Interview (Part 2): Brent Delaney

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Brent Delaney wrote the original screenplay “Brownie Mary” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Brent about his creative background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Today in Part 2 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Brent talks about the real-life inspiration for his Nicholl-winning screenplay “Brownie Mary.”

Scott: “Brownie Mary” is the Nicholl‑winning script. Let’s dig into it because it’s a terrific story. I’d never heard of it. It’s strange. I’ve lived in California half my life, even Northern California, and I’d never heard the story before.

Logline. “At the height of the AIDS crisis, Mary Jane Rathbun, illegally distributes cannabis‑infused brownies to heal thousands of gay men in San Francisco and inadvertently becomes the face of the first medical marijuana movement in US history.”

How did you stumble on or find, or maybe even you knew all along, this real‑life individual, Mary Jane Rathbun?

Brent: Yeah, it was a confluence of events, actually, because I grew up with gay uncles who introduced me to the history of queer culture when I was a kid. It was wonderful. And so, I’d heard about Brownie Mary while growing up, but I was reintroduced to her story when my fiancé, Lana, was working in the cannabis industry and reminded me of it.

Scott: I guess that she would be something of an icon in the cannabis industry, right?

Brent: Yeah. Very much so.

Scott: I always talk to my students when they first come up with a story concept before they launch into it and say, “OK, we get the kind of green light to go ahead and write it.” I always ask this question, what’s your emotional connection to the story?

You’ve got to have some passion or emotional connection to the material, I think, to be able to get through it. You’ve got your two uncles that you’re familiar with, your fiancé that works in the industry. Beyond that, was there another thing, another dimension to it that really sparked your emotional resonance with the material?

Brent: Yeah, I think the moment when I really knew the story had to be told was when I read a particular quote by Dennis Peron, who said that Mary Jane had lost her child but adopted every kid in San Francisco as her own. That was the main emotional component to it, the spine of the story, the overarching theme.

And I realized that the theme of treating others as family resonates both on an emotional level, but also on a philosophical level. It’s an idea, I think, that needs to be continually updated from generation to generation. What if we treated everyone around us as family? That, to me, is a profound idea. It’s a way of life.

Scott: Dennis Peron’s comments that she lost her child and adopted all these other people, that’s a character arc right there, isn’t it?

Brent: Yeah. What I noticed, too, and what I look for when evaluating stories, is an inherent contradiction in the protagonist. Mary Jane lost her child and was faced with the exact opposite of what she wanted: to see young kids dying all around her. That’s one of the great things about Pixar’s storytelling. They always seem to find that contradiction between want and need.

In Mary Jane’s case, that’s her character arc. She wants to protect herself after losing her only daughter by closing herself off to the world, but what she needs is to face her grief through caring for the young, vulnerable people who are dying from AIDS around her.

Scott: There’s obviously that direct emotional, philosophical connection to it, but Hollywood has a long history of movies featuring real life underdog figures taking on the system, like Norma Rae, Silkwood, Erin Brockovich, Milk to name a few.

When you were considering this, did you ever put on your producer’s hat and say, “Well, this might be something that could appeal to people in Hollywood because it does seem like there’s a track record here.”

Brent: Yeah. I’d like to think I put my producer hat on more now, but at that particular time, I just really wanted to write her story, to be honest. I generally operate with the mindset, “one for them, one for me,” and this one was for me.

In fact, I thought a political activist story would be a much harder sell. And it’s a period piece. So, it seems like a much tougher movie to get made than a genre piece, for example. For that reason, even with my producer hat on, I think I took more of a risk than anything. [laughs]

Scott: Often, adapting these real‑life characters, that’s a challenge because you’re trying to find the arc. I remember reading an interview with screenwriter Akiva Goldsman who adapted A Brilliant Mind. He read the book and he thought, it was perfect three‑act structure: Genius, Madness, Redemption.

With “Brownie Mary,” you’ve got the Protagonist’s character arc you could lean into. Did that give you some comfort as a writer that you knew where the story was going to go?

Brent: Yeah, I thought it fit the three-act structure from the outset. Mary Jane started out without a family, helped a community, and then gained a new family.

Of course, there were parts of the historical record that I had to freely adapt to make the story work. For example, Jonathan West’s character had to be included in the 1970s, when in fact he wasn’t Dennis’s partner until the 1980s. That way, Mary Jane and Jonathan could build a relationship over the course of the entire story, so that Jonathan comes to represent all of the young people who died — Mary Jane’s ‘kids’.

Here is the video where the 2023 Nicholl Fellows found out their scripts had been selected as winners.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Brent delves deep into the key characters in “Brownie Mary.”

For Part 1, go here.

Brent is repped by Range Media Partners.

Twitter / X: @Brent__Delaney

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.