Screenwriter/producer Mike Gray died 30 April 2013 of heart failure. Born 26 October 1935 in Darlington, Indiana, he won a WGA award and was nominated for an Oscar, BAFTA, and Golden Globe for his screenplay of The China Syndrome (1979).

After earning a degree in engineering from Purdue, Gray moved to Chicago in the early 1960s, and worked at producing television commercials. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Gray took a film crew to the streets to record clashes between police and protesters. In a 1998 interview with the Chicago Tribune, he said, “When we came back to our studio at 3 a.m., we were different people. We had been changed, transformed.”

According to his Los Angeles Times obituary, “he gave up TV commercials and turned to projects that reflected his new political sensibilities. With Howard Alk, a founder of Chicago’s Second City comedy group, he collaborated on documentary films, including American Revolution II (1969), about the social and political turmoil of the 1960s, and The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), about the FBI raid in which Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton was killed.” He moved to Los Angeles in 1973, and wrote screenplays and books, including [[[Angle of Attack]]], about the moon race, and [[[Drug Crazy: How We Got Into this Mess and How We Can Get Out]]], about the war on drugs.

Of his most famous work, the Times says he “developed the ‘China Syndrome’ story after reading books and interviewing scientists about the dangers of nuclear power. No one knew how timely the subject would prove. A nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went into partial meltdown barely three weeks after the opening of the movie, which starred Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and became a box-office and critical success.

Gray wrote and directed Wavelength (1983), was a writer/producer/director for the television series Starman (1986), and wrote the episode “Unnatural Selection” and directed it and 12 other episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation during the 1988-89 season.

At the time of his death, he was working on a documentary about former Black Panther and Houston community organizer Robert E. Lee III. He is survived by his wife, Carol, and a son, Lucas.