Whit Stillman

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Whit Stillman (born John Whitney Stillman in Washington, D.C. on January 25, 1952 ^[1][2]) is an Academy Award-nominated American writer-director known for his sly depictions of the "urban haute bourgeoisie" (as he terms the upper-class WASPs of the U.S. socio-cultural elite).

Contents 1 Films 1.1 Metropolitan 1.2 Barcelona 1.3 The Last Days of Disco 2 Background 3 Current projects 4 External links 5 References

[edit] Films

Stillman has 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 influenced the films of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.

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. In The Last Days of Disco, the theme is yuppies and how this derogatory term actually characterizes positive features and qualities.

[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. It 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 who is deeply skeptical about the upper-class values of the SFRP, Tom (Edward Clements) grows increasingly attached to the cynical Nick (Chris Eigeman), and plays an important part, of which he's largely unaware, in the life of Audrey (Carolyn Farina). Many of the exclusive interior locations were lent to Stillman by family friends and relatives. Stillman received a 1991 Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for the film^[3] and was 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.^[4]

[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, possibly including Studio 54. Much like his earlier Metropolitan, the film deals with a group of Ivy League- and Hampshire-educated Manhattanites falling in and out of love in the urban environment of the "very early 1980s" disco scene. This film concludes a trilogy loosely based on his own life and contains many references and cameo appearances from the previous two films: characters considers a move to Spain to work for American ad agencies there and the heroine of Metropolitan reappears as a successful publisher. In 2000 he published a novelization of the film: The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

[edit] Background

Stillman was raised in the upstate New York town of Cornwall, the son of an impoverished debutante (Margaret Riley Stillman) from Philadelphia and a Democratic politician (John Sterling Stillman, an assistant secretary of commerce under President John F. Kennedy^[5]) from Washington, D.C. His godfather is E. Digby Baltzell, who coined the term WASP. ^[6][7] He attended Harvard University where he was tapped by Michael Kinsley to take over the humor columns for the The Harvard Crimson. After graduating from Harvard in 1973^[8], Stillman began working as a journalist in New York City.

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.

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, where he has lived ever since.

[edit] Current projects

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."^[9]

As of May 2006, Stillman is slated to direct a film adaptation of Christopher Buckley's novel Little Green Men. This will be the first time Stillman has directed someone else's screenplay (Sean Bates and Gregory Mackenzie adapted the book).^[10]

[edit] External links

• Whit Stillman at the Internet Movie Database
• Phil's Unofficial Whit Stillman Home Page
• Films of the Spirit First Things, June/July, 2002
• Confessions of a serial drifter Stillman writes about his films in The Guardian, May 12, 2006
• A conversation with filmmaker Whit Stillman The Charlie Rose Show, June 8, 1998

[edit] References