Garcia attended
Cornell University to study English and film, then transferred to the
University of Southern California during his junior year. His first novel,
Anonymous Rex was published in 1999. The second novel in the Rex series,
Casual Rex, was published in 2001, and was a prequel to
Anonymous Rex, a fact which was not on the book flap. The inclusion of characters in
Casual Rex who were dead in
Anonymous Rex confused many fans, who assumed that the book was a sequel. In 2002,
Random House published
Matchstick Men, a novel completely different from Garcia's prior work.
Warner Brothers had already purchased the film rights and signed Ridley Scott as the director, with
Nicolas Cage,
Sam Rockwell and
Alison Lohman as the film's stars. The
film version, released in September 2003, received good reviews but was an average performer at the box office. 2004 was a busy year for Garcia. His third book in the Rex series,
Hot And Sweaty Rex, was published early in the year, and in June,
HarperCollins/
ReganBooks published ''Cassandra French's Finishing School For Boys'', a hard-core satire of the
chick-lit genre. Also in 2004, the SciFi Channel showed the two-hour
TV-movie pilot for
Anonymous Rex, which was based on
Casual Rex but kept the name of the original book. The show received negative reviews from both critics and fans and was never made into a series. In June 2009, it was announced that
Jude Law and
Forest Whitaker would star in
Repo Men, a movie co-written by Garcia with Garrett Lerner, a writer for
Fox Broadcasting's
House. The movie is based on Garcia's 2009 original
paperback novel for HarperCollins,
The Repossession Mambo. As of 2010, Garcia has also written an adaptation of
John Searles book
Strange but True, a thriller to be directed by Alex and David Pastor. In 2012, Garcia wrote and executive-produced to produce a pilot for a TV series adapted from his novel ''Cassandra French's Finishing School For Boys'' for MTV, along with actress
Krysten Ritter as a fellow exec. producer. It did not go forward as a series. In 2015, Garcia produced the horror film
The Autopsy of Jane Doe. In 2016, Garcia wrote and executive-produced "Cassandra French's Finishing School," an 8-episode series based on his own novel, and released by
DirecTV and Fullscreen. His adaptation of John Searles' novel "Strange But True" was produced in 2018, and was released in 2019 by CBS Films, starring Amy Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Nick Robinson, Margaret Qualley, Blythe Danner, and Brian Cox. On January 1, 2023, Netflix released
Kaleidoscope, a non-linear heist thriller on which Garcia was showrunner and creator. This is his second project with
Ridley Scott, who is an executive producer on the show. Within its first 6 months on air, Kaleidoscope had over 252,000,000 hours viewed, and was the #12 most watched program on Netflix. ==Personal life==