Last Days of the Condor!

“I always wanted to be a writer,” James Grady told Hollywood on the Potomac. “My parents were terrified by that and so they I would say they convinced me that I wanted to be a lawyer; so I thought that was what I should do – but I never really wanted to do that. I just wanted to write stories and movies and it seemed inescapable somehow. Oddly enough before I was five … I’m only going with what my mom told me …. I would tell her stories and make her write them down. She would take enough notes to be able to tell me where I’d left off and throw the rest away.”

Fortunately “Grady” – as he is known to his friends – went on to quite a prolific writing career that was topped off by Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford. He was 24 when he sold it.

“I was born April 30, 1949, in Shelby, Montana, a tough oil field, railroad and farming town clinging to the prairie 60 miles east of the Rocky Mountains, a half hour drive south of Canada, and a million miles from everywhere else. For most of my youth, my father managed movie theaters and my mother was a county librarian. I was a bookish, movie-going kid who survived playing high school football. I went to public schools and worked: I was a grave digger, farm tractor jockey, rock picker, hay bucker, janitor, motion picture projectionist, and city road crew laborer – all before I graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism.” Jim Grady