David Stephen Ward (born October 25, 1945) is an American film director and award winning screen writer.
Ward has degrees from Pomona College (BA), as well as both USC and the UCLA Film School (MFA). He was employed at an educational film production company when he managed to sell his screenplay for The Sting (1974), which led to an Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay. After this initial success, his follow up projects were less critically and commercially well received, including Ward's maiden directorial effort, Cannery Row (1982), and a sequel The Sting II (1983). Efforts made by Ward to sell a script based on the frontier days of California were scuttled by an industry-wide "ban" on Westerns after the failure of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980).
In 1986, Ward was contracted by Sting star Robert Redford, who hired the screenwriter to work on the Redford-directed The Milagro Beanfield War. The response to this project enabled Ward to sell Morgan Creek and Mirage Productions to bankroll Major League (1988), a baseball comedy that he'd been pitching to producers without success since 1982. Major League was a labor of love for Ward, who had lived in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid as a child and had rooted for the Indians' teams of the 1950s, including the 1954 American League Champions. "I figured the only way they were ever going to win anything in my lifetime was to do a movie and they'd win," says Ward. Within 10 years, the Indians would appear in the World Series twice.
Perhaps autobiographically, Major League and Ward's subsequent efforts as a writer and director, King Ralph (1991) and Major League II (1994), were about underdogs who triumphed over the gadflies and nay-sayers of the world.
Ward later scored a box-office coup with his screenplay (in collaboration with Nora Ephron) for 1993's Sleepless in Seattle. He went back to the well, directing the sequel Major League II, and then moved onto the Navy comedy Down Periscope starring Kelsey Grammer. Another ten years would pass before Ward was credited on another film, Flyboys, a 2006 World War I-drama starring James Franco directed by Tony Bill (who was a producer on The Sting).
Ward also currently is a professor at Chapman University, in southern California, where he teaches screenwriting and directing, and acts as a Filmmaker in Residence for the campus.
External links
- David S. Ward at the Internet Movie Database
- Platt, Ben MLB.com, "Popularity of 'Major League' remains," April 7, 2009
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