With Hot Properties in Development, Screenwriter Giacomelli Loves Taking Meetings at Hollywood’s Musso & Frank

Moments. Make. Movies.

Like many of us who engage the City of Angels for the first time, and view the Hollywood sign or Musso & Frank Grill, which features in Tarantino’s ode Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, screenwriter/producer Gianmarco Maximilian Giacomelli recalls moments that have stood out for him.

For example, Giacomelli’s expanding list of screenwriting credits has been influenced by films like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, In Bruges, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Indeed, Giacomelli has recently written two scripts that are in active development, namely Two Kings, a modern-day adaptation of “The Man in the Iron Mask” by Alexandre Dumas, and Valentina, (aka Los Reyes del Vicio), the origin story of the cartels in Mexico, inspired by true events, and set during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. He says of writer-directors Quentin Tarantino and Martin McDonagh: “Tarantino and McDonagh use their dialog like weapons and don’t give you a minute to think. They lure you in to their carefully crafted stories until you blink and the film’s over.”

In addition, Giacomelli, who earned a Master of Fine Arts, Screenwriting from the AFI (American Film Institute) Conservatory, eloquently describes one of his many Hollywood moments, one of which was influenced by the 6-time Oscar-winning movie, La La Land:

“My wife and I like to hike with our dog in Griffith Park by Mt. Hollywood, the same spot where Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling tap dance in La La Land to the film’s original song ‘A Lovely Night.’ It overlooks the San Fernando valley and has stunning views of the city.  We got caught in the rain one afternoon, a rare occurrence in LA, and dusk was setting, so I asked my wife to dance with me. I’m a terrible dancer, but she put up with it, although she did ask why I couldn’t dance more like Ryan Gosling. Our dog hid under a tree—I’m not sure if he was more scared of the rain or my dancing.”

Most importantly, he suggests one of his strengths when it comes to screenwriting and storytelling is writing dialog—using it as a weapon as Hollywood icon Tarantino uses his rapid-fire dialog to drive the plot: “One of my favorite dialog sequences is in Pulp Fiction when Captain Koons (actor Christopher Walken) delivers a monolog to a young Butch about how he smuggled his father's gold watch out of a POW camp in Nam. It speaks to Koons’ character, moves the story forward, and delivers exposition in a hilarious way about the significance of the watch. This sets up the scenes and action that follow and we have a clear understanding of what’s at stake.”

While Giacomelli is now ensconced in Hollywood, his talent has seen him hired by production companies like Flamehawk Studios which is producing an upcoming fantasy-adventure video game called the Mechanical World of Dr Gearbox. And, he talks about learning about the power of collaboration: “It was a dream come true, getting to create an entire world and the characters that inhabit it. Writing for a video game is much different than traditional TV or film, as there’s an immediacy to it. As I was writing storylines and characters, the design team was creating them right in front of my eyes. The cross-team dynamics and synergy was tantamount to ensuring we were all on the same page, and working to tell the same story.”

Moreover, Giacomelli also got involved during the early stages of development of Magic: The Gathering, an animated series based on the fantasy card game Magic, a project which has been overseen by the Russo brothers and which allowed for a level of participation that he calls incredible: “Similar to writing for the Dr Gearbox video game, animated projects require a different level of collaboration than traditional TV and film.”

However, all of his exciting Hollywood adventures, all started back in Canada, where he was on a completely different career path—which strangely enough, got him focused on the storytelling career path.

Growing up in Toronto, his father was a writer-producer who worked in a number of a different industries, from TV to music to novels. In this creative environment, Mr. Giacomelli would gather his family in front of the TV and they’d watch a rotation of The Twilight Zone, the Marx Brothers, and classics like Casablanca, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and anything from Hitchcock. But his mother’s family was more into the finance world, which is what young Giacomelli ended up studying in university, explaining: “I never thought of ‘creative writing’ as a career path, besides maybe becoming a professor, so I left it behind after high school. So, I worked in finance after graduating from Dalhousie University but quickly realized it wasn’t for me—the lesson here was to take a step back and actually think about where I wanted to focus my energy.”

While working in China, he met a TV and film producer who hired Giacomelli to help him write a pilot script. The now in-demand writer confesses “it was terrible, but it sparked something, and when I eventually moved back to Canada, I knew this was what I wanted to do.”

What followed was a crash course in film production at Ryerson University; screenwriting classes at University of Toronto; a few years working in TV development, spending nights and weekends writing his own scripts. One project, a short film script, My Old Man, led to an introduction to writer-director and horror guru, Ryan M. Andrews, who took Giacomelli under his wing and showed him how to bring a script to life in production: “After My Old Man was accepted into the Canadian Film Fest and nominated for best short, Ryan and I continued working together, and I was on set for a number of his subsequent feature films.”

And, then he was accepted to the AFI Conservatory, ranked the #1 film school in the US, and his life changed, with Giacomelli enthusing: “If there’s one thing AFI made sure we’d never forget it was ‘collaboration’—that filmmaking is a collaborative process with a number of decision-makers and creative partners along the way.”

Consequently, he has several scripts in play, including: Two Kings has recently gotten A-list talent and an agency attached to the project and they’re currently going out to networks and showrunners; Valentina is with a big production company in Mexico City that co-produced Narcos and El Chapo for Netflix.

Additionally, with Hollywood productions ramping up after the pandemic lockdown, Giacomelli is excited: “I think having a year off from face-to-face meetings was a blessing in disguise in many ways—more time to write. But I’m thrilled to finally be able to catch up in person with people I’ve only emailed or Zoomed with. There’s an energy and visceral element to pitching stories in person that you can’t capture on camera or on the page.” He add, “My immediate goal is to finish an alternate-history black comedy pilot that I’ve had in my head for years - and which I promised my manager I would finish this summer - and then the sky is the limit.”

Drop in on Gianmarco Maximilian Giacomelli’s IMDb page and on Facebook and Instagram.