Coffee Roaster, Screenwriter, Enthusiast At Large

If you’re reading this, you probably know me. Perhaps you bought coffee from me. Perhaps we worked on a show together. Perhaps you landed here after a game of Substack hopscotch. However you arrived, welcome. I don’t know how often I’ll post. There’s a real possibility that I’ll never write again. Don’t get too attached.

Now more about me—in some detail.

I grew up in Los Angeles and went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, where I majored in Art History (ha!). At eighteen, I started acting. My biggest role was in Donnie Darko—I played Gyllenhaal’s best friend

By the end of college, I wanted to be a screenwriter, which is a sensible goal only when your other career prospects pertain to Art History. It took me five years to write something half-decent and five more to make half-a-buck. I’ve sold shows, had a movie produced, and written for a couple of streaming series, most recently “Cross” on Amazon Prime. I’ve got thoughts about screenwriting, filmmaking, and storytelling, so I’ll use this space to jot them down, but I’m also going to focus quite a bit on my other career.

See, I’m also a coffee roaster.

It was Covid. I was bored. I’d been roasting my own coffee for ten years. I had a drum roaster, and I’d even hired some of the world’s foremost coffee consultants to give me private lessons. The passion was bananas, but not so Chiquita as to be consequential until a certain spike protein iced the world over. With no way to get coffee, friends started asking me to roast them bags. They told their friends that there was a guy roasting in his backyard, and I started getting texts. ”Hey, is this Gary? I hear you roast coffee. Can I get some?” I began dropping sharpie-scrawled bags on doorsteps across Los Angeles, and soon enough, I gathered a following that turned into a business called My Friend’s Coffee.

The stuff I roast tends to be third wave, which is a pretentious way of saying it’s light, single-origin, and best enjoyed in a fedora. Occasionally, it tastes fruity (Ethiopia). Occasionally, chocolatey (Guatemala). Tannic (Kenya). Spice-laden (Yemen). The business is a side-project, and my schedule makes it difficult to maintain, but I keep it up because I love it. More to the point, the people who buy my coffee seem to love it, and for a screenwriter, satisfied patrons are a rarity.

This Substack will serve as a forum to discuss coffee—what I’m roasting, what I’m drinking, origin trips, etc. I’ll weigh in on whether you should put faith in Instagram pour over recipes—a short post titled, “No”—and whether grind size ought to be your first adjustment for flavor corrections—a long post titled, “No.” If you are a coffee geek, it should feel like home.

So, coffee and screenwriting—those are my careers. But every now and again, I entertain the idea that people are more than their jobs (a fleeting thought with very little grip). I may dip into hobbies and interests including meditation, martial arts, live fire cooking, music, and food glorious food. If discipline fails me, I may even wade into politics. I’ll do my best to make it interesting, with an up-front pledge that I will never delve into anything more personal than the odd accounting of my prostate health.

So, there’s post one. Hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you’ll continue reading if I continue writing, which I hope I do. At the very least, this stuff might be an interesting thing for my kids to read one day.