Karl J. Niemiec

Karl J. Niemiec is the grandson of Detroit Polish Mobsters depicted in his book/script, The Polish Gang - 1929. He hales from Jonesville, Michigan, a small country town on the border of Michigan and Ohio where he grew up working on farms, playing baseball, basketball, football, shooting guns, and fulfilling his love of riding horses.

At 16, he left for the Detroit suburbs where he attended Dearborn Fordson because his father paid taxes there. He rented an apartment while washing dishes, busing tables, and working in a bread factory at night to finish high school. He shared it with his 18-year-old brother who was attending college until his oldest brother, a teacher, and his artist sister moved in. Reuniting them for the first time in many years. After graduation, and the Niemiec siblings scattered across the USA, Karl lived in a frat house on Wayne State Campus and bounced in a bar called The Traffic Jam, but attended writing courses at Oakland Community College. After a year, he transferred to The University of Detroit taking journalism courses where he continued his writing adventures until he decided, at barely 20, to crash film classes at UCLA to write screenplays and books.

So he hit the road by thumb, something he'd done a few times before between semesters, to hitchhike around the USA writing journals about everyone he met, (soon to be a book) including those that chased him out of a small Oklahoma town for sleeping with a beautiful stranded young woman, only to be picked up by an old Airforce creep that woke him up in the middle of nowhere with a gun to his head wanting to leave his body parts scattered across Texas like he'd done to the others for not sleeping with him. Miraculously, he survived these deadly events by using sure wit and the fear of death to escape in one piece. After walking half the night through the dark fog in the middle of nowhere he spent the night in a phone booth in Amarillo. The next morning, Karl continued his trip on a much happier note through Boulder, Vegas, and San Fransisco, then finally after a couple of months on the road, he thumbed up the coast to where his oldest brother now lived in Portland. From there, he bought a motorcycle, to keep the creeps at bay, and headed back down the coast to LA.

Finding an apartment at the corner of Santa Monica and Vine above the army surplus store, then filled with retired radio actors, writers, and a few nuts, where he began to write his first play based on living there, Potential Killers, and a script about his family that turned into a novel, The Polish Gang, on a 1929 Underwood, Karl's first job was at Dubble Day Book Story in Beverly Hills where he bought the Underwood for five bucks. It was then he started taking extension writing and film production classes and when allowed sitting in on regular UCLA writing classes. One day while standing in line to hear Lucille Ball speak, he was invited to seek a job at ABC Prospect as a page from a woman in the publicity department. Finding no page jobs available, and getting yelled at for talking to his secretary in the elevator, Karl noticed that the head of the mailroom was very unhappy with someone on the phone for not showing up to work, so he went in and started delivering mail to the head of the page department the next day. The look on his face was worth the trip.

At this time, to continue his Hollywood education, Karl was permitted by the head of the studio to sit in and volunteer at every department on the lot on his time off, which he did almost every day. A few months into working at ABC Prospect, Karl was assigned half days at the ABC Century City Office where he got to watch how casting actors took place. One day the film librarian came and got Karl out of the mailroom and told him he was to run an audition film for him from the studio contract players' days that showed how the actors worked with directors, lighting, camera, makeup, and hair. He didn't ask why. But it turned out to be a blessing. Something priceless he uses in his acting, directing, and teaching to this day. At that time, he also started running tapes to Jimmy Komack's home in Beverly Hills and his office at Prospect and back where in exchange they allowed Karl to sit in on writer pitch and episode assignment meetings. Both of these events led to Karl being cast on Welcome Back Kotter and General Hospital in recurring roles which eventually led to, while coaching baseball with a fellow GH actor, a SAG army training film Director cast him because, being a country boy, he could skin a rabbit on film. Which he did and was also blown up in a troop transporter in Georgia. He is now on leave from AFTRA and SAG and will reactivate when needed.

Thus, began Karl's 30 years of adventures in LA where he started his own property management business so that he could stay home and write over 30 scripts and plays, and 13 published books, and get paid for it, eventually turning that experience into Sci-Fi Noir, Jozeph Picasso Alien Trilogy - Filmmaking Aventures, by twisting his real-life misadventures into fiction because some of those involved in the really Hollywood craziness threatened to break his legs if he ever told the whole truth to anyone. In the process of being developed as a TV series, these book adventures are now available on Amazon through his publishing company LapTopPublishing LLC. All of Karl's books and some of his plays and scripts, including the screenwriting course book he developed while at UCLA Extension, Prolific Screenwriter, which he taught at IUPUI, are also available at most bookstores.

Karl has one unproduced WGA credit thanks to writing a screenplay for Alex Karris. He has also written and acted in a produced film that played on USA Up All Night and sold worldwide on VHS, California Hot Wax (aka) Bikini Car Wash which became a whole front page of Variety while being marketed at AFM. The making of this film has been documented in Karl's book Making The Original Bikini Car Wash: a Murder Mystery Picture Book - That Launched A Genre & Created Prolific Screenwriter.

After those years in LA and writing, directing, and producing Special - Give Us A Game, a 60-minute doc on his brother's special hockey team, Karl and his wife Erin, who produced Special with him, have taken their then growing family to Carmel Indiana where Karl began to teach screenwriting and self-publishing from his course books as an IUPUI Adjunct Professor and teach acting classes in his studio. He has directed six shorts, one film, and 9 children's musicals since arriving in Indiana, and acted in five others. He now runs his film company Noir Pictures at KjN Studios and LapTopPublishing LLC out of his home, a full green screen, editing, and sound studio, where he lives with his four teenage children and a loving wife of 25 years.

His latest project is a Neo-Noir Film, Law of Average, based on, in part, unedited footage shot in 1993, which he has turned into a series concept that he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in. It recently won an award at the LA Neo-Noir Film Fest. Karl is in the film playing young and older Joe Average nearly 30 years apart. He used the footage to learn to edit with FCPX at KjN Studios. Saving the original digital footage and adding new footage to match it has been an adventure. But some of those close pals involved with the original footage didn't make it out of LA, and for them and those still around, he has spent the past two years finishing the project since finding a digital copy.

In development, he has the romantic sports dramedy film POLO, inspired by his childhood love of horses, that has won and reached the semi-finals of international screenwriting events including Nicholl Fellowship.

Sizzle Reel, Pitched Deck, Script, and Publish Book are available on request.

Thanks for reading.

Karl J. Niemiec