Ready Player One (Cline)

Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Ashland, Ohio, USA
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas


Ernest Cline is an American novelist, spoken word artist and screenwriter. In his past, he worked as a short-order cook, fish gutter, plasma donor, elitist video store clerk, and tech support drone. His primary occupation, however, has always been geeking out, and he eventually threw aside those other promising career paths to express his love of pop culture fulltime as a spoken word artist and screenwriter. His 2009 film Fanboys, much to his surprise, became a cult phenomenon

Spoken word
From 1997-2001, Cline performed his original work at the Austin Poetry Slam venues. He was the Austin Poetry Slam Champ in 1998 and 2001, and competed on the Austin Poetry Slam Teams at the 1998 Austin National Poetry Slam and the 2001 Seattle National Poetry Slam

His most popular spoken word pieces include: "Dance, Monkeys, Dance", "Nerd Porn Auteur" and "When I Was a Kid." Paulo Ang, a UCSD student, created a popular flash cartoon out of Ernie's track "Dance Monkeys Dance." Cline himself subsequently reworked "Dance Monkeys Dance" into a faux educational filmstrip, which became a popular viral video that has now been translated into 29 different languages.

In 2001, Cline self-published a chapbook collection of his spoken word writing, The Importance of Being Ernest and released an album, The Geek Wants Out, both sold through his website.

Screenwriting
In 1996, Cline wrote a sequel (Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League) to W. D. Richter's 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and made it available on the Internet.

In 1998, Cline's screenplay, Fanboys, generated local interest in Austin, TX, including mention on Harry Knowles' website Ain't It Cool News. In late 2005, the Weinstein Company purchased Ernest Cline's script for Fanboys film, casting Sam Huntington, Chris Marquette, Dan Fogler, Jay Baruchel and Kristen Bell as the five main characters. Fanboys was released in 2009.

Also in the summer of 2008, Lakeshore Entertainment announced that they would be producing Cline's screenplay, Thundercade. Thundercade follows the story of a video game junkie in his mid-30's who learns that a young gamer has beaten a record he set when he was a teenager. He then travels with his friends to the world's largest gaming championship, Thundercade, to restore his former glory.

Fiction
In June 2010 Cline sold his first novel Ready Player One in a bidding war. The film rights to the novel were sold the following day to Warner Bros. with Cline attached to write the screenplay. Ten months after the hardcover release and coinciding with the paperback release, Cline revealed on his blog that both the paperback and hardcover editions of Ready Player One contained an elaborately hidden easter egg. This clue will form the first part of a series of staged video gaming tests, similar to the plot of the novel. Cline also revealed that the competition's grand prize would be a 1981 DeLorean.

Personal life
Like the hero of Ready Player One, Cline spent much of his young adulthood working a series of low-paying tech support jobs that allowed him to surf the Internet while on the clock and research his many pop-culture obsessions. He's a huge fan of the Back to the Future film series and owns a 1982 DeLorean DMC-12 sports car that has been modified to look like the time-travelling vehicle from the films. Cline’s all-time favorite video game is Black Tiger, which figures prominently into the plot of Ready Player One.

Cline lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and daughter. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/25/13.)