(Chicago, Illinois, USA)
John Mattson is an American screenwriter and author. His screenplay for the film Milk Money sold to Paramount Pictures for an outright purchase of $1.1 million ($1,968,366 in 2018 US dollars) after Paramount topped a $1 million bid from Dino De Laurentiis Communications. He is the co-writer of Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (for which he won the 1996 Environmental Media Award) and the writer of Free Willy 3: The Rescue. Ebert and Siskel called Free Willy 3 "the best of the Free Willy movies." His story "Figure and Ground" won the 2018 R. N. Kinder Prize for Realistic Fiction, and was published by Pleiades Magazine in 2019. His story "Eric Clapton's Girlfriend" won the 2019 Los Angeles Review Literary Award for Flash Fiction , judged by Rob Koertge and will be published by the Los Angeles Review in 2019.