Author Bio
With credits ranging from directing Off-Broadway to portraying Hamlet on the London stage to writing self-help books and Saturday morning cartoons, Jess has lived an eclectic creative life.
A Southern California native, Jess was raised in the bohemian artists' enclave of Lake Sherwood before it was transformed into a top ten golf course. His mother, a freelance writer, and his father, a writer and producer for the Walt Disney Studios, instilled early on a love of language, wordplay, and talking animals.
Wisely giving up sports for drama, speech, and journalism at Newbury Park High School, he continued his education at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of California, Berkeley. Although he majored in English and specialized in Shakespeare, Jess mostly hung out in the dark, subterranean hallways of experimental theater, studying improvisation with Shireen Strooker of Amsterdam's Het Werkteater.
In 1981, he joined forces with high school chum Adam Long and writer/director Daniel Singer to form The Reduced Shakespeare Company.
After six years of busking at Renaissance Faires and tourist haunts with their freewheeling, half-hour versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, their full-length show The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987 and became an international sensation, leading to multiple world tours and lengthy engagements in Los Angeles, New York, London, Montreal, Dublin, and Edinburgh. In 1991, the show opened in the West End to rave reviews. Jess retired from the RSC in 1992, but The Complete Works continued with various casts, finally closing at Piccadilly's Criterion Theatre in 2005 as the longest-running comedy in the West End.
Although the 1990s found Jess adapting and editing the trade paperback version of The Complete Works (now in its fourth printing) and directing critically-acclaimed productions of the show both Off-Broadway and at San Diego's Old Globe Theater, he largely turned his attention from Shakespeare to animation. Following in his father's footsteps, he embarked on a second career as a writer and producer for the Walt Disney Company that culminated in two Daytime Emmy awards for Disney's Teacher's Pet (starring Nathan Lane and Jerry Stiller) and the hugely successful Lilo and Stitch spinoffs Stitch! The Movie; Lilo and Stitch: The Series; and Leroy and Stitch.
After dipping his toes back in Shakespearean waters with the lighthearted self-help book What Would Shakespeare Do? in 2000, Jess left Disney in 2005 to begin work on his first novel, My Name Is Will — A Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare, which blends a historically plausible story of William Shakespeare's young adulthood with a contemporary romp loosely based on experiences from Jess's years in Santa Cruz and Berkeley.
Jess lives in Hollywood with his wife Sa, an accomplished ceramicist.
In his spare time, he blogs about Los Angeles's dynamic ethnic food scene (lafoodcrazy.blogspot.com) and supports the L.A. Philharmonic, the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles Kings, and the distillers of Ketel One vodka, as well as many progressive causes and charities.