Whit Stillman (born January 25, 1952) is an American writer-director known for his sly depictions of the "urban haute bourgeoisie."^{[note 1]} He is perhaps best known for his 1990 film Metropolitan, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Early life[link]

Stillman was born John Whitney Stillman on January 25, 1952, in Washington, D.C.,^[1][2] the son of Margaret Drinker (née Riley), from Philadelphia, and a Democratic politician, John Sterling Stillman, an assistant secretary of commerce under President John F. Kennedy,^[3][4] from Washington, D.C.^[5] He grew up in the downstate New York town of Cornwall. His godfather is academic E. Digby Baltzell.^{[6][note 2]} He attended Harvard University, where he was a member of the Fly Club^{[citation needed]} and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.^[7]

Career before filmmaking[link]

After graduating from Harvard in 1973,^[8] Stillman began working as a journalist in New York City.^{[citation needed]}

He was introduced to some film producers 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,^{[citation needed]} and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, such as his role in Trueba's Sal Gorda.

Filmmaking[link]

Stillman wrote and directed three comedies of manners (or "comedies of mannerlessness") released in the 1990s: Metropolitan^[9] (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998); he also published a novel based on the last of these films. After completing his film trilogy, Stillman departed from independent comedy and started researching and writing a series of scripts set abroad. The weekend that The Last Days of Disco was released, he left his loft conversion in Manhattan's SoHo and relocated to Paris.^{[citation needed]} He returned to New York in 2009.^{[citation needed]}

A fourth film, Damsels in Distress, was released in 2011, premiering out of competition as the closing film at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.^[10]

[edit] Metropolitan

Stillman wrote the screenplay for Metropolitan between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustration agency in New York, and financed the film by selling his apartment (for $50,000) and with the contributions of friends and relatives. Loosely based on real-life events Stillman had experienced while living in Washington, D.C., with his divorced mother during the week of Christmas break 1970 during his first year at Harvard, Metropolitan tells the story of the alienated Princetonian Tom Townsend's introduction to the "Sally Fowler Rat Pack" (SFRP), a small group of preppy, 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 about 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.^{[citation needed]} Stillman won Best First Feature at the 6th Independent Spirit Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991 for Best Original Screenplay.^[11] Metropolitan was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize (Drama) at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival. He won the 1990 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best New Director.^[12]

[edit] Barcelona

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.

[edit] The Last Days of Disco

The Last Days of Disco was loosely based on Stillman's experiences in various Manhattan nightclubs, including Studio 54. The film concerns Ivy League and Hampshire graduates falling in and out of love in the disco scene of Manhattan in the "very early 1980s". It concludes a trilogy loosely based on his own 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 the Barcelona character of Ted Boynton, and Metropolitan'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, The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.^[8]

[edit] Damsels in Distress

After a 13-year hiatus, Stillman released his fourth film, Damsels in Distress, starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody and Analeigh Tipton. It premiered September 10 at the 2011 Venice Film Festival as the closing film, to 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."^[13]

Other projects[link]

Stillman stated in 2006 that he was working on several unfinished scripts.^[14] He was for a time slated to direct a film adaptation of Christopher Buckley's novel Little Green Men,^[15] but in a recent interview,^{[citation needed]} Stillman says the adaptation is not "happening, at least with me." He has long been writing another film, Dancing Mood, set in Jamaica in the 1960s.^[16]

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Whit Stillman at the Internet Movie Database
• Doomed Bourgeois In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman
• Whit Stillman unofficial website
• A conversation with filmmaker Whit Stillman The Charlie Rose Show, June 8, 1998
• A conversation with Whit Stillman The Charlie Rose Show, September 27, 2000