J. F. Lawton - Early Life

Early Life

Lawton was born on August 11, 1960, in Riverside, California. He is the son of author and novelist Harry Lawton and Georgeann Leona Lawton (née Honegger), a pianist. The couple met in Berkeley while attending the University of California. Later they moved to Riverside, where Harry was hired as a reporter for The Press-Enterprise.

As a child, he suffered from severe dyslexia making school life very difficult. It took him many years of practice, hard work and patience to control his learning disabilities. Despite the challenge, he decided to become a writer like his father. Harry Lawton, independently of his son's disability, always made sure to give him as much incentive as possible. To this day he credits his father for always being supportive of him and his mother for going the extra mile to help him overcome his obstacles.

When Lawton was still in elementary school, his father's novel, Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt, was made into a film starring Robert Redford. During the making of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, Harry Lawton would take J.F. to the set, exposing him to the process of filmmaking. From that moment on, fascinated, he determined that he would become a screenwriter. Always curious, Lawton would observe his surroundings and write about them, although due to his dyslexia, it would take him double the time to put his stories down on paper.

In high school, he continued to write short stories, plays and scripts. After graduating from John W. North High School in Riverside, he enrolled at California State University in Long Beach to study Filmmaking. There he wrote, directed and edited two short films, The Artist and Renaissance. The first was a sci-fi thriller placed in the future in which the main character kills his victims, takes their pictures and exposes them in his art exhibitions. The second, Renaissance, was a short horror film where the protagonist, a sadistic sexual predator, dominates and kills his victim every night, but revives her the next morning to only start the vicious cycle all over again. Both short films won several awards in the college circuit.