Jonathan Gems was born in 1952 in London and went to many different schools because when the tension between his parents grew too intense, they moved house to another school district. Like most intelligent children, he detested school, and left as soon as he could at the age of fourteen. He started a magazine called Student, hoping to spark a debate on – and reform of – the education system. Alas, this never took place, and schools are even worse today than they were in the 1970’s.
The success of Student magazine (the first issue sold 50,000 copies), brought attention to the fact that Jonathan was legally too young to be out of school and, at fifteen, he was forced to attend the local comprehensive. Student carried on however, thanks to the heroic efforts of Richard Branson, and birthed Virgin Records, which began as a mail-order company selling records through the magazine.
Jonathan was expelled from the comprehensive school and finished his indoctrination at a grammar school in the Isle of Wight. After this, he was told to work at Gems Wax Models, the family firm, which manufactured wax figures and shop window mannequins. But, after training and working for a year, his father sold Gems Wax Models to spend the rest of his life living comfortably on the proceeds.
Finding himself out of work, Jonathan first earned a living dealing drugs, followed by jobs in restaurants, clothes shops, cleaning companies, and a travel agency. Then he founded a company called Capricorn Graphics, which designed and printed posters and did artwork for magazines. A couple of years later, he wound up the company to do a stage management course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Following this, he published a comic called It’s All Lies, and wrote songs, and performed in several bands. When the comic went bust, he formed a company called Holland Mirrors, which made decorative mirrors, then worked at The Portobello Hotel where he met the designer Jean Colette Seel and helped her produce and sell made-to-order clothes. After this, he worked as an assistant stage-manager at the Open Space Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, London. When, a year later, the theatre closed, he was hired as the stage manager of the then semi-derelict Half Moon Theatre in Aldgate East. It was here he first got into playwrighting, after being asked to revise, and write songs for, an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Up until then he’d had no interest in writing plays because of spending his childhood watching the depression, angst and frustration suffered by his mother, Pam Gems, thanks to her playwrighting.
He spent the next two years on the dole, living rent-free in a squat, so he could study and work on dramatic writing. He wrote and produced three short plays, and then a full-length play, The Tax Exile, produced by the Bush Theatre in West London. This was followed by Naked Robots (Royal Shakespeare Company), Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom (Royal Court), The Secret of the Universe, (Institute of Contemporary Art), The Paranormalist (Greenwich Theatre), and Susan’s Breasts (Royal Court.) He won the George Devine Award for The Tax Exile, and The Critics Circle Award for Susan’s Breasts.
The success of these shows led to offers to work as a writer on the movies Nineteen Eighty-Four and White Mischief, both directed by Michael Radford, followed by Batman, directed by Tim Burton. After Batman, he spent nine years in Los Angeles writing numerous screenplays, of which just two were made: Mars Attacks! and The Treat (which he also directed). Then, as he was getting ready to direct his second feature, Dance of the Dead, he fell ill with Hepatitis C. He was given three to five years to live by two doctors in L.A. and one in London.
For the next twenty years he lived, struggling with Hep C, in London until, thanks to a combination of natural and allopathic medicine, he was cured in 2018.
In 2019, he co-wrote with Vinod Mahindru Who Killed British Cinema? – a factual book on the British film industry – available from Quota Books. In 2020, he was interviewed for Mars Attacks Memoirs, and wrote Hollyweird, a collection of short stories, slated for publication in June 2021.
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