20th Annual Pollak Prizes for Excellence in the Arts

Vince Gilligan

Lifetime Achievement Award

× Expand Vince Gilligan (Photo by Rob Greer)

Anxiety seized Vince Gilligan. Leaving dinner after seeing a film at the Westhampton Theatre, he confided to his girlfriend, Holly Rice, about a potential big assignment. Gilligan, a writer and co-executive producer for “The X-Files,” had been asked by the show’s creator, Chris Carter, to direct an episode that Gilligan wrote.

He didn’t feel capable.

“And Holly, God bless her, she asked me, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ ”

Gilligan laughs while recalling his response: “Well, they could lose $5 million because I screw up so badly.”

She responded, “You gonna bring the company down?”

Gilligan thought about that and figured, no, 20th Century Fox would record any loss as a rounding error. Rice insisted that the worst thing he could do was not accept the challenge.

“I was petrified with fear over the weekend leading into the first day of shooting. It’s always daunting,” he says of directing. “Not always petrifying.”

Gilligan’s directorial debut, “Je Souhaite,” which translates as “I Wish,” aired on May 14, 2000. The story concerns Anson Stokes, a storage-facility employee who is reprimanded by his bellowing boss, Jay Gilmore, for not cleaning out a unit. Stokes starts the task and unrolls an Oriental rug to discover a leather-jacket-clad “ginnaye,” or genie. She possesses the power to grant wishes but has lost patience with the venal desires of mortals.

The episode is often rated among the favorite installments of “The X-Files,” which featured FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Gilmore seeks them after his lips are overgrown by facial skin. In a scene reminiscent of an EC Comics horror story, Gilmore, his mouth cut open by surgery, explains to the agents that he thinks his vanished former employee is somehow responsible. When Mulder and Scully visit the Stokes trailer home, where they first see a yacht stranded in the driveway, they are met at the door by Stokes’ wheelchair-bound brother Leslie, who insists that Gilmore’s condition comes from “weird chemicals.” He mentions that Anson once found “a guy with a meth lab in one of the storage units.”

About eight years later, Gilligan created “Breaking Bad,” about a cancer-ridden high school chemistry teacher with the alliterative and character-colored name of Walter White. He goes from an OK guy into an evil genius meth manufacturer.

The weird splendors of Gilligan’s imagination have garnered him a slew of Emmy awards, as well as honors as a writer, director and producer for his meth-fueled crime drama, “Breaking Bad,” and its successor prequel, “Better Call Saul.”

These days, Gilligan’s longtime colleague Peter Gould is shepherding “Better Call Saul” as it its preps its fourth season. Gilligan is adapting “Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People,” a 1982 account by reporter Tim Reiterman of the events that led to the 1978 mass suicide of almost 1,000 people associated with would-be messiah Jim Jones and his People’s Temple cult in Guyana. Reiterman, then reporting for the San Francisco Examiner, accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan for a fact-finding mission. Reiterman sustained injuries from the gunfire that killed Ryan. Gilligan is working on a miniseries version for HBO.

“My writing for this is slow as mud,” he sighs. “It’s the most depressing thing, and I hope that taking this on wasn’t a horrible mistake.” The individual members of the group, he says, were mostly good people who wanted better lives and to make contributions to something greater than themselves. Instead, Gilligan says, “They got suckered by a sociopathic con man.”

It Opens in a Bookshop

Born in Richmond, Gilligan grew up in Farmville and Chesterfield County — and in his grandfather Vincent T. Gilligan’s Richmond Book Shop.

He credits the fundamental component of his education to the now-gone “flying-saucer-shaped” J.P Wynne Campus School in Farmville, a laboratory school and part of Longwood College (now university). Gail, his mother, taught there. He recalls her making a life-size “reading tree.” She spent hours after school in its realization so that her students could sit and read beneath its construction-paper boughs. From plywood, she built Campy the Clown, a matching game that lit up like an educational “Operation” board.

Jacqueline “Jackie” Wall, an exhibiting artist and cofounder of the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts who also taught at Wynne, made a profound and enduring impression on Gilligan. Her interest in building student excitement for creative work extended beyond the classroom. Each summer, Wall loaned Gilligan a Super 8 Eumig movie camera. “This is an expensive German camera she’s loaning a sixth-grader,” he remembers, with a measure of amazement.

“I made these little science fiction movies,” Gilligan says. At the time, the film cartridges went to Gray’s Drug Store in Farmville to be processed, meaning weeks of waiting for development and delivery. Wall also made a corner of the janitor’s closet next to the art room into a rudimentary editing suite. Gilligan spent untold hours in that tiny compartment with a hand-cranked viewer and splicer. He laughs now at the effort it took, but also the nontechnical simplicity. “You had a loupe, a little anvil slicer, and you’d tape a splice and work to get the air bubbles out of it.”

Angus Wall, a son of the teacher, became a good friend of Gilligan’s. He, too, exhibited artistic vision and as an adult shared Oscars for his and Kirk Baxter’s editing of “The Social Network” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” His award-winning title sequences include “Se7en” and “Game of Thrones.” Wall later sent his mother’s camera to Gilligan, and it now occupies a place of prominence in his Los Angeles home.

“For two people to come out of this elementary school — but with no small work — achieve some success in their chosen field is some sort of statistical peculiarity,” Gilligan says. Of all the schools he went to — including Lloyd C. Bird High School in Chesterfield and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts — Wynne was where he learned the lessons that have stayed with him. He used the name for the school where Walter White teaches.

Gilligan’s father engendered in him a love of old movies. Prior to the advent of VCRs, when a film came on television, that was the only time to see it past its original theatrical run, so even after bedtime he’d rouse Gilligan and brother Patrick to watch such films as the Spencer Tracy thriller “Bad Day at Black Rock.” And then there was television: Petersburg’s WXEX (now WRIC) late night horror movie program “Shock! Theater,” with campy host the Bowman Body, and the afternoon (WRVA now WTVR) “Sailor Bob Show” featuring former commercial art student Bob Briggs drawing cartoons on a large pad. “I loved Sailor Bob,’’ Gilligan recalls. “I loved his drawings, and I even got one of his sailor caps with my name on it.”

Another major influence came via his grandfather Vincent T. Gilligan, who moved to Richmond in 1957 to be his own boss, leaving a General Motors plant in Syracuse, New York, following an ad in a trade paper. He first opened a bookstore on East Main Street, then moved to Broad between Goshen and Gilmer streets — where under different management it remains in business. In a 1999 essay for this magazine, Gilligan described how, fortified by Filet O’ Fish sandwiches carried from Belvidere and Broad, he and Patrick ate “amid piles of Virginia history and religion, Zane Grey and Shakespeare, movie books and circus books and Edgar Allan Poe. And the magazines: Life, The New Yorker, Argosy, Famous Monsters of Filmland, comic books, Popular Mechanics, Playboy and Mad. Anything and everything, just none of it new.”

Among the treasures of the stockroom was a complete run of National Geographic, back to 1888, “moldering on four tall bookshelves.” The oldest issues were in the farthest and thus most tempting corner, which Gilligan described as smelling “like papier-maché and crypt dust. The magazines seemed far older than the Egyptian pyramids on their covers.” He traces his fascination with history and his love for reading, and by extension writing, to the dim aisles of the bookstore, reading until his eyes hurt, “reading about things that were but are no more, and things that might have been.”

He was a huge “Star Trek” fan, and one of the first movies he experienced on the big screen was “Star Wars” in Farmville’s State Theatre. At one point, he thought perhaps he’d be an astronaut. “But — the math,” he says with a chuckle.

A Big Break

The launching pad for Gilligan’s career came in what was in 1989 called the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Competition of the Virginia Festival of American Film. Both the competition and the festival were in their second year, and have since shortened their names to the Virginia Screenwriting Competition and the Virginia Film Festival. Gilligan submitted “Home Fries,” a script about an extremely dysfunctional family, featuring several twists and a blend of the comic and macabre. The award brought with it a $1,000 check. “I was having trouble paying rent in Brooklyn a year out of college,” he says. “So I appreciated that.”

In October 1989, Gilligan was back at home in Chesterfield, struggling with the best path to the future. Then the phone rang and a voice said, “Hold for Mark Johnson.” Johnson, a Washington, D.C., native, University of Virginia graduate and Hollywood producer, won the 1988 Best Picture Oscar for “Rain Man.” As a judge for the competition, he’d liked the “Home Fries” script and wanted to know if Gilligan had anything else.

“I fortunately had two scripts in presentable condition,” Gilligan says, his voice rising with the memory of the excitement. He ran to Kinko’s, made copies, and mailed them out. The result was two real Hollywood movies with well-known actors saying his words. “Home Fries,” with Drew Barrymore and Luke Wilson, drew mixed reviews, while “Wilder Napalm” featured Dennis Quaid and Arliss Howard playing brothers who shared pyrokinetic powers and a love for Debra Winger. “Not many people saw that one,” Gilligan says. But in Johnson he found a mentor and a working relationship that stretched to “Breaking Bad.”

Nowadays, someone starting in the industry doesn’t always get the luxury of apprenticeship. New writers may find themselves thrown into the deep end without sufficient experience. Gilligan observes of the hazard, “And sometimes they don’t acquit themselves as well as they might’ve if they’d started out on a writing staff.”

Gilligan was a fan of “The X-Files” from its 1993 debut. He sent a freelance script to Chris Carter and became a writer during the third season. He wrote or cowrote 30 episodes. During his “X-Files” run, he went from creative consultant to executive producer, a title he took to the spinoff “Lone Gunmen” series for which he also wrote.

A show business axiom is that the success is “all in the timing.” Today, he says, there are close to 500 scripted television shows, which makes for “an amazing wealth and abundance for viewers and a lot more possibilities for the director and actor,” while at the same time, there is a greater challenge for a show to break out. “I’d say, though, it’s a net good.”

Gilligan credits the shift in the delivery of entertainment as part of the reason why “Breaking Bad” achieved worldwide recognition. “It was the first wave of streaming on demand.” If the show had premiered six months earlier, “Nobody would’ve ever heard of it, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. An integral part of this business is just luck. I feel like a lottery winner sometimes.”