GREG STELLEY
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GREG STELLEY

Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
El Cajon CA

Your script stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your
story and why did you write a script instead of a short story or a novel?
The Magic Apples screenplay is based on my true story book: God Inside the Fire,
which was an Amazon KDP best seller after its release in 2012. I felt compelled to write
the book, then the screenplay after my family experienced a mosaic of miracles during
the infamous 2003 Cedar Fire in the mountains above San Diego. Whenever I shared
my story with strangers beginning in 2004, most of them were moved to tears.

How long did it take you to write your script...and what is your writing process? Do
you outline...use index cards...white board...or just start with FADE IN?
My process was backwards from the beginning. I knew I had a one-of-a-kind true
story— An agnostic physicist, a rampaging firestorm, and an Old Testament-sized
miracle, all on one five acre apple ranch—I also knew if I didn’t write the book, then
later, the screenplay, nobody else ever would. This was a story the world needed to
read, so I began trying to write the book in 2008. I e-mailed faith-friendly books
agents and got only one response from Judy Hilsinger: “Is this true?” she wrote.
“Yes Judy, it’s all true.” I replied. “Send me the pdf,” she responded. Since God
Inside the Fire is a true story, I already had real adults and their children to base the
book’s characters on, so with a ghost-writer to guide me, and after countless
rewrites, the book was finished.
Judy shopped it to every major publisher, but no bites. Then she turned to every
major Christian publisher, but I wasn’t a pastor, or a pastor’s son, so no luck. That’s
when I self published and briefly became a best seller, passing ‘Heaven is for Real’
for a time.
Years later, I decided to try my hand at The Magic Apples screenplay. I crafted it as
‘based on a true story’ combining the two families into one to push Grant, the now
fictitious physicist protagonist, into a spectacular hero’s journey never before seen
in a Family, Faith-based, or Natural Disaster genre movie. After years of rewrites,
contest notes, and rewrite help from Jon Beauchemin, a highly talented young
screenwriter, and Mark Sanderson, an extremely helpful Script
Doctor—www.fiveoclockblue.net—the screenplay was ready for the industry.

What is your ultimate ambition as a writer?
To see The Magic Apples movie project completed and available to a vast
worldwide audience—one that is dying of spiritual thirst for a true story filled with
explicit contemporary physical evidence of God’s unchanging power and love.

Was your entry at The Wiki Screenplay Contest a full script or “the first ten pages”?
Why did you make that choice?
The first ten pages, and that could’ve been a mistake. I included the logline on
my title page and got great studio notes on my spectacular Hollywood open-
introducing all the main characters-but my analyst wanted more of the 2nd and
3rd act stories within the logline to somehow be included in my first ten pages.

What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show...and why?
Mary Poppins. I usually can’t stand live action musicals ( I’ve tried to watch West Side
Story for decades, but can’t get through it), but Mary Poppins is ‘practically perfect all
the time’, as she tells us. The music, the evocative lyrics, the flawless casting, the sets,
the story mixing melancholy and sadness, with childhood joy and temporary beauty in a
timeless way, Then, an unexpected kite-flying happy ending. It’s perfect.

What advice do you have for writers hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as
you have?
Your screenplay isn’t finished. You think it is, but you’re wrong. The biggest leap
forward I ever made happened when I hired the right script doctor. Not the $3000.
ones, I mean a working WGA screenwriter with produced movie or TV credits. For me,
that was Mark Sanderson, and it was the best $375 dollars I ever spent. He read my
script four times! Then he worked with me for a full week trading emails to fix all of my
amateur mistakes. Best of all, he really loved my screenplay and he told me why...
Such great encouragement.

What else are you working on that the world needs to know about?
I have a TV pilot about the world of guardian angels who surround and protect us
when we really need them with millisecond precision.

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