Whit Stillman

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Whit Stillman (born John Whitney Stillman on January 25, 1952 in New York City) is a writer-director known for his sly depictions of the "urban haute bourgeoisie".

He has to date filmed three comedies of manners (or "comedies of mannerlessness"): Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998); he also published a novel based on the last of these films. His Manhattan-based, mannerist comedies have been compared to the films of Hal Hartley and Noah Baumbach.

Stillman was raised in the upstate New York town of Cornwall, the son of an impoverished debutante from Philadelphia and a Democratic politician from Washington D.C. Stillman graduated from Harvard in 1973 and started out as a journalist in Manhattan, New York. In 1980 he met and married his Spanish (or Catalan) wife while on an assignment in Barcelona.

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, and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, such as his role in Trueba's Sal Gorda.

Stillman wrote the screenplay for Metropolitan between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustrating agency in New York, and financed the film from the proceeds of selling his apartment for $50,000 as well as contributions from friends and relatives. It tells the story of the working class protagonist (albeit Ivy League student) Tom Townsend's introduction to the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, a small group of preppy, Upper East Side Manhattanites making the rounds at debutante balls during Christmas break of their first year in college. Many of the exclusive interior locations were lent to Stillman by family friends and relatives.

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.

The Last Days of Disco was loosely based on Stillman's experiences in various Manhattan nightclubs, possibly including Studio 54. Much like his earlier Metropolitan, the film deals with a group of Ivy League and Amherst Manhattanites, recently graduated from college and law school, falling in and out of love in the urban environment of the very early 1980s disco scene. In 2000 he published a part-novelization of the film: The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

Stillman's protagonists have voiced admiration for opposition political ideas or literary figures like Charles Fourier, Jane Austen, or Samuel Johnson. His films, correspondingly, show an interest in the rise and fall of beneficent social situations, the expression and alteration of human vice and virtue, and the influence upon these trends exercised by culture and the cultured. In Metropolitan, this is expressed by one of the character's obsession with the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie and how the current generation of old money is doomed to failure. While in The Last Days of Disco, the theme is yuppies and how this derogative term should be used as a characterisation of positive features and qualities.

Following the trilogy, he departed from independent comedy and started planning on two historical projects, one on the American Revolution's Francis Marion, and an adaptation of Red Azalea, Anchee Min's tale of China's Cultural Revolution. The rights and execution of these projects were costly. While the former was dropped by the studios due to a sedated market for American history movies, the financiers dropped out on the latter. During this period, he left his loft conversion in downtown Manhattan for New Jersey, before relocating to Paris with his family.

Filmmaker magazine reports in its winter 2006 issue: "To justify the long silence, I've been working on a number of scripts that are in various stages," Stillman says, adding that one of them is ready to go. But his writing process cannot be hurried. Metropolitan, for example, took four years to write, on and off, in the wee hours of the night in a caffeinated haze. "I don't think a script is very authentic until I've thought about it and gone over it a few times," he adds. "For me, time is the biggest luxury."[1]