Maximus Wright’s entry into the entertainment world began with a question: Why can’t Mississippi be a destination for film and TV?
About six years ago, his daughter, Jaime Wright, approached him and said she wanted to try out for parts in Disney productions. To Jaime, then 14 years old, that meant eventually moving away from their home state.
“She told me, ‘Dad, when I graduate high school, I’m going to have to leave Mississippi.’ I was like, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘I can’t be on television in Mississippi.’ That struck a cord with me. That bothered me,” Wright says.
Wright, a Yazoo City native who has lived in the Jackson area since 2004, began taking his daughter to auditions and says that he saw the scheme of things. These productions weren’t attempting to build anything in Mississippi.
He decided to get more involved in boosting the local film community, hosting entertainment events and purchasing a camera to make his own short projects. In 2013, he launched his company, Phoenix Rising Entertainment, through which he now creates films and novels.
“When I was growing up, if they said, ‘What do you want to be? You have a choice of being an astronaut, a writer or a ninja,’ then I would have said, ‘Looks like I’m going to be a ninja because I love Bruce Lee,’” he says with a laugh. “I really couldn’t have fathomed that this is what I’d be doing.”
While film wasn’t a career path he anticipated, Wright says that he always loved movies and paid close attention to dialogue. Once he got into the field, though, all of his quirks made sense, he says, whether it was picking up on how people moved or their speech patterns.
Wright’s latest project is a short film adapting part of his second novel, “My Name Is Lola.” Initially, the events in “My Name Is Lola” were more of a backstory he had in his head for the titular character while writing his authorial debut, “Soul Damage.”