Galt Niederhoffer

Galt Niederhoffer is an American producer, director and novelist. She has produced over thirty feature films, eleven of them Sundance Film Festival selections or award winners.

Her movie credits as a producer include: Infinitely Polar Bear (2013), Robot & Frank (2012), winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at Sundance; The Kids Are All Right (2010), nominated for four Oscar awards (including best picture) and winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical; Grace Is Gone (2006), winner of the Audience Award and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance; Lonesome Jim (2005), nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance; Prozac Nation (2001), an adaptation of the best-selling novel; and Hurricane Streets (1997), winner of the awards for Audience, Best Director and Best Cinematography at Sundance (the first feature film to win three awards at the festival).^[1]

She has written three published novels. Her first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles (2005), about the love and rivalry of six sisters, was loosely based on her family, including her father, the idiosyncratic and highly acclaimed squash champion, economist and hedge fund manager Victor Niederhoffer, and her five sisters.^[2] The book's surprise ending was mirrored in real life when her father had a seventh child, a son, a year after the book came out. A movie adaptation of the novel starring Kristen Stewart and Alec Baldwin is rumored to be in production.

Her second novel, The Romantics (2008), about college classmates who get together for a wedding six years after graduation, where they compare their meager progress towards life's important goals and rekindle previous rivalries, was praised as an "involving, tightly woven tale with fascinating characters".^[3]

Niederhoffer adapted The Romantics into a movie in 2010, which she also directed. The movies starred Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin, Malin Akerman, Josh Duhamel, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong and Elijah Wood. The film was praised at Sundance as "a sharp college-reunion dramedy with echoes of 'The Big Chill'”, including Holmes's "sensitive, nuanced performance".^[4] Disagreements over the final cut with the distribution company, including the elimination of Niederhoffer's ambitious soundtrack, attributed to the theatrical version's lackluster success.

Her third novel, Love and Happiness, about a married couple whose seemingly idyllic lives in Brownstone Brooklyn has become mundane was released in September 2013. The novel has been called an "utterly realistic" and "provocative investigation of modern marriage".^[5]

She attended The Chapin School, Milton Academy and Harvard University.

References

Filmography

• Hurricane Streets (1997)
• Prozac Nation (2001)
• Lonesome Jim (2005)
• The Baxter (2005)
• Grace Is Gone (2006)
• The Kids Are All Right (2010)
• Robot & Frank (2012)
• Infinitely Polar Bear (2014)
• God's Pocket (2014)

External links

• Galt Niederhoffer at the Internet Movie Database