Whit Stillman

John Whitney Stillman (born January 25, 1952) is an American writer-director and actor known for his 1990 film Metropolitan, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Stillman was born in 1952 in Washington, D.C., to Margaret Drinker (née Riley), from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a Democratic politician, John Sterling Stillman, an assistant secretary of commerce under President John F. Kennedy (a classmate of Stillman's father at Harvard), from Washington, D.C. His great-grandfather was businessman James Stillman; his great-great-grandfather, Charles Stillman, founded Brownsville, Texas.

Stillman grew up in Cornwall, New York, and experienced depression during puberty.

"I was very depressed when I was 11 or 12," he told The Wall Street Journal.

"I was sent to the leading Freudian child psychologist in Washington, D.C. It was heck. The last thing I needed to talk about was guilt about sex."

However, when his parents separated, he found that his depression ceased: "I actually felt healthier."

Stillman's godfather was E. Digby Baltzell, a University of Pennsylvania professor and chronicler of the American upper class.

He attended the Collegiate School, Potomac School, and Millbrook School, and then studied history at Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson.

He was writing another film, Dancing Mood, set in Jamaica in the 1960s, which was not produced.

Loosely based on Stillman's Manhattan days, with his divorced mother during the week of Christmas break 1969 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 of 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.

After graduating from Harvard in 1973, Stillman began working as an editorial assistant at Doubleday in New York City, followed by a stint as a junior editor at The American Spectator, a conservative magazine.

Stillman has subsequently distanced himself from his work for the Spectator, stating that he now hates "to be drawn into ideological debates" and prefers to remain "apolitical".

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 Madrid and Barcelona as a sales agent for directors Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo, and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, as in Trueba's film Sal Gorda.

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.

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".

Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale play roommates with opposite personalities who frequent disco clubs together.

The Last Days of Disco concludes a trilogy loosely based on Stillman's 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.

Stillman wrote the screenplay for Metropolitan from 1984 to 1988 while running an illustration agency in New York, and he financed the film by selling the insider rights to his apartment (for $50,000) and with the contributions of friends and relatives.

Metropolitan (1990)

The film premiered and was screened as part of the Directors' Fortnight section at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

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.

The movie was a financial success, grossing about $3 million on a budget of $225,000.

In an interview Stillman said of the film, "The material seemed pretty rich, almost rank. And perhaps it's better approaching a subject people feel strongly about, even if that strong feeling is hatred, than something colorless and unspecific. Also, I love anachronism and this was the chance to film, essentially, a costume picture set in the present day or recent past. But a large part of the idea was to disguise our pitifully low budget by filming the most elegant subject available."

Stillman won Best First Feature at the 6th Independent Spirit Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991 for Best Original Screenplay.

He is also known for his other films, Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998), Damsels in Distress (2011), as well as his most recent film, Love & Friendship, released in 2016.

Barcelona (1994)

The Last Days of Disco (1998)

The Last Days of Disco was based loosely on Stillman's experiences in various Manhattan nightclubs, including Studio 54.

In 2000 Stillman published a novelization of the film, titled The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

Stillman stated in 2006 that he was working on several unfinished scripts.

He had been slated to direct a film adaptation of Christopher Buckley's novel Little Green Men, but in a 2009 interview, Stillman said the adaptation is "[not] happening, at least with me."

Damsels in Distress (2011)

After a 13-year hiatus, Stillman released his fourth film, Damsels in Distress, starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Hugo Becker and Lio Tipton (credited as Analeigh Tipton).

It premiered September 10 at the 2011 Venice Film Festival as the closing film and received favorable reviews.

The novelization won the French 2014 Prix Fitzgerald Award.