9th WEST

WRITER”S BIO
Nazem Elmasri was born in Mreijat Bekaa Lebanon. He was taught English at home by his father a fruit orchard farmer and a retired high school teacher and principal.
His first three years of schooling were at the church up the hill from his house, Although he was not born in a Christian family, his parent did not find it difficult to send him to a Christian school since the convent was directly across the street from his house and his mother was friends was a friend of the Lebanese, Egyptian, and French nuns who lived there and taught at the school.
Junior high was at a government non-religious school in Mreijat and Zahle Bekaa. He started high school at the exclusive private Evangelical School of Zahle , but did not graduate because the civil war broke out in 1975. He then tried to finish high school in the government high school in Aley Lebanon, but the war intensified and he was stuck at home until he left Lebanon to live with his sister to live in Hama Syria with his sister who was working at the time as a secretary for Lahoud Engineering Company building a cement factory.
There he started working on getting a visa from the American embassy in Damascus, at sixteen years old his proudest moment at that time was to meet an American employee and speaking English with him as he interviewed him for his visitor visa to the USA. He arrived at LAX on 11/11/1976 and lived with his brother who lived for two years in Sab Gabriel CA. His brother helped him get a green card and become a permanent resident of the USA.
His first job in the USA at 17 years old was at Jack in the Box, other jobs included Mcdonalds, a Shell gas station owned and managed by the mechanic a Christian Arab from Nazereth. Nazem recalls that he loved to work on cars and enjoyed working for his boss. Other jobs included machinist after taking machine shop and mechanics courses at Pasadena City College , He was also a precision grinder for four years, before taking his first vacation in 1980 and traveling throughout Mexico. When he got back to the US he got a job working for the Los Angeles Times newspaper selling prescriptions door to door. That lasted until 1983 when he enlisted in the US Air Force.
He had applied for citizenship in Los Angeles CA five years after receiving his green card like he was supposed to but since his permanent duty station was in Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico, the nearest immigration office was in El Paso Texas, where he found out that his application for citizenship was lost and he had to re-apply. He received his citizenship certificate at the Federal Building in West Los Angles 5 years late.
Aside from writing for his English composition classes in junior high. Mr Elmasri’s first attempt at writing professionally was in 1979 when he was 19 years old and wanted to be a lyricist writing country music songs .
After writing a few lyrics he moved to Nashville Tennessee for a while, which did not last too long and after making up his mind that instead he wanted to write screenplays he returned to Los Angeles and moved to Hollywood where he wrote his first screenplay by hand. Months later he saw the 1937 film : A Star is Born, with starred Janet Gaynor and decided his script had the same story line only it is about a Lebanese immigrant, and therefore it was not original enough, so he took it to a park and burnt it in a barbeque grill, and decided never to write screenplays again.
Later and after performing in different community plays throughout California, in 1991, he formed Classical Productions a shoe string film production company where he produced directed and starred in an experimental super 8 35 minute synchronized sound film , a surrealistic look at an actor’s life who fantasizes about actually living in Shakespearean plays locations and interacting with their characters. All that is complicated by his guilt of living a luxury life and enjoying worldly pleasures until he is beheaded by the angel of death played at the time by his roommate.
While working on his film Mr. Elmasri was also working as a movie extra and performing in Shakespearean plays in the park with a small obscure company: The Royal Hollywood Shakespeare Company which got a letter of appreciation from the late Mayor Tom Bradley.
Meanwhile, he wrote 5 plays to be produced at a theater that his fiend Sir Gregory Lansing was about to buy in Hollywood CA but that deal fell through and Mr Elmasri lost his property to foreclosure while he was working on producing and directing a film in Oaxaca Mexico.
When he came back to Los Angeles California he had lost his property in Panorama city California, his scripts, typewriter and all his film equipment, as well as all his film stock and the 800 foot reel as well as the VHS videotape conversion of his film: The Thespian.
In 2006 he moved to the bay area and attended De Anza college and took a screenwriting course where he learned to use Final draft the screenwriting software, after that quarter ended he wrote his first feature length screenplay a spy thriller set in Beirut Lebanon : Code Named Blue Cedar. He followed it with: Agent At Large another spy thriller set in LA CA, Paris France and the highlands of Vietnam. He submitted that script to the TSA Screenplay Agency in Manhatten NY, but nothing else happened.
His last script was A Sober outcome about a CIA agent that forgets about his mission to catch a terrorist when he gets involved in the reconciliation and construction efforts in Iraq.
In 1999 he wrote a book of poetry about the civil wars of Lebanon, and Afghanistan, which he later self-published in 2007 with Kindle Publishing. He also wrote poems about the invasion of Iraq, and is currently writing about Syria, the two state solution of Palestine and Israel, the region as a whole and submitting to various newspapers, websites, and universities all over the USA as the Cato Institute, The Council on Foreign Relations and other think tanks in Washington DC.