Jeff Vintar attended the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, where he published a series of cartoons in Random House's The Quarterly.
Carving out a living as a factory worker, English teacher, and transit bus driver, Vintar broke into the film business when he sold three original spec scripts in the span of six months.
The second screenplay, a twist-filled sci-fi love story called Spaceless, has become almost legendary in insider circles due to its reputation and long tortuous twenty-three year struggle through Hollywood's "development hell."
With notable professionals calling it their favorite unproduced screenplay and online collectors always on the lookout for a copy of the script, it is often referred to as one of the Holy Grail scripts.
It is a long-time favorite of Gore Verbinski, who directed The Ring, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Rango.
The third spec sale, Hardwired, renamed by the studio I, Robot after the Isaac Asimov short story collection, starred Will Smith and made $350 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing non-sequel of the summer, and the tenth highest-grossing film of 2004.
The original Hardwired screenplay was a cerebral murder mystery that read like a stage play, and representatives of the Asimov estate considered it "more Asimov than Asimov."
Vintar transformed the script into a big-budget studio film, also moving the story into the greater I, Robot universe.
Mandated changes made the project more of a summer action blockbuster, a move that angered Asimov purists, although many critics considered the final product to have brains as well as brawn.
Ten years before Iron Man with Robert Downey, Jr. was released, Vintar wrote an early draft called The Iron Man for 20th Century Fox.
He only agreed to take the job after he asked Stan Lee to co-write the screenplay or story with him, and Stan agreed.
This was before the X-Men and Spider-Man films proved super-heroes are box office gold.
Studio head Tom Rothman complimented the script, saying he did not understand the character until he read the Vintar/Lee draft, but insisting that the market would never support all these super-hero movies, especially not a fringe title like Iron Man.
The Iron Man by Jeff Vintar and Stan Lee has made several reader's lists, including the one at Screenwriter's Utopia, of Best Unproduced Screenplays, and has been called "perhaps the best superhero screenplay of the era.”
His first television series, The Hot Zone, became NatGeo's most-watched scripted series and warned of a coming catastrophe six months before the worldwide pandemic hit.
Vintar's current projects include an adaptation of Blood Music, an original Christmas comedy, a time travel adventure series, and a crazy monster detective show with a great deal of cannabis.
In his spare hours, just for fun, Vintar creates comic strips using his vintage action figure collection.
