Cyrus Nowrasteh

The following year he wrote 10,000 Black Men Named George, the story of the Pullman strike of the 1930s, for Showtime.

Nowrasteh wrote the "Manifest Destiny" episode of the highly regarded (16 Emmy nominations) Steven Spielberg and TNT miniseries presentation, Into the West.

Cyrus Nowrasteh (Persian: سیروس/کوروش نورسته; ; born September 19, 1956) is an American-‌Iranian screenwriter, director, and producer of film and television.

Nowrasteh was born on 19 September 1956, in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin.

He is of Iranian descent and graduated from Madison West High School in 1974 and was a city boys high school tennis champion.

Nowrasteh attended New Mexico State University on an athletic scholarship and later transferred to the University of Southern California to attend the School of Cinematic Arts, graduating in 1977.

In 1986, Nowrasteh began his career by writing for the CBS television series The Equalizer.

He made his directorial debut with the Veiled Threat, a 1989 independent film based on the real-life murder of an Iranian journalist living in Orange County.

The film was pulled from the AFI Film Festival after organizers received bomb threats, allegedly due to the film's criticism of anti-Khomeni themes.

Nowrasteh subsequently accused the AFI of buckling to "censorship" and claimed their pulling the film "killed" its chances at distribution.

He also worked on independent films such as the American/Brazilian production The Interview (1995), which played at Sundance and on the Showtime network; and Norma Jean, Jack and Me (1998).

He went on to work on Falcon Crest as a producer and story editor and wrote the pilot for the USA Network show La Femme Nikita (1996).

Richard Miniter, a conservative author and critic of the Clinton administration, said that a key scene with Sandy Berger was based on "Internet myth": "If people wanted to be critical of the Clinton years there's things they could have said, but the idea that someone had bin Laden in his sights in 1998 or any other time and Sandy Berger refused to pull the trigger, there's zero factual basis for that."

In 2001, Nowrasteh wrote and directed the highly rated, award-winning Showtime presentation The Day Reagan Was Shot, which starred Richard Dreyfuss as Alexander Haig and was executive produced by Oliver Stone.

Critics said it fictionalized the lead-up to the 11 September 2001 attacks in order to direct blame to the Clinton administration.

Although Nowrasteh's screenplay for The Path to 9/11 was billed by the ABC network as having been "based on the 9/11 Commission Report", there were accusations that the screenplay evidenced political bias because of its allegedly contrafactual portrayal of events.

Nowrasteh admitted dramatic license in the movie.

However, he maintained that a certain amount of dramatic license must be allotted in the process of writing a dramatic script with a historical underpinning (see docudrama and biopic).

Although the precise conversations depicted in the script may never have taken place, he alleged that the general tone and content of events depicted in The Path to 9/11 were true.

When asked if he thought of the script as a "historical document," Nowrasteh has responded:

No, but I stand by the original version of the movie, and I stand by the edited version.

... There has to be conflation of events.

The most obvious problem any dramatist faces is that of sheer length.

I had to collapse the events of eight and a half years into five hours.

I don't know any other way to do it except collapse, conflate, and condense.

Critics, including 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste pointed out that some scenes in the film were complete fabrications.

The 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 aired under much controversy.

Nowrasteh wrote about his work on Path To 9/11 in an opinion piece in the opinionjournal.com on 18 September 2006.

He stated:

"The Path to 9/11 was set in the time before the event, and in a world in which no party had the political will to act. The principals did not know then what we know now. It is also indisputable that Bill Clinton entered office a month before the first attack on the World Trade Center. Eight years then went by, replete with terrorist assaults on Americans and American interests overseas. George W. Bush was in office eight months before 9/11. Those who actually watched the entire miniseries know that he was given no special treatment."

Critics—including President Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright, former Clinton aides, an FBI agent who quit as a consultant to the film, 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee H. Hamilton, and some conservatives, including Bill Bennett and John Fund—asserted that the film contained inaccuracies such as its depiction of Clinton as so distracted by the Lewinsky scandal that he neglected the terrorism issue (although the 9/11 Commission Report states that "we have found no reason to question" the testimony of Clinton aides who claimed that the Lewinsky scandal had no bearing on national security considerations ).

Nowrasteh is quoted in the documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 as saying that his intention in depicting Clinton as "somewhat hamstrung" in his response to terrorism was, ironically, to make Clinton a more sympathetic figure.

In 2008, talk show host John Ziegler and producer David Bossie of Citizens United premiered a documentary co-produced, written and directed by Ziegler entitled Blocking The Path to 9/11, revisiting the controversy behind the ABC miniseries.

The Stoning of Soraya M. is a 2008 American drama film adapted from French Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam's 1994 book of the same name based on the true story of a woman falsely convicted of adultery in Iran and subsequently stoned to death.

The film version was directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh and written by Nowrasteh and his wife, screenwriter Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh.

It stars Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo, as well as James Caviezel and Mozhan Marnò.

Because of its highly critical attitude toward the Iranian legal system, the controversial book, an international bestseller, was banned in Iran.

Likewise, the film version of The Stoning of Soraya M., even before its release, made its way onto a list of American films that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad deemed offensive and for which he demanded an apology.

But the film's release also drew enough attention to the issue of stoning in Iran that it sufficiently embarrassed the Iranian authorities into announcing consideration of a ban on stoning and other harsh legal punishments.

He has worked on numerous television series and made-for-TV movies including The Day Reagan Was Shot, Falcon Crest, Into the West, and the controversial docudrama The Path to 9/11. He has also directed the theatrical features The Stoning of Soraya M. (2009), The Young Messiah (2016), and Infidel (2020).