Stephen Schiff | |
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Born | |
Occupation | Writer |
Awards | Golden Globe, Pulitzer Prize finalist, two Writers Guild of America Awards and two additional nominations, Writers Guild of America Richard B. Jablow Award, Peabody Award, two Emmy Award nominations, Critics Choice Award, American Film Institute Award, Television Critics Association Award, Producers Guild Award |
Stephen Schiff is an American screenwriter, producer, and journalist. He is best known for his work at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair , his screenplays for Lolita , True Crime , and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps , and his work as a writer and producer on the FX television series The Americans .
Schiff grew up in Littleton, Colorado. [1] He graduated from Wesleyan University. [2]
Schiff began his writing career at The Boston Phoenix , where he became the chief film critic and film editor (succeeding David Denby), [3] and hired and trained such critics as Owen Gleiberman and David Edelstein.
In 1983, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. [4] [5] Later that year, he was named Critic-at-Large of Vanity Fair , a post he held until 1992, when he became a staff writer at The New Yorker , specializing in cultural profiles, many of which appeared under his rubric, "Cultural Pursuits." [6] His subjects included Steven Spielberg, V. S. Naipaul, Stephen Sondheim, Oliver Stone, Muriel Spark, and Edward Gorey. [7]
From 1987 until 1996, Schiff was also the Film Critic of National Public Radio's Fresh Air . [8] He served three terms as chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, [9] [10] and spent two seasons as a Correspondent on CBS-TV's prime-time newsmagazine West 57th , whose other Correspondents included Steve Kroft and Meredith Vieira.[ citation needed ]
In 1995, Schiff was asked to write a screenplay adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita , by the prospective film's then-producer, Richard Zanuck. It was Schiff's first screenplay, and the controversial film that was made from it, directed by Adrian Lyne, was released in 1998. [11] In her New York Times review, critic Caryn James called "Stephen Schiff's discerning, faithful screenplay [...] sensitive to Nabokov's wit as well as his lyricism." [12]
Schiff became a full-time screenwriter, [13] leaving The New Yorker in 2003. His subsequent films include The Deep End of the Ocean (1999), starring Michelle Pfeiffer; [14] True Crime (1999), directed by and starring Clint Eastwood; Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Oliver Stone's sequel to the 1987 film Wall Street ; [15] and American Assassin (2017). [16]
In 2013, Schiff became a writer and Consulting Producer of the FX television series The Americans , [17] starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys. He continued with the show for the rest of its six-season run, rising to the position of writer/Executive Producer for its last two seasons. [18]
Schiff's episode "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" (Season 4, Episode 8) was named the best episode of the entire series by New York magazine. [19]
For his work on The Americans , Schiff won a Golden Globe, [20] the Peabody Award, [21] two Writers Guild of America Awards, the Critics Choice Award the Television Critics Association Award, the American Film Institute Award (for "Contribution to America's Cultural Legacy"), and the Producers Guild Award. He also received two Prime Time Emmy Award nominations and two additional Writers Guild of America Award nominations. [22] [23]
During Schiff's tenure with the show, The Americans was nominated for 72 major awards, winning 23 of them.
From 2011 to 2016, he was also the writer and Executive Producer of the extreme sports documentary series Ultimate Rush . [24]
Schiff served four terms on the governing Council of the Writers Guild of America East. He also served as the Writers Guild's National Chairman and twice headed the East's negotiating committee. In 2002, he was given the Guild's Richard B. Jablow Award. [25]
Since 2005, he has served as chairman of the Board of the Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, which publishes Parabola magazine. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Writers Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America, and PEN America.
He contributed the critical essay on Nabokov's Lolita to Harvard University Press's landmark scholarly compendium A New Literary History of America , which was published in September, 2009. [26]
In December 2009, Henry Holt and Company announced that it would publish Schiff's forthcoming biography of Norman Mailer. [27]
In November 2018, Schiff was hired by Lucasfilm to serve as showrunner for Andor TV series. He stepped down from the position in February 2020, and in April 2020 Tony Gilroy replaced him as showrunner. Schiff remained involved with the series, writing the seventh episode ("Announcement") of the first season.
Schiff was an Executive Producer and writer on the Showtime TV series Super Pumped . The show debuted in February 2022. [28]
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
Suellyn Lyon was an American actress who is most famous today for playing Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation of Nabokov's eponymous novel, for which she was awarded a Golden Globe.
David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His works have been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Lolita is a 1962 black comedy-psychological drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on the 1955 novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov.
Denis Hale Johnson was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son (1992). His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in 2018.
Lolita is a 1997 drama film directed by Adrian Lyne and written by Stephen Schiff. It is the second screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel of the same name and stars Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores "Lolita" Haze, with supporting roles by Melanie Griffith as Charlotte Haze and Frank Langella as Clare Quilty.
Mark Dery is an American writer, lecturer and cultural critic. An early observer and critic of online culture, he helped to popularize the term "culture jamming" and is generally credited with having coined the term "Afrofuturism" in his essay "Black to the Future" in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, from Rolling Stone to BoingBoing.
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Calder Baynard Willingham Jr. was an American novelist and screenwriter.
Angels in America is a 2003 American HBO miniseries directed by Mike Nichols and based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1991 play of the same name by Tony Kushner. Set in 1985, the film revolves around six New Yorkers whose lives intersect. At its core, it is the fantastical story of Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS who is visited by an angel. The film explores a wide variety of themes, including Reagan era politics, the spreading AIDS epidemic, and a rapidly changing social and political climate.
Véra Yevseyevna Nabokova was the wife, editor, and translator of Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, and a source of inspiration for many of his works.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He describes his obsession with a 12-year-old "nymphet", Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish diminutive for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and nonfiction book author.
David Manson is an American film and television producer, screenwriter and director.
Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) directed thirteen feature films and three short documentaries over the course of his career. His work as a director, spanning diverse genres, is regarded as highly influential.
Brian Savelson is an American writer, director, and producer who works in film, theater, and television.
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