Whit Stillman Biography
Whit Stillman (John Whitney Stillman) is an American writer-director well known for his 1990 film Metropolitan, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and the 1998 romantic drama The Last Days of Disco. His most recent film, Love & Friendship, was released in 2016.
Whit Stillman Age
Stillman was born on January 25th, in 1952 Washington, D.C. He is 67 years old as of 2019.
Whit Stillman Family | Young
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. He grew up in Cornwall, New York, and experienced depression during puberty.
Whit Stillman Married
There is no information about Whit having been married, he has not shared any information about him having married and has opted to keep silent about his personal life. He has also not shared any information about him having dated before.
Whit Stillman Education
He was enrolled at the Collegiate School, Potomac School, and Millbrook School, and then studied history at Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson.
Whit Stillman Career
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, describing himself in 2012 as “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.
Whit StillmanStillman wrote and directed three comedies of manners released in the 1990s: Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998); he published a novel based on the last of these films. After completing his film trilogy, Stillman left independent comedy and started researching and writing a series of scripts set abroad. In August 1998 (shortly after The Last Days of Disco was released) he left his loft conversion in Manhattan’s SoHo and moved to Paris. He returned to New York in 2010.
A fourth film, Damsels in Distress, was released in 2011, premiering out of competition as the closing film at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.[20] The Guardian in 2012 compared Stillman to Terrence Malick, another filmmaker who has “come to owe a good part of their mystique to the very paucity of their oeuvre … The lengthy gaps in between [films] have created expectations that are hard to fulfil, and admirers have been inclined to overestimate their achievement.” A reviewer at Salon opined that the reason for the long gaps between his films is that “Stillman is sometimes simply too damn smart for his own good. You can’t always tell at whom he’s poking fun, or why, and it becomes unfortunately easy to typecast him as the WASP answer to Woody Allen and conclude that his movies are insufferably irritating documents of privilege. He himself is aware of that possibility the whole time, and bastes his entire worldview in a rueful, ironic-romantic glaze.”
Stillman’s effectiveness at the box-office has been mixed. He filmed Metropolitan for about $250,000, according to Stillman, with a box-office return of about $3 million. Barcelona was then filmed on a budget of under $3 million, returning just under $8 million. His third film was not a box-office success; its budget of $8 million returned about $3 million. Stillman, in an AOL interview following the twenty-fifth anniversary of Metropolitan, refers to himself as having been put into “director’s prison” for more than ten years before he made Damsels. His 2016 film, Love & Friendship, a comedy based on a Jane Austen story, was a box office success, grossing more than $20 million worldwide against a production budget of $3 million
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. In April 2016, the Criterion Collection released a retrospective box set edition of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco, available on Blu-ray and DVD. Stillman himself oversaw the digital transfers of the films and recorded audio commentaries along with members of the casts and crews.
Whit Stillman Net Worth
Whit estimated net worth is under review, there is no information about his net worth or salary but he is said to have been earning a huge salary from his work.
Whit Stillman Books
- Stillman, Whit (1994). Barcelona and Metropolitan:
- Stillman, Whit (2000). The last days of disco:
- Stillman, Whit (2015). Love & Friendship:
- Stillman, Whit (March 1981). “The Nation’s Pulse”. The American Spectator.
- Stillman, Whit (November 1983). “New Frontier Days: A Camelot memoir”. The American Spectator. 1
- Stillman, Whit (2000-12-22). “A preppy pantheon”. Salon.com.