Alan McElroy was born in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Hawken School in Gates Mills, Ohio, and planned on becoming a novelist while majoring in psychology at Boston University, at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and at Miami's European campus in Luxembourg. Shortly after graduation and marriage he taught himself to write his first screenplay from an article in Writer's Digest magazine. McElroy then moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Kymm, and one script in hand, and was picked as one of thirty ind