Whit Stillman | |
|---|---|
 Stillman in 2017 | |
| Born | John Whitney Stillman (1952-01-25)January 25, 1952 (age 73) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Alma mater | Harvard University (AB) |
| Occupation(s) | Screenwriter,film director |
| Years active | 1973–present |
| Notable work | Metropolitan (1990) The Last Days of Disco (1998) Love & Friendship (2016) |
John Whitney Stillman (born January 25, 1952) is an American writer-director and actor known for his 1990 filmMetropolitan, which earned him a nomination for theAcademy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He is also known for his other films,Barcelona (1994),The Last Days of Disco (1998),Damsels in Distress (2011), as well as his most recent film,Love & Friendship, released in 2016.
Stillman was born in 1952 in Washington, D.C.,[1][2] to Margaret Drinker (née Riley), from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and aDemocratic politician, John Sterling Stillman, theAssistant Secretary of Commerce for Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs under PresidentJohn F. Kennedy[3] (a classmate of Stillman's father at Harvard), from Washington, D.C.[4][5] His great-grandfather was businessmanJames Stillman; his great-great-grandfather,Charles Stillman, foundedBrownsville, Texas.[6]
Stillman was raised inCornwall, New York, and experienceddepression during puberty. "I was very depressed when I was 11 or 12," he recounted toThe Wall Street Journal. "I was sent to the leadingFreudian child psychologist in Washington, D.C. It was heck. The last thing I needed to talk about was guilt about sex." However, when his parents separated, he found that his depression ceased. "I actually felt healthier."[7]
Stillman's godfather wasE. Digby Baltzell, a University of Pennsylvania professor and chronicler of theAmerican upper class.[8][note 1]
He attended theCollegiate School in New York City,Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, andMillbrook School inMillbrook, New York. Hemajored in history atHarvard University, where he wrote for its student newspaperThe Harvard Crimson.[9][10]
After graduating from Harvard in 1973, Stillman began working as an editorial assistant atDoubleday in New York City, followed by a stint as a junior editor atThe American Spectator, a conservative magazine.[9]: 41 [11][12] Stillman has subsequently distanced himself from his work for theSpectator, stating that he now hates "to be drawn into ideological debates" and prefers to remain "apolitical."[13][14]
He was introduced to some film producers fromMadrid and persuaded them that he could sell their films to Spanish-language television in the US. He worked for the next few years in Madrid andBarcelona as a sales agent for directorsFernando Trueba andFernando Colomo, and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, as in Trueba's filmSal Gorda.[15][16]
Metropolitan (1990)
Stillman wrote the screenplay forMetropolitan from 1984 to 1988 while running an illustration agency in New York, and he financed the film by selling the insider rights[note 2] to his apartment (for $50,000)[18] and with the contributions of friends and relatives.[19] Loosely based on Stillman's Manhattan days, with his divorced mother during the week of Christmas break 1969[20] during his first year at Harvard,Metropolitan tells the story of the alienatedPrincetonian Tom Townsend's introduction to the "Sally Fowler Rat Pack" (SFRP), a small group ofpreppy,Upper East Side Manhattanites making the rounds at debutante balls during Christmas break of their first year in college. Though he is a socialist deeply skeptical of the SFRP's upper-class values, Tom (Edward Clements) grows increasingly attached to the cynical Nick (Chris Eigeman) and plays an important part, of which he is largely unaware, in the life of Audrey (Carolyn Farina), a young debutante. Many of the exclusive interior locations were lent to Stillman by family friends and relatives.[19]: 18
The film premiered and was screened as part of theDirectors' Fortnight section at the1990 Cannes Film Festival.Metropolitan was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize (Drama) at the 1990Sundance Film Festival. Stillman won Best First Feature at the6th Independent Spirit Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991 forBest Original Screenplay.[21] He won the 1990New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best New Director.[22] The movie was a financial success, grossing about $3 million on a budget of $225,000.[23][24][25] In an interview Stillman said of the film, "The material seemed pretty rich, almost rank. And perhaps it's better approaching a subject people feel strongly about, even if that strong feeling is hatred, than something colorless and unspecific. Also, I love anachronism and this was the chance to film, essentially, a costume picture set in the present day or recent past. But a large part of the idea was to disguise our pitifully low budget by filming the most elegant subject available."[26]
Barcelona (1994)
Barcelona, his first studio-financed film, was inspired by his own experiences in Spain during the early 1980s. Stillman has described the film asAn 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.[27]
The Last Days of Disco (1998)
The Last Days of Disco was based loosely on Stillman's experiences in various Manhattan nightclubs, includingStudio 54. The film concerns Ivy League andHampshire graduates falling in and out of love in thedisco scene of Manhattan in the "very early 1980s".Chloë Sevigny andKate Beckinsale play roommates with opposite personalities who frequent disco clubs together.The Last Days of Disco concludes a trilogy loosely based on Stillman's life and contains many references to the previous two films: a character considers a move to Spain to work for American ad agencies there after meeting with theBarcelona character of Ted Boynton, andMetropolitan's heroine Audrey Rouget reappears briefly as a successful publisher, as do a few other characters from that film, as clubgoers. In 2000 Stillman published a novelization of the film, titledThe Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails atPetrossian Afterwards.[28] The novelization won the French 2014 Prix Fitzgerald Award.[29]
Stillman stated in 2006 that he was working on several unfinished scripts.[30] He had been slated to direct a film adaptation ofChristopher Buckley's novelLittle Green Men,[31] but in a 2009 interview, Stillman said the adaptation is "[not] happening, at least with me."[32] He was writing another film,Dancing Mood, set in Jamaica in the 1960s, which was not produced.[32]
Damsels in Distress (2011)
After a 13-year hiatus, Stillman released his fourth film,Damsels in Distress, starringGreta Gerwig,Adam Brody,Hugo Becker andLio Tipton (credited as Analeigh Tipton). It premiered September 10 at the 2011 Venice Film Festival as the closing film and received favorable reviews. The film is "about three young women at an East Coast university, the transfer student that joins their group and the young men they become entangled with."[33]
The Cosmopolitans (2014)
In 2014, Stillman wrote and directed the pilot episode of the TV seriesThe Cosmopolitans for Amazon Studios on August 28, 2014, the pilot was available and Amazon Prime users could watch the pilot episode and vote to pick it up for a full series.[34][35] On July 11, 2016, Tom Grater reported that Stillman was commissioned by Amazon to write six new scripts to continue his original pilot film forThe Cosmopolitans.[36]
"I explained to Amazon that I don’t like outlining or projecting what something’s going to be. I like to allow a story to arise as I’m writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes. I was really resistant to do the mini-bible. So I gave them something, but I really didn’t want to do it that way. They also knew about the film, so they commissioned six scripts for the first season that they were going to let me postpone until I finished this film, which is now. So in ten days, we’ll be full on with that. It’s been really good because I think I was waiting for the idea I really want, and I think I have that now. It’s not exactly Paris, it’s a European idea. So it will be Chloe and Adam Brody. We’ll keep the pilot, that’s part of the story, but we’ll be going a different place with it."
- Whit Stillman, shortly before the world premiere of Love & Friendship at Sundance[37]
In 2016, Amazon stated that: "Our agreements with the content provider don’t allow purchases of this title at this time."[38][39][40][34]
"The bulk of the pilot of “The Cosmopolitans” involves several of Stillman’s signature subjects. The first is a party: the male trio, plus Aubrey, head to a soirée at the posh apartment of an arrogantly wealthy Parisian acquaintance (or perhaps a German in Paris), Fritz (Freddy Åsblom). For Stillman, parties are laboratories where possibilities arise suddenly from the close and quickly ricocheting contacts of social atoms—and where social rules, hidden beneath the murky surface of daily life, emerge more clearly, in ritualized isolation. The second is something that happens at the party: a dance, but a formally patterned one where the rules are the very subject."
-Richard Brody, 27 August 2014[41]
Love & Friendship (2016)
A film version of one of Jane Austen's early short novelsLady Susan was reported byEntertainment Weekly on January 22, 2016. This followed the indication that Little, Brown and Company would be publishing the screenplay adapted by Stillman[42] The film premiered in January 2016 at theSundance Film Festival under the title ofLove & Friendship. Although the plot of the film is adapted fromLady Susan, the actual title used (Love & Friendship) is from another, unrelated earlyepistolary novel by Austen, unpublished during her lifetime. It received universal acclaim from critics.
The promotional announcement by Little, Brown and Company summarized Stillman's adaptation stating; "Recently widowed, Lady Susan arrives, unannounced, at her brother-in-law's estate to wait out colorful rumors about her dalliances circulating through polite society. While there, she becomes determined to secure a new husband for herself, and one for her reluctant debutante daughter, Frederica, too. As Lady Susan embarks on a controversial relationship with a married man, seduction, deception, broken hearts, and gossip all ensue. With a pitch-perfect Austenian sensibility, Stillman breathes new life into Austen's work, making it his own by adding original narration from a character comically loyal to the story's fiendishly manipulative heroine, Lady Susan."[43]
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Stillman wrote and directed threecomedies of manners[44] released in the 1990s:Metropolitan[45] (1990),Barcelona (1994), andThe Last Days of Disco (1998); he published a novel based on the last of these films in 2000.[46] After completing his film trilogy, Stillman left independent comedy and started researching and writing a series of scripts set abroad.[46][19] In August 1998 (shortly afterThe Last Days of Disco was released) he left his loft conversion in Manhattan's SoHo and moved to Paris.[13] He returned to New York in 2010.[13]
A fourth film,Damsels in Distress, was released in 2011, premiering out of competition as the closing film at the68th Venice International Film Festival.[47]The Guardian in 2012 compared Stillman toTerrence Malick, another filmmaker who has "come to owe a good part of their mystique to the very paucity of their oeuvre...The lengthy gaps in between (films) have created expectations that are hard to fulfil, and admirers have been inclined to overestimate their achievement."[48] A reviewer atSalon wrote that the reason for the long gaps between his films is that "Stillman is sometimes simply too damn smart for his own good. You can't always tell at whom he's poking fun, or why, and it becomes unfortunately easy to typecast him as theWASP answer toWoody Allen and conclude that his movies are insufferably irritating documents of privilege. He himself is aware of that possibility the whole time, and bastes his entire worldview in a rueful, ironic-romantic glaze."[49]
Stillman's effectiveness at the box-office has been mixed. He filmedMetropolitan for about $250,000, according to Stillman, with a box-office return of about $3 million.Barcelona was then filmed on a budget of under $3 million, returning just under $8 million. His third film was not a box-office success; its budget of $8 million returned about $3 million. Stillman, in an AOL interview following the twenty-fifth anniversary ofMetropolitan, refers to himself as having been put into "director's prison" for more than 10 years before he madeDamsels. His 2016 filmLove & Friendship, a comedy based on a Jane Austen story, was a box-office success, grossing more than $20 million worldwide against a production budget of $3 million.[50]
| Year | Title | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Homicide: Life on the Street | Episode: "The Heart of a Saturday Night" |
| 2014 | The Cosmopolitans | Television pilot |
| TBA | The Splendid Affinities | Series |
| Year | Award | Category | Nominated work | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Academy Awards | Best Original Screenplay | Metropolitan | Nominated | [51] |
| 1990 | Sundance Film Festival | Grand Jury Prize | Nominated | ||
| 1990 | Independent Spirit Awards | Best First Feature | Nominated | ||
| Best Screenplay | Nominated | ||||
| 1990 | New York Film Critics Circle | Best New Director | Won | ||
| Best Screenplay | Nominated | ||||
| 1994 | Torino International Film Festival | Best Feature Film | Barcelona | Nominated | |
| 2016 | Gotham Awards | Best Screenplay | Love & Friendship | Nominated | |
| 2016 | London Film Critics' Circle | Screenplay of the Year | Nominated | ||
| 2016 | Dublin Film Critics' Circle | Best Screenplay | 4th Place | ||
| 2016 | IndieWire Critics Poll | Best Screenplay | 3rd Place | ||
| 2016 | Village Voice Film Poll | Best Screenplay | 3rd Place |
25-Year Wexner Center film retrospective
The Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University held a 25-year retrospective of the career and films of Stillman including his film titledLove & Friendship. At the time of the retrospective, Stillman was asked: "Your films all have a sort of costume drama sensibility, but without the costumes, and now you've made a costume drama, period dress and all." Stillman responded by stating that: "Love & Friendship doesn't loom as a costume drama, because it's a pretty funny comedy, so it's really not what you might anticipate. It's notDownton Abbey in any way, shape or form. There are a lot of very good English comic actors who have done the supporting parts and really shine. I love Jane Austen. I sort of wanted something of my own to work on between paid script writing assignments. It's good that I had so much time with no producer or studio executive wanting delivery quickly because it's an incredibly funny novella she wrote, but hard to read and hard to dramatize. It's an epistolary form from the 18th century and there are all these very funny ideas and lines buried within. It's kind of an inaccessible format and it was a long process of adaptation."[52]
Criterion Collection Release
In April 2016,The Criterion Collection released a retrospective box set edition ofMetropolitan,Barcelona, andThe Last Days of Disco, available on Blu-ray and DVD. Stillman himself oversaw the digital transfers of the films and recorded audio commentaries along with members of the casts and crews.[53]
Stillman wrote a novelization ofThe Last Days of Disco published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under the same title, with the added subtitle "...With Cocktails atPetrossian Afterwards". It won the French 2014 Prix Fitzgerald Award.[34] Stillman also wrote the novelization of his 2016 filmLove & Friendship.
