AFI CRITICS PUT EX-CON ON HOT SEAT AT SCRIPT READING

Some members of the audience said afterward that they didn’t understand the motivation of the killer. Others felt that the supernatural elements at the finale detracted from the psychological suspense of the central story. A couple of people mentioned the laughs that had erupted at inappropriate moments.

But one criticism nobody thought to make after Wednesday night’s reading of “Mac and Tanker,” a screenplay about a sociopathic killer child, is that it was boring.

“It sounds like we’re working you over pretty good,” author Ray Bradbury told the script’s author, J. B. Mackey, during a post-reading analysis at the American Film Institute. “But the bottom line is that you’ve written a solid screenplay. It’s very good.”

Most of the people in the jam-packed auditorium seemed to agree with Bradbury. “Mac and Tanker,” which the 48-year-old Mackey adapted from a vaguely autobiographical short story he had written while serving time for murder in San Quentin, is a remarkably visual and compelling first draft for a junior high school drop-out who had never even seen a screenplay until 10 weeks ago.

“This script received the least amount of legitimate criticism of any script we’ve ever read,” said Willard Rodgers, director of the AFI Alumni Assn. Writer’s Workshop program. “There have been others that have been well-received, but not this well from the first draft.”

Mackey, who lives with his wife in a small hotel room on downtown’s Skid Row, sat quietly through most of the script analysis session that Bradbury moderated. He defended or explained elements of his script when asked, and quickly rejected any suggestions he didn’t like.

“I thought a lot of it (criticism) was nit-picking,” Mackey said, afterward. “Some of them kept asking why that kid does what he does. He’s psychotic, that’s why. Somebody else said there were too many killings. Hell, I took out a whole bunch of them already.”

Wednesday’s reading was a little unusual for the writers program, Rodgers acknowledged. Mackey has become a media celebrity in recent days. Besides the overflow crowd (Rodgers said he turned away 150 people), the aisles of the 136-seat AFI auditorium were clogged with TV crews.

That day, Mackey had been interviewed by CNN, Channel 2, Fox Broadcasting and by a crew for an East Coast TV magazine program. They were all on hand that night to add footage from the reading.

In a business where the unusual is usual, Mackey’s story still stands out. The Odessa, Tex., native admits to have killed four men in a life that got off to the same sort of sociopathic start as his main character’s in “Mac and Tanker.” Mackey said he killed two men in Latin America while serving with a mercenary unit in his late teens and was sent to San Quentin in 1965 after stabbing a man to death.

In prison, Mackey murdered another convict and ended up doing a total of 13 years in San Quentin and Folsom prisons. During his imprisonment, he underwent various psychiatric procedures, including electric shock treatments, and credits an experimental operation on his brain with extracting the killer from his personality.

It was also during his years in prison that he began using his own experiences as springboards for fiction. He said he wrote several short stories, including the one about the psychopathic kid and his dog that was read Wednesday in script form.

So far, Mackey has not made a dime from his fledgling screen-writing career. He’s living on welfare and food stamps and has been relying on Rodgers or the RTD for transportation to the inevitable Hollywood meetings. Rodgers said he has had more than a dozen calls this week from agents wanting to sign Mackey and two publishing companies have brought up the prospect of publishing his life story.

Mackey says he isn’t sure what he’s going to do about all of this. Right now, he says he is getting free advice from an entertainment lawyer and from an agent, but he hasn’t signed anything. Rodgers said he is advising Mackey to hold off until the next draft of the screenplay is finished.

Rodgers said that during the seven years he’s been running the writers workshop, about 35 scripts have been optioned and that two--”River’s Edge” and “Cross Road”--have been produced.

The attention surrounding Mackey has also brought attention to the writers workshop. Rodgers said the nonprofit organization, operated mostly through the volunteer efforts of established writers (who analyze scripts) and actors (who perform them), has had more than 300 requests for applications since Mackey’s story became public.

“I have worked with a lot of unusual people and unusual scripts,” Rodgers said, “but I haven’t met anyone like J.B. before. He is not only a gifted writer, he has a gifted mind.”