| Whit Stillman |
Article Index for Whit |
Shopping Stillman |
Website Links For Whit |
Information AboutWhit Stillman |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT WHIT STILLMAN | |
| american film directors | |
| american film actors | |
| harvard university alumni | |
| the collegiate school alumni | |
| people from new york city | |
| 1952 births | |
| living people | |
|
Stillman was raised in the Upstate New York town of Cornwall , the son of an impoverished Debutante from Philadelphia and a Democratic politician from Washington D.C. Stillman graduated from Harvard in 1973 and started out as a Journalist in Manhattan, New York . In 1980 he met and married his Spanish wife while on an assignment in Barcelona . He was introduced to some Film Producer s from Madrid and persuaded them that he could sell their films to Spanish-language Television in the U.S. He worked for the next few years in Barcelona and Madrid as a Sales Agent for directors Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo , and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, such as his role in Trueba's '' Sal Gorda ''. Stillman wrote the screenplay for ''Metropolitan'' between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustrating agency in New York, and financed the film from the proceeds of selling his apartment for $50,000 as well as contributions from friends and relatives. It tells the story of the rise and fall of the Sally Fowler Rat Pack , a small group of Preppy Manhattanites making the rounds at debutante balls during Christmas Break of their first year in college. ''Barcelona'', his first studio-financed film, was inspired by his own experiences in Spain during the early 1980s . Stillman has described the film as '' An Officer And A Gentleman '', but with the title referring to two men rather than one. The men, Ted and Fred, experience the awkwardness of being in love in a foreign country culturally and politically opposed to their own. Serendipitously, one of the film's stars, Taylor Nichols , met a Spanish woman during production, whom he later married, thus echoing what Stillman had done years before. ''The Last Days of Disco'' was loosely based on Stillman's experiences in various Manhattan Nightclub s, possibly including Studio 54 . Much like his earlier ''Metropolitan'', the film deals with a group of Ivy League and Amherst Manhattanites, recently graduated from college and Law School , falling in and out of love in the urban environment of the very early 1980s Disco scene. Stillman's Protagonist s voice admiration for Charles Fourier , Jane Austen , and Samuel Johnson . His films, correspondingly, show an interest in the rise and fall of beneficent social situations, the expression and alteration of human Vice and Virtue , and the influence upon these trends exercised by culture and the cultured. '' Filmmaker '' magazine reports in its winter 2006 issue: "To justify the long silence, I've been working on a number of scripts that are in various stages," Stillman says, adding that one of them is ready to go. But his writing process cannot be hurried. ''Metropolitan'', for example, took four years to write, on and off, in the wee hours of the night in a caffeinated haze. "I don't think a script is very authentic until I've thought about it and gone over it a few times," he adds. "For me, time is the biggest luxury." EXTERNAL LINKS |
|
|