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] after Paramount topped a $1 million bid from Dino De Laurentiis Communications.[2] He is the co-writer of Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (for which he won the 1996 Environmental Media Award) and Free Willy 3: The Rescue. His story "Figure and Ground" won the 2018 R. N. Kinder Prize for Realistic Fiction,[3] and was published by Pleiades in 2019. His story "Eric Clapton's Girlfriend" won the 2019 Los Angeles Review Literary Award for Flash Fiction.[4]
He teaches in the screenwriting program at Chapman University.[5]