1.
Steve Tesich
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Stojan Steve Tesich was a Serbian American screenwriter, playwright and novelist. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1979 for the movie Breaking Away. Steve Tesich was born as Stojan Tešić in Užice, in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia on September 29,1942 and his family settled in East Chicago, Indiana. Tesich graduated from Indiana University in 1965 with a BA in Russian and he went on to do graduate work at Columbia University, receiving an MA in Russian Literature in 1967. He also wrote his first plays while at Columbia University, after graduation, he worked as a Department of Welfare caseworker in Brooklyn, New York in 1968. He had been a rider in 1962 for the Phi Kappa Psi team in the Little 500 bicycle race. His teammate was Dave Blase, who rode 139 of 200 laps and was the rider crossing the finish line for his team. Dave Blase was the model for the character in Tesichs award-winning screenplay Breaking Away in 1979. His play Division Street opened on Broadway in 1980 starring John Lithgow, the 1980 production of Division Street played at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City. The production opened on October 8,1980 and closed after 21 performances and his novel Karoo was published posthumously in 1998. Arthur Miller described the novel, Fascinating—a real satiric invention full of wise outrage. ”The novel was a New York Times Notable Book for 1998, the movie Breaking Away won the 1980 Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture-Musical/Comedy. The screenplay to the movie was published in book form as Breaking Away,1979. As a movie tie-in, a novelization of the screenplay was published in 1979 by Warner Books in New York written by Joseph Howard based on the screenplay by Steve Tesich. In 1973, Tesich won the Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright for the play Baba Goya, in 2005, the Serbian Ministry for diaspora established the annual Stojan—Steve Tešić Award, to be awarded to the writers of Serbian origin that write in other languages. L. Doctorow, German-language version entitled Abspann and a French-language version Karoo same as original, New York, Performing Arts Journal Publications,1981. Contents, Division Street -- Baba Goya -- Lake of the Woods -- Passing Game, Steve Tesich at the Internet Movie Database The American Place Theatre Presents Touching Bottom by Steve Tesich. Srpska-mreza. com A Few Moments with Steve Tesich by Dejan Stojanović
2.
Costa-Gavras
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Costa-Gavras is a Greek-French film director and producer, who lives and works in France. He is known for films with political themes, most famously the fast-paced thriller Z. Most of his movies have made in French, however, six were made in English, Missing, Hanna K. Betrayed, Music Box, Mad City. He produces most of his films himself, through his production company K. G. Productions, Costa-Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese and his father had been a member of the Pro-Soviet branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War. In 1956, he left his university studies to film at the French national film school. After film school, he apprenticed under Yves Allégret, and became an assistant director for Jean Giono, after several further positions as first assistant director, he directed his first feature film, Compartiment Tueurs, in 1965. His 1967 film Shock Troops was entered into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival, the film is a fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. It had additional resonance because, at the time of its release, Z won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Costa-Gavras and co-writer Jorge Semprún won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Film Screenplay, LAveu follows the path of Artur London, a Czechoslovakian communist minister falsely arrested and tried for treason and espionage in the Slánský show trial in 1952. State of Siege takes place in Uruguay under a government in the early 1970s. Hormans father, played by Jack Lemmon, and wife, played by Sissy Spacek, search in vain to determine his fate. Nathaniel Davis, US ambassador to Chile from 1971–1973, a version of character had been portrayed in the movie, filed a US$150 million libel suit. 1372, against the studio and the director, which was eventually dismissed, the film won an Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation and the Palme dOr at the Cannes Film Festival. Betrayed, roughly based upon the terrorist activities of American neo-Nazi and white supremacist Robert Mathews, in Music Box, a respected Hungarian immigrant is accused of having commanded an Anti-Semitic death squad during World War II. His daughter, a Chicago defense attorney played by Jessica Lange, the film is inspired by the arrest and trial of Ukrainian immigrant John Demjanjuk and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas realization that his father had been a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party. The film won the Golden Bear at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival, La Petite Apocalypse was entered into the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival. Amen. was based in part on the highly controversial 1963 play, ein christliches Trauerspiel, by Rolf Hochhuth
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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE was a German-born British and American Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory. After moving to India in 1951, she married Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, the couple lived in New Delhi, and had three daughters. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began then to elaborate her experiences in India and wrote novels, Jhabvala wrote a dozen novels,23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories and was made a CBE in 1998 and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant. She is the person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar. Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne, Germany to Jewish parents Marcus, Marcus was a lawyer who moved to Germany from Poland to escape conscription and Eleanoras father was cantor of Colognes largest synagogue. Her father was accused of communist links, arrested and released, the family was among the last group of refugees to flee the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert Salomon, an expert on Heinrich Heine and horror films, was fellow of The Queens College and Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. During World War II, Prawer lived in Hendon in London, experienced the Blitz and she became a British citizen in 1948. The following year, her father committed suicide after discovering that 40 members of his family had died during the Holocaust, Prawer attended Hendon County School and then Queen Mary College, where she received an MA in English literature in 1951. Jhabvala lived in India for 24 years from 1951 and her first novel, To Whom She Will, was published in 1955. It was followed by Esmond in India, The Householder and Get Ready for the Battle, the Householder, with a screenplay by Jhabvala, was filmed in 1963 by Merchant and Ivory. During her years in India she wrote scripts for the Merchant-Ivory duo for The Guru and she collaborated with Ivory for the screenplays for Bombay Talkie and ABC After-school Specials, William - The Life and Times of William Shakespeare. In 1975, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and that year, she moved to New York where she wrote The Place of Peace. Jhabvala remained ill at ease with India and all that it brought into her life and her early works in India dwell on the themes of romantic love and arranged marriages and are portraits of the social mores, idealism and chaos of the early decades of independent India. Jhabvala moved to New York in 1975 and lived there until her death in 2013, many of these works feature India as a setting where her characters go to in search of spiritual enlightenment only to emerge defrauded and exposed to the materialistic pursuits of the East. The New York Times Review of Books chose her Out of India as one of the best reads for that year. In 2005 she published My Nine Lives, Chapters of a Possible Past with illustrations by her husband, salman Rushdie described her as a rootless intellectual when he anthologised her in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing while John Updike described her an initiated outsider
4.
Philip Kaufman
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Philip Kaufman is an American film director and screenwriter who has directed fifteen films over a career spanning more than five decades. He has been described as a maverick and an iconoclast, notable for his versatility and he is considered an auteur, whose films have always expressed his personal vision. His choice of topics has been eclectic and sometimes controversial, having adapted novels with diverse themes and stories, Kaufmans works have included genres such as realism, horror, fantasy, erotic, Westerns, underworld crime, and inner city gangs. Examples are Milan Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Michael Crichtons Rising Sun, a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and his film The Wanderers has achieved cult status. But his greatest success was Tom Wolfes true-life The Right Stuff, other critics note that Kaufmans films are strong on mood and atmosphere, with powerful cinematography and a lyrical, poetic style to portray different historic periods. His later films have a somewhat European style, but the stories always stress individualism and integrity, Kaufman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1936, the only son of Elizabeth, a housewife, and Nathan Kaufman, a produce businessman. He was the grandson of German-Jewish immigrants, one of his grammar and high school friends was William Friedkin, who also became a director. He developed a love of movies and during his youth he would often go to double features. He attended the University of Chicago where he received a degree in history and he returned to Chicago for a postgraduate degree, hoping to become a professor of history. In 1958 Kaufman married Rose Fisher, a year after they met as undergraduates and they later had a son, Peter. Before graduating Kaufman became involved in the movement and in 1960 moved to San Francisco. He took various jobs there, including worker, and befriended a number of influential people. He and his wife decided to travel and live in Europe for a while where he would teach. After spending time working on a kibbutz in Israel, he taught English, during his travels he also met author Anaïs Nin, whose relationship with her lover, Henry Miller, later became the inspiration and subject for Kaufmans film Henry and June. Goldstein Kaufman returned to Chicago, ready to make his first feature film and he went around town looking for funding for his directorial debut, Goldstein, co-written and co-directed with Benjamin Manaster. Kaufman initially conceived of the story in a novel. It was inspired by a story from Martin Bubers Tales of the Hasidim, the film won the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, with French director Jean Renoir calling it the best American film he had seen in 20 years. François Truffaut, another leading French director, was visiting Chicago when the film premiered, Kaufman recalled that Truffaut leaped to his feet in the middle of the screening and began applauding
5.
Alan Bennett
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Alan Bennett is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University where he studied history and he stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full-time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968, Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds. The youngest son of a butcher, Walter, and his wife Lilian Mary, Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School. He learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his service before applying for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He was to remain at the university for several years, where he researched and taught Medieval History, in August 1960 Bennett, along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook, achieved instant fame by appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. After the festival, the show continued in London and New York and he also appeared in My Father Knew Lloyd George. His highly regarded television comedy sketch series On the Margin was unfortunately erased, however, in 2014 it was announced that copies of the entire series had been found. Bennetts first stage play Forty Years On, directed by Patrick Garland, was produced in 1968, many television, stage and radio plays followed, with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose, and broadcasting and many appearances as an actor. Bennetts distinctive, expressive voice and the humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his work very popular. Bennetts readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are widely enjoyed. Many of Bennetts characters are unfortunate and downtrodden, life has brought them to an impasse or else passed them by. In many cases they have met with disappointment in the realm of sex and intimate relationships, largely through tentativeness and a failure to connect with others. Despite a long history both the National Theatre and the BBC - Bennett never writes on commission, declaring I dont work on commission. If people dont want it then its too bad, Bennett is both unsparing and compassionate in laying bare his characters frailties
6.
Woody Allen
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Heywood Woody Allen is an American actor, writer, director, comedian, playwright, and musician whose career spans more than six decades. He worked as a writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comedian, as a comedian, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians and he is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late 1970s. Allen often stars in his films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup, some of the best-known of his over 40 films are Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. In 2007 he said Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, critic Roger Ebert described Allen as a treasure of the cinema. Allen won four Academy Awards, three for Best Original Screenplay and one for Best Director and he also won nine British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards. His screenplay for Annie Hall was named the funniest screenplay by the Writers Guild of America in its list of the 101 Funniest Screenplays, in 2011, PBS televised the film biography Woody Allen, A Documentary on the American Masters TV series. Allen was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn, New York and he and his sister, Letty, were raised in Midwood, Brooklyn. He is the son of Nettie, a bookkeeper at her familys delicatessen, and Martin Konigsberg and his family was Jewish, his grandparents immigrated from Russia and Austria, and spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, and German. His parents were born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His childhood was not particularly happy, his parents did not get along, Allen spoke German quite a bit in his early years. He would later joke that when he was young he was sent to inter-faith summer camps. While attending Hebrew school for eight years, he went to Public School 99 and to Midwood High School, at that time, he lived in an apartment at 968 East 14th Street. Unlike his comic persona, he was interested in baseball than school. He impressed students with his talent at card and magic tricks. To raise money, he wrote jokes for agent David O. Alber, at the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen and later began to call himself Woody Allen. According to Allen, his first published joke read, Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O. P. S and he was then earning more than both parents combined
7.
David Mamet
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David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. As a playwright, Mamet has won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet first gained acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway plays in 1976, The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. His play Race opened on Broadway on December 6,2009, Mamets 2017 play The Penitent previewed off-Broadway on February 8,2017. Feature films that Mamet both wrote and directed include Redbelt, The Spanish Prisoner, House of Games, Spartan, Heist, State and Main, The Winslow Boy, and Oleanna. This was accompanied by Homicide, Things Change, and most recently the 2013 HBO film Phil Spector, starring Al Pacino as Spector with Helen Mirren and Jeffrey Tambor. His drama Glengarry Glen Ross, in 1992, was adapted by Mamet into a version which also received an Academy Award nomination. Mamet was also the producer and frequent writer for the TV show The Unit. As a screenplay writer, Mamet received Oscar nominations for The Verdict, Mamet was born in 1947 in Chicago to Jewish parents, Lenore June, a teacher, and Bernard Morris Mamet, an attorney. One of his first jobs was as a busboy at Chicagos The Second City and he was educated at the progressive Francis W. Parker School and at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. At the Chicago Public Library Foundation 20th anniversary fundraiser in 2006, though, I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign. Mamet is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company, he first gained acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway plays in 1976, The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross and his play Race, which opened on Broadway on December 6,2009 and featured James Spader, David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington, and Richard Thomas in the cast, received mixed reviews. His play The Anarchist, starring Patti LuPone and Debra Winger, in her Broadway debut and his 2017 play The Penitent previewed off-Broadway on February 8,2017. In 2002, Mamet was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame, Mamet later received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for Grand Master of American Theater in 2010. His latest feature-length film, a thriller titled Blackbird, is slated for release in 2015, Mamets first produced screenplay was the 1981 production of The Postman Always Rings Twice, based upon James M. Cains novel. He received an Academy Award nomination one year later for his first script, The Verdict and he also wrote the screenplay for The Untouchables. In 1987, Mamet made his directing debut with House of Games, starring his then-wife, Lindsay Crouse. He uses friends as actors, especially in one scene in the movie
