![]() | This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject.(February 2025) |
Sarah Kernochan | |
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Born | Sarah Marshall Kernochan December 30, 1947 |
Education | Rosemary Hall |
Alma mater | Sarah Lawrence College |
Occupations |
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Years active | 1972–present |
Spouse | James Lapine |
Children | Phoebe Lapine |
Parent(s) | Adelaide Chatfield-Taylor John Marshall Kernochan |
Relatives | Wayne Chatfield-Taylor (grandfather) Hobart Chatfield-Taylor (great-grandfather) Rose Chatfield-Taylor (great-grandmother) ContentsCharles B. Farwell (great-great-grandfather) |
Website | sarahkernochan |
Sarah Marshall Kernochan ( /ˈkɜːrnəkɛn/ KUR-nə-ken; born December 30, 1947) is an American documentarian, film director, screenwriter and novelist. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including two Academy Awards (Documentary Feature for Marjoe in 1973 and Documentary Short Subject for Thoth in 2002).
Kernochan was born in New York City, the daughter of Adelaide (Chatfield-Taylor), a UNESCO consultant, and John Marshall Kernochan, a Columbia Law School professor. [1] Her maternal grandfather was Wayne Chatfield-Taylor, Under Secretary of Commerce and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. [1] Her maternal great-grandparents included writers Hobart Chatfield-Taylor and Anna De Koven. Her great-great-grandfather was Illinois Senator and XIT Ranch owner Charles B. Farwell. Her paternal grandfather was composer Marshall Kernochan.
She graduated from Rosemary Hall (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in 1965, where Kernochan was classmates with Glenn Close, [2] and attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1966. [3]
After Sarah Lawrence, she worked as a ghostwriter for The Village Voice for about a year. [3] After quitting that job, she became interested in documentary film-making and soon gained national prominence in the United States as co-director and co-producer with Howard Smith of the film Marjoe (1972), about evangelist Marjoe Gortner, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature. [4] [5]
Kernochan's first screen credit as a screenwriter came with the film 9½ Weeks (1986). She followed that film with the script for Dancers (1987), starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and directed by Herbert Ross, which chronicled the backstage drama of a ballet company (played by American Ballet Theatre dancers) and their director during the staging of the ballet Giselle .
By the time she was brought in to work on the film Sommersby (1993), she had become known for a particular style of writing in Hollywood. [6] She commented in an interview with Salon:
Since then, she has been primarily a screenwriter for such films as Dancers (1987); Impromptu (1991), the debut film directed by her husband James Lapine with a script she characterized as "maybe the best thing that I will ever do"; [6] Sommersby (1993); wrote and directed The Hairy Bird (1998); [7] co-wrote the story for What Lies Beneath (2000); [8] and directed Thoth (2002) and wrote Learning to Drive (2014).
Her second documentary, Thoth , also won an Academy Award in 2002, this time for Best Documentary Short Subject. She has taught screenwriting at Emerson College. [9]
In August 2014, her feature script Learning to Drive , based on a New Yorker story by Katha Pollitt, went before cameras. Starring Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson, the film was released in the United States on August 21, 2015.
In 1977, Kernochan's novel Dry Hustle ( ISBN 0-688-03149-8 in hard cover, ISBN 0-425-03661-8 in paperback) was published. It was reprinted as an ebook in 2011. In June 2011, Kernochan released her first novel in over 35 years entitled Jane Was Here ( ISBN 0980037727). A mysterious young woman, calling herself Jane, arrives in the small rundown community of Graynier, Massachusetts. She can point out the house where she grew up, though she has never been to Graynier in her life. Jane carries with her the fragmentary memory of her former life, and refuses to adjust to her new identity. Thus begins Jane's mission, to retrieve the puzzle pieces of a former life, groping her way through the past and the present simultaneously.
Kernochan is also a singer, lyricist and composer. During the two years after the release of Marjoe , she released two albums on RCA Records as a singer-songwriter, House of Pain and Beat Around the Bush. [10]
Kernochan released her third album as a singer-songwriter, Decades of Demos, in 2013. She also wrote the musical Sleeparound Town, which was a show about puberty and featured five adolescents. [9]
Kernochan is married to American stage director James Lapine, a Pulitzer Prize and three-time Tony Award winner. The couple's daughter is food and health writer Phoebe Lapine. [11]
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a 1954 American musical film, directed by Stanley Donen, with music by Gene de Paul, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and choreography by Michael Kidd. The screenplay, by Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich, and Dorothy Kingsley, is based on the short story "The Sobbin' Women", by Stephen Vincent Benét, which was based in turn on the ancient Roman legend of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which is set in Oregon in 1850, is particularly known for Kidd's unusual choreography, which makes dance numbers out of such mundane frontier pursuits as chopping wood and raising a barn. Film critic Stephanie Zacharek has called the barn-raising sequence in Seven Brides "one of the most rousing dance numbers ever put on screen." The film was photographed in Ansco Color in the CinemaScope format.
Impromptu is a 1991 period drama film directed by James Lapine, written by Sarah Kernochan, produced by Daniel A. Sherkow and Stuart Oken, and starring Hugh Grant as Frédéric Chopin and Judy Davis as George Sand. It was shot entirely on location in France as a British production by an American company. Its main filming location was at the Château des Briottières outside Angers, in the Loire Valley.
James Elliot Lapine is an American stage director, playwright, screenwriter, and librettist. He has won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times, for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion. He has frequently collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn.
Guinevere Jane Turner is an American actress, screenwriter, and film director. She wrote the films American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page and played the lead role of the dominatrix Tanya Cheex in Preaching to the Perverted. She was a story editor and played recurring character Gabby Deveaux on Showtime's The L Word.
Elisabeth Röhm is an American television and film actress and director. She is best known for playing Kate Lockley in the television series Angel from 1999 to 2001 and Serena Southerlyn in the television series Law & Order from 2001 to 2005.
Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner is an American former evangelist preacher and actor. He first gained public attention during the late 1940s when his parents arranged for him to be ordained as a preacher at age four due to his extraordinary speaking ability, making him the youngest known in that position to this day. As a young man, he preached on the revival circuit and brought celebrity to the revival movement.
Howard Smith was an American Oscar-winning film director, producer, journalist, screenwriter, actor and radio broadcaster.
Marjoe is a 1972 American documentary film produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan about the life of Pentecostal preacher Marjoe Gortner. It won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The Academy Film Archive is part of the Academy Foundation, established in 1944 with the purpose of organizing and overseeing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' educational and cultural activities, including the preservation of motion picture history. Although the existing incarnation of the Academy Film Archive began in 1991, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acquired its first film in 1929.
Cynthia Scott is a Canadian award-winning filmmaker who has produced, directed, written, and edited several films with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Her works have won the Oscar and Canadian Film Award. Scott is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Her projects with the NFB are mainly focused on documentary filmmaking. Some of Scott's most notable documentaries for the NFB feature dancing and the dance world including Flamenco at 5:15 (1983), which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984. She is married to filmmaker John N. Smith; their son is actor Dylan Smith.
Thoth is a documentary film by Sarah Kernochan and Lynn Appelle about the life of New York–based street performer S. K. Thoth. In 2002, the film won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 74th Academy Awards.
Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 American psychological horror film written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel. The film stars Mia Farrow as a newlywed living in Manhattan who becomes pregnant, but soon begins to suspect that her neighbors have sinister intentions regarding her and her baby. The film's supporting cast includes John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, Angela Dorian, and Charles Grodin in his feature film debut.
Robin Stender Swicord is an American screenwriter, film director, and playwright, best known for literary adaptations. Her notable screenplays include Little Women (1994), Matilda (1996), Practical Magic (1998), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), the latter of which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. She wrote and directed the 2007 film The Jane Austen Book Club.
S. K. Thoth is a New York-based performance artist known for his eclectic mix of violin, voice, and dance performance who was the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary Thoth. Thoth calls his work "prayformance", emphasizing a spiritual dimension. His motto from his website is "I heal through divine prayformance". He sings in a language he himself created, the language of the Festad, a mythical people and land in his "Solopera", his one-man opera.
John Marshall Kernochan was a law professor, composer and music publisher who founded Columbia Law School's Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts. His pioneering work in intellectual property law helped spur stronger protections for artists.
Black Swan is a 2010 American psychological horror film directed by Darren Aronofsky from a screenplay by Mark Heyman, John McLaughlin, and Andres Heinz, based on a story by Heinz. The film stars Natalie Portman in the lead role, with Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder in supporting roles. The plot revolves around a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by the company of New York City Ballet. The production requires a ballerina to play the innocent and fragile White Swan, for which the committed dancer Nina Sayers (Portman) is a perfect fit, as well as the dark and sensual Black Swan, which are qualities better embodied by the new rival Lily (Kunis). Nina is overwhelmed by a feeling of immense pressure when she finds herself competing for the role, causing her to lose her tenuous grip on reality and descend into madness.
Rosemary Hall was an independent girls school at Ridgeway and Zaccheus Mead Lane in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was later merged into Choate Rosemary Hall and moved to the Choate boys' school campus in Wallingford, Connecticut.
Sarah Williams is a British producer and screenwriter perhaps best known for writing the scripts to the 2005 television film Wallis & Edward and co-writing the 2007 feature film Becoming Jane. For her work adapting the novels Poppy Shakespeare and Small Island for television, Williams received two Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award nominations.
All I Wanna Do is a 1998 American comedy film written and directed by Sarah Kernochan. It stars Kirsten Dunst, Gaby Hoffmann, Monica Keena, Heather Matarazzo and Rachael Leigh Cook in an ensemble cast as students of the fictional Miss Godard's Preparatory School for Girls, and Lynn Redgrave as the school's headmistress. The film takes place in 1963 and focuses on several students' plotting and sabotage of a proposed merger for the school to go coed.