski, Céline, and writing what I thought was brilliant poetry.

When I got back I ended up finding someone in the JWs to marry who was the best fit for me, as a JW, but that’s not a tall order. She allowed me to read worldly literature and wouldn’t tell on me, which was like marrying a Sports Illustrated supermodel in the JWs, so we got married fast, because the elders were still after me to find some reason to disfellowship me, and I knew I couldn’t be disfellowshipped without killing myself–there was no way to handle it. We got married and I told her we needed to do it just to get to know each other, and later we could divorce and I’d get disfellowshipped for it. 

But I got a little more suckered into the belief system again, and it was four years later I told her that I was leaving the JWs and that I was going to write seriously. She freaked out about me leaving, and I was only leaving because I knew something was wrong, I didn’t know what, but I’d read a biography of Che Guevara, and that shifted my reality, because if the United States was that deceptive about slavery in Latin America, and I knew something was deceptive in the JWs, I couldn’t stand down.

Then I started two webzines, one called Cherry Bleeds where me and some friends wrote short stories every week, and one called Filmjunkie, that got me press passes to festivals and interviews. And that’s how Drinks with Tony began around 2001.

Tony Dushane ( credit: Buck Lewis)

CS: Along with being a novelist and screenwriter, you’re the host of the long-running podcast Drinks with Tony, where you interview a different author every week. You also teach screenwriting for UCLA Extension…you’re obviously a busy man and a generous supporter of other writers. How did you learn to write both fiction and screenwriting? Was it from reading a lot and simply starting to put words on the page? Did you take classes? Some combination of the two? 

TD: Drinks with Tony was kind of a fluke. I had college radio experience, and this was 2001, so, I started just reaching out to publishers and my first guest was Chuck Palahniuk. His publicist asked me what the show was for and I said it was a “literary webstream.” I don’t even think podcast was a term yet. Internet disk space was very expensive in those days, but I had friends at Hewlett Packard provide my back end, and we were off and running.

I continued Drinks with Tony as a radio show, sending segments to KFJC for their news hour on Friday nights, then joining Pirate Cat Radio, which was an unlicensed radio station in San Francisco, and pirate radio was all the rage in those days, really serving the community of the Mission District in SF. Pirate Cat dissolved, and I started with Radio Valencia and we broadcast on the same frequency, 88.9 FM. 

I did that until I moved to Los Angeles in 2013 when Jesus Jerk went into production. After Jesus Jerk came out, I felt the emptiness of all of it being over and I was really depressed and I remembered that the last time I was really happy was doing my radio show, and that’s when I started Drinks with Tony as a podcast in 2018, thinking it might work out for about 20 episodes. And here we are and I’m still doing it mostly every week, and it also now airs on Pirate Cat Radio in Santa Cruz under the low power community license actually given by the FCC, so, it runs every Thursday at 6 p.m. and I’m proud to still be a part of that operation.

Oh, writing, I just read everything I could get my hands on. I still do. I feel like I lost years of my life to not reading, so, I read everything, and I write every day. In 2000 I was writing a lot of short stories and reading them at events around San Francisco and Oakland, then booking my own events at bars and nightclubs, and I just continued writing. I took one novel-writing class in San Francisco, and that was after I tried to write a novel that was a total failure about the breakup of a marriage….essentially, I was a prophet on that one. 

After I took the novel class I wrote a short story about preaching with a JW sister that I loved and how our legs would touch in the back seat of the car on the way to the territory where we were preaching. I published that on Cherry Bleeds, probably around 2005, and it felt shameful to be so open about my life as a JW, but, the reaction blew me away, and that’s when I went full steam ahead to craft Jesus Jerk into a novel. Also, there were some just poorly written memoirs coming out on Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time, whiny woe-is-me narratives, and I was bent on writing a contemporary novel that was crafted, entertaining, and then, oh yeah, it also happened to be about JWs and my life.

Before that I took some classes at Film Arts Foundation in San Francisco, just a tourist, dabbling, and I took a screenwriting class where we did a lot of table reads of our scenes. The instructor pulled me aside and said, “You’re fucking talented because you can make the entire class laugh, but you suck at writing scenes.” I was flattered and deflated, but so excited about his honesty, so that’s when I buried my head and just tried to figure out craft, everything I read that moved me I asked myself why it moved me, I annotated books left and right, I also did some standup comedy and sketch writing, so that got my work out to audiences fast, where I bombed and killed, so, that was more like boot camp to keep people engaged.

I should have stayed with standup–it pays more, but my heart and soul are the novel and films.

CS: What are five books and five movies you’d take with you if you were being blasted into space for the next 20 years? 

TD: 

BOOKS: In Search of Lost Time, Proust

The Bible

Secret Teachings of the Ages, Manly P. Hall

Ulysses, James Joyce

The Mahabharata

FILMS: Dekalog, Krzysztof Kieślowski

Apocalypse Now, Coppola

Scenes from a Marriage, Bergman

Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier

2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy

CS: What are you working on now? 

TD: I’m about to turn in my novel Dream Casting to my agent to see if there’s any traction on it. The quick synopsis is: When we die, the afterlife isn’t heaven or hell—it’s working in the subconscious as an actor in the dreams of the living.

I’ve also been working on a novel on the side between rewrites called The Smugs, about a professor who has never read James Joyce, but gets stuck teaching a class on Ulysses, and he just complains about his love life in the lectures, but the students find it a genius deep analysis of male and female identity in Ulysses, when the professor has no clue.

And I have the next two books briefly outlined of Dream Casting—actually more of the series adaptation of the book and what happens beyond the book in season two and three. I spent so much time in this world of dreams and the characters maneuvering as actors in the dreams of the living that there’s much more material to cover.

I’m also working on my mental health once a week with my therapist.

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Tony DuShane is the author and award-winning screenwriter of Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk. The book was published by Soft Skull Press and the feature film, directed by Eric Stoltz, and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. He teaches screenwriting at UCLA Extension and works in story development for screenplays.

His journalism and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Penthouse, The Believer, and other media outlets. DuShane was a music and literary columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 2010 – 2015, and he hosts the weekly author interview podcast Drinks with Tony.

Tony also works as a freelance story consultant: “From idea stage to final draft, I work with clients at all levels of experience. Writing the novel, screenplay, memoir— feel free to get in touch—dushane@gmail.com.” More info at his website: https://www.tonydushane.com/

I also recommend Giulia Corda if you’re looking for notes on a feature film or TV script. Contact: giuliacorda@gmail.com. Giulia has worked as a story analyst for the prestigious Nicholl Fellowships (housed in AMPAS), the Black List, and the Sundance Institute. She is a Fulbright scholar in film, a recipient of a Tribeca feature film award, and has an MFA in screenwriting from USC. She is also currently adapting Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “The Boundary” for the screen.