Canadian Writers Abroad

Playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, Richard Willett was born in Los Angeles and raised in Vancouver. In 1978 he moved to New York City, which he left in 2005 for Hollywood.

A Canadian in Tinsel Town
by Richard Willett

As a Canadian living in Trump’s America, I possess something much talked about these days: birthright citizenship. That’s right, I’m also a U.S. citizen, because my dad, Bob Willett, was a journalist covering Hollywood for Canadian publications for many years leading up to the year of my birth, 1959. We moved back to Canada in 1962, but I’ve retained dual citizenship ever since. Oh, just a second. There’s someone at the door with a mask on. (That’s a joke, but you never know these days.)

When I was growing up in North Vancouver, it was something of an idyllic alpine village at the foot of Grouse Mountain. Crisp, clean air; stunning vistas; one of the most beautiful, it was said, places on earth. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. As either an actor or a writer I felt certain that I was going to be a big star, and that meant, in my mind, returning to the big, bad United States, ASAP. I moved to New York City at 19, having never even been to the place, and stayed for 27 years, among other things writing fiction and stage plays. I then decided to try my hand at screenwriting and returned to the place of my birth, where I live to this day. I was actually born in Hollywood, at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. When I was a kid in North Van, I had to take my birth certificate to school to prove to my wide-eyed Canadian schoolmates that I’d truly been born in such a glamorous, ultra-American place.

My novel, A Friend of Dorothy’s, which I wrote when I was in my twenties but which was just published, deals a lot with all of this disconnect. I was both proud and determined to become a real American, an edgy New Yorker to be specific, but then when AIDS arrived in the city (and my community specifically) in the 1980s I yearned with a deep nostalgia for what felt then like the innocence of my Canadian home. When I’d go home for visits from New York, I would thrill to open a window in my parents’ North Vancouver apartment, gaze up at the snowcapped mountains, and breathe deeply of that amazing fresh air I’d run from not that long ago.

Oddly enough, I had a similar experience the first time I returned to Southern California as an adult, in 2001. I was visiting friends in Oceanside, and looking up at the giant palm tree visible from their backyard and breathing deep, I kept saying: “There’s something so wonderful in the air here.” I think perhaps we remember the air we first breathed in the world, and then know it when we inhale it again.

My family lived in Mar Vista when I was a baby, and I have no memory of that life, when my dad toiled clacking away two-fingered on his typewriter in the garage that had been converted into an office, in between trips to the studios or the stars’ homes, to interview the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and Jayne Mansfield. L.A. is filled with memories none the less, of stories I was told growing up, if nothing else. I’m located now in West Hollywood, just a few blocks from where my parents lived as newlyweds and where my older brother and sister went to elementary school (that building is still standing, as is the house my grandparents lived in when they moved down to be closer to my parents). And I’m almost walking distance from the Egyptian Theatre, where my mom and dad attended world premieres, and the Pantages, where they went to the Oscars. I’m writing a new play about my family, my most Canadian play yet, because for all the American influence it is in the end about a Canadian family, especially the riddle of my mom and dad: two kids from the Depression-era Canadian prairies (Mom from Alberta, Dad from Saskatchewan) who landed in Tinsel Town. They told me that since I didn’t remember L.A., they thought I’d be the one kid who’d be most purely Canadian, that I’d never have any yen for the States. I’m happy to report that they could laugh over the years at how much they got that wrong.

Richard Willett’s short stories have been published in American Writing 5 (Philadelphia: Nierika Editions, 1992), Christopher Street (13.164, 1991), Karamu (XIV.1, 1994), and Oxalis, among others. His short play about AIDS, Boys Will Be Boys, was included in the anthology Art & Understanding: Literature from the First Twenty Years of A&U (eds. Needle and Goettel, Black Lawrence Press, 2015). He is also the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, Tiny Bubbles, 9/10, A Terminal Event, and Grief at High Tide, presented off-off-Broadway and at theatres across the country. Honours include an Edward F. Albee Foundation fellowship (1990) and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship (1993). He was a semifinalist twice in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Top 50 (in 2011 for “9/10” and for “The Flid Show” in 2013, and a finalist for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program (2024) and the Sundance Labs (2005 and 2021). Richard Willett lives in West Hollywood, California.

Further

• Website for Richard Willett
• Richard Willett reads with Lee Curran, at the bookstore, The Bureau of General Services — Queer Division, in New York, via YouTube
• Richard Willett Movie Reviews on Facebook
• Christopher Street magazine, 1976-1995
• The Egyptian Theatre