John Patrick Shanley

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John Patrick Shanley (born in 1950) is a playwright from the Bronx. He was educated by the Irish Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Charity. He is famous for insisting in his contract that not a single word can be changed in the screenplays that he writes. He is a graduate of New York University.

For his script for the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Shanley won the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. In 2004 Shanley was inducted into the Bronx Walk of Fame.

Regarding the 1990 film Joe Versus the Volcano for which he both wrote the screenplay and directed – people close to Shanley at the time related the story was based on a near death experience Shanley had and was his attempt to describe and explain the altered outlook on life he adopted as a result.^{[citation needed]} Shanley wrote two songs for the movie, Marooned Without You and The Cowboy Song, the former used thematically throughout and the latter performed by Tom Hanks on the ukulele.

In 2005, John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Drama Desk Award and Tony Award for Best Play. Doubt: A Parable, is also featured in The Fourth Wall, a book of photographs by Amy Arbus in which Shanley also wrote the foreword.

His personal biography states:

John Patrick Shanley is from the Bronx. He was thrown out of St. Helena 's kindergarten. He was banned from St. Anthony's hot lunch program for life. He was expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. He was placed on academic probation by New York University and instructed to appear before a tribunal if he wished to return. When asked why he had been treated in this way by all these institutions, he burst into tears and said he had no idea. Then he went in the United States Marine Corps. He did fine. He's still doing okay.