Micah Wright facts for kids

Micah Ian War Dog Wright (born 1969) is an American writer who has worked in film, television, animation, video games and comic books. He is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation.

Early life

Wright was born in Lubbock, Texas. He graduated from the University of Arizona with degrees in political science and creative writing. While in college, Wright was involved in a weekly sketch comedy show where he started out as a writer and eventually became a performer.

Career

Animation and comics

After graduating and moving to Los Angeles, Wright started interning at Nickelodeon, before becoming script supervisor and eventually a staff writer on The Angry Beavers. In early 2000, a number of writers working on Nickelodeon cartoons contacted the Writers Guild of America to renegotiate the contracts on their behalf and organize a union. At the time, Wright, who also took part in the union drive, was writing and producing the pilot for his own show, Constant Payne, a steampunk science fiction series following a family of adventurers co-produced with Madhouse, with an aesthetic inspired by anime, pulp magazines and early Soviet propaganda posters. The show, which would have been Nickelodeon's first action adventure offering, was not ordered to series due to the network's fears of violent programming in the wake of the September 11 attacks as well as Nickelodeon's suspicions that Wright was one of the figureheads in the union organizing effort. Wright has since tried pitching Constant Payne to Warner Bros. Animation and to foreign studios as an animated feature-length film but the project remains uncompleted. During his time at Nickelodeon, Wright became friends with Jay Lender, with whom he would collaborate as a writing partner on numerous projects across various media.

At San Diego Comic Con in 2001, Wright, who has been a fan of comics since childhood, was introduced to some of the editors of DC Comics' Wildstorm imprint through his friend, artist John Cassaday. Wright pitched his idea for a creator-owned G.I. Joe-type series, hoping to publish it through the Homage sub-imprint. The editors liked the concept but asked Wright to rework it to fit into the Wildstorm Universe, and the project was eventually developed into a new version of one of the imprint's founding titles, Stormwatch. Stormwatch: Team Achilles with art by Whilce Portacio, debuting in July 2002 under the "mature readers" sub-imprint Eye of the Storm, featured a UN-sanctioned team that consisted primarily of human soldiers and was created in response to the growing superhuman presence in the political areas of the Wildstorm Universe, particularly the events depicted in Mark Millar's run on The Authority. Despite consistent critical acclaim throughout its run, Stormwatch, like other Eye of the Storm titles, suffered from low sales and was ultimately cancelled few issues shy of Wright's planned 26-issue storyline. Shortly before the cancellation, the series took part in the line-wide crossover "Coup d'Etat" which saw The Authority take over the United States, forcing Team Achilles to go on the run.

Soon after the launch of Stormwatch: Team Achilles, Wright and artist Mark Robinson created a pitch for the revival of another Wildstorm property, DV8, which was rejected due to the low sales of the series' previous iteration and the creators' relatively unknown status. In 2003, Wright teamed up with artist Rick Remender to pitch a series focusing on the exploits of a low-ranking member of Advanced Idea Mechanics, a villainous organization operating within the Marvel Universe. The proposal, titled Joe A.I.M. and submitted for publication under Marvel's briefly revived Epic imprint, was rejected, prompting Wright to share his dissatisfaction with the Epic editorial on his Delphi message board, which resulted in a public dispute between him and Marvel's then-Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada. In an interview later that year, Wright expressed regret for making the issue public. Other unproduced projects include American Cross with artist Niko Henrichon, a revenge story that takes place during the American Revolution, Lifer with artist Steve Pugh, a four-issue military sci-fi series described by Wright as "Starship Troopers meets Catch-22", Los Diablos with art by Taesoo Kim, a rejected weird western anime pitch repurposed into a comic book series. and Thunderhead!, an adult-oriented animated series co-created by Wright and Jay Lender.

Video games and WGA

Since 2004, Wright has worked primarily in the field of video game writing, often with his long-time writing partner Jay Lender. The pair's shared credits include Looney Tunes: Back in Action for Electronic Arts, The Dukes of Hazzard: Return of the General Lee for Ubisoft, Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon and its sequel for THQ, as well as Robocalypse for Vogster. Wright is a member of the Writers Guild of America West, where he is the chair of the Video Game Writers Caucus. In 2007, Wright and Lender were cited as being "instrumental" in creating the WGA's first ever Video Game Writing Award as part of the traditional film and television Writers Guild Awards. In 2011, the Video Game Writing Award attracted criticism from various video game websites for being too exclusive, prompting Wright to address the issue online.

In addition to his work at WGA's Video Game Writers Caucus, Wright co-founded the Native American and World Indigenous Writers Committee and was elected to be a part of the Guild Negotiating Committee for 2014.

2010s

In 2012, Wright returned to comics with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign for Duster, a graphic novel he co-created with Jay Lender. The story, initially developed as a film script, depicts the life of a recently-widowed female cropduster pilot at the end of World War II and her battle against a group of Nazi soldiers who crash-landed near her farm in West Texas. The graphic novel was eventually published in 2015. That same year, Wright worked as a consultant on HTC Vive's virtual reality game TheBlu, which led to his interest in VR technology and eventually a position as a teacher of the virtual reality filmmaking course at the Los Angeles branch of Emerson College. In 2016, Wright and Lender made their directorial debut with the feature film They're Watching, a found footage horror comedy distributed by Amplify.

Between 2017 and 2019, Wright served as the Chief Content Manager of the Native American broadcast television network First Nations Experience, overseeing the creation of first original programming in the network's history.

Filmography

Television

• The Angry Beavers (script supervisor, 1997–1999; writer, 1999–2001)
• Constant Payne (writer/director/executive producer, unreleased pilot)
• Ozzy and Drix (writer, 2002)
• Aboriginal Unity Experience (executive producer, 2017–2018)
• KVCarts (executive producer, 2017–2018)
• Native Shorts (executive producer, 2017–2019)
• Smoke Signals (writer/executive producer, 2017–2019)
• First Nations Comedy Experience (executive producer, 2018)
• Studio 49 (executive producer, 2018–2019)
• Wassaja (executive producer, 2018)
• Future Proof (executive producer, 2018)
• California Pow-Wow (writer/executive producer, 2018–2019)
• The Huunam of Paakuma (executive producer, 2018)
• Native Vote 2018 (executive producer, 2018)
• Live from 3rd and Grand (executive producer, 2019)

Film

• Wonderful Days (uncredited; co-writer with Jay Lender, 2003)
• They're Watching (co-writer and co-director with Jay Lender, 2016)

Work in video games

• Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), Electronic Arts
• Shadow Ops: Red Mercury (2004), Atari
• The Dukes of Hazzard: Return of the General Lee (2004), Ubisoft
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), 2K Games
• Friends: The One with All the Trivia (2005), Warner Bros. Home Video
• The Sopranos: The Road To Respect (2006), THQ
• HUXLEY (2008), Webzen
• Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon (2008), THQ
• Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed (2008), THQ
• Night at the Museum 2 (2008), Brash Entertainment
• League of Legends (2008), Riot Games
• Robocalypse (2008), Vogster
• Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid (2009), Ngmoco
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Activision
• Big League Sports Summer (2009), Activision
• Robocalypse: Mobile Destruction (2009), Vogster
• Robocalypse: Beaver Defense (2009), Vogster
• Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time (2010), Ubisoft
• PlayStation Move Heroes (2010), SCEA/Nihilistic Software
• Skullgirls (2011), Reverge Labs
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012), Activision
• TheBlu (2016), WeVR