Ken Kwapis

Kwapis directs America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel, and Blake Lively in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Ken Kwapis (born August 17, 1957, East St. Louis, Illinois) is an American film and television director and screenwriter. He helped define the single-camera sitcom in the 1990s and 2000s and has directed popular feature films such as Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and He's Just Not That Into You.^[1]

Education and early life

Ken Kwapis was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up in neighboring Belleville.^[2] Kwapis attended the Jesuit preparatory academy St. Louis University High School. He earned a Bachelor's degree at Northwestern University's School of Speech, after which he traveled west to enroll in the M.F.A. program at the USC School of Cinema-Television.^[3] Kwapis’ twenty-four minute thesis film, For Heaven's Sake, won the Student Academy Award in 1982. The film is a contemporary adaptation of Mozart's one-act opera Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario).

Career

1980s

In 1983, Kwapis directed Revenge of the Nerd for CBS’ "Afternoon Playhouse," followed by Summer Switch for ABC’s "Afterschool Special." Starring Robert Klein, Summer Switch is an adaptation of Mary Rodgers’ novel of the same name, the sequel to her classic young adult fantasy Freaky Friday. For the Scholastic Book Company, Kwapis directed The Benniker Gang, starring Andrew McCarthy.

Kwapis’ first feature film was Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird (Warner Bros., 1985). The film was not only Kwapis’ big-screen debut, but also the big-screen debut of several Sesame Street characters (although Big Bird did previously make a brief cameo in 1979’s The Muppet Movie, Oscar appeared in The Great Muppet Caper, and many of the Muppets had cameos in the 1984's The Muppets Take Manhattan). Follow That Bird tells the story of Big Bird’s quest to live with a family of his own kind; namely, birds. A social worker arranges for Big Bird to move in with a family of Dodo Birds in Oceanview, Illinois.

Kwapis’ colleagues on Follow That Bird included songwriter Van Dyke Parks and Clint Eastwood’s longtime composer Lennie Niehaus, who teamed up to write the film's score.

In 1987, Kwapis made his prime time television debut, directing an installment of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. The episode, “Lane Change,” stars Kathy Baker, and is unique in that the entire story takes place inside a moving automobile.

Kwapis’ second feature Vibes (Columbia, 1988) was made under Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's fledgling Imagine banner. Written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, Vibes is the tale of two psychics (Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper) who are enlisted by a fortune hunter (Peter Falk) to divine the whereabouts of a treasure hidden in the Andes. The film was shot on location in Ecuador, and features a pan pipe-flavored score by James Horner.

1990s

Kwapis began the 1990s with a feature-film project, He Said, She Said (Paramount, 1991)—co-directed by his now-wife Marisa Silver. The film, written by Brian Hohlfeld, is a unique romantic comedy in which the same events are recounted twice—once from each partner’s point-of-view. The woman's (Elizabeth Perkins) portion of the film was directed by Silver and the man's (Kevin Bacon) by Kwapis. The film also features Sharon Stone and Nathan Lane. Soon after the release of He Said, She Said, the film’s title (coined by Silver) entered the vernacular as shorthand for any situation involving "testimony in direct conflict".^[4]

Kwapis then moved into series television, directing the pilot of HBO’s influential comedy The Larry Sanders Show. He directed twelve episodes of the series, two of which earned him CableAce nominations for Best Director: “The Spiders,” featuring Carol Burnett, and “The Performance Artist,” with real-life performance artist Tim Miller as the titular character.

Kwapis also contributed two episodes to the sci-fi series Eerie, Indiana. “Tornado Days” features Matt Frewer as an Ahab-style tornado hunter. “Reality Takes A Holiday” is a Pirandellian fantasy in which the hero happens upon the script of the very episode we’re watching, with reality-altering consequences.

Kwapis’ fourth feature, Dunston Checks In (Twentieth Century Fox, 1996), stars Jason Alexander as the manager of a grand hotel in New York City, which is owned and operated by a tyrant in the Leona Helmsley mold (Faye Dunaway). An aristocrat of dubious origin (Rupert Everett) checks into the hotel with an orangutan jewel thief. The film was awarded both the Grand Priz du Jury (“to Ken Kwapis for the inestimable qualities of the film’s direction”)^{[citation needed]} and the Audience Award at the Cannes Junior Festival in 1997.

Dunston Checks In echoes classical comedies such as Grand Hotel and Kwapis’ next film, The Beautician and the Beast (Paramount, 1997), evokes the Ruritanian comedies of Ernst Lubitsch. Fran Drescher plays a New York cosmetologist who is mistakenly hired to tutor the children of the despotic president of Slovetzia (Timothy Dalton).

In the late '90s, Kwapis began a fruitful period of work on several innovative, single-camera comedy series. He directed two episodes of NBC’s short-lived but well-reviewed Freaks and Geeks and nineteen episodes of Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle, winning an Emmy nomination for his work as a producer-director.

2000s

In 2001, Kwapis helped launch The Bernie Mac Show for Fox, directing the pilot and ten additional episodes, including the series finale, “Bernie’s Angels.” Also for Fox, Kwapis was one of the main creative forces behind Grounded for Life, an unusual, hybrid comedy combining single- and multi-camera techniques. Kwapis pushed the envelope of the form even further in the pilot of Watching Ellie, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ highly anticipated follow-up to Seinfeld. The distinctive pilot has a story that unfolds in real time; specifically, twenty-three minutes and twelve seconds. Playing the role of Ellie’s insufferable ex-boyfriend is Steve Carrel, with whom Kwapis would shortly collaborate on his next major project.

On the set of The Office, Kwapis (right) advises Steve Carell and Jenna Fischer.

In 2005, Kwapis was part of the team responsible for bringing The Office to America, transplanting the BBC mockumentary from Slough to Scranton. He directed the pilot and twelve additional episodes, including the 100th episode of the series, “Company Picnic.” His work on the third season premiere, “Gay Witch Hunt” earned him a second Emmy nomination.

For Showtime Independent Pictures, Kwapis wrote and directed Sexual Life (2005), loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler’s satiric look at sexual hypocrisy in fin-de-siècle Vienna, La Ronde. The ensemble cast includes Elizabeth Banks, Anne Heche, James Le Gros, and Kerry Washington. Kwapis’ sixth feature also marked his first outing as a writer-director. The film premiered at the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival and enjoyed a healthy film festival life before being broadcast on Showtime.

Kwapis’ next feature was another adaptation, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Warner Bros., 2006), based on the bestselling young adult novel by Ann Brashares. Sisterhood, a coming-of-age story about four sixteen-year old friends, stars Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel, America Ferrera, and Blake Lively (her screen debut). Sisterhood won the Heartland Film Festival’s Truly Moving Picture Award, and inspired a sequel in 2008.

Ever since He Said, She Said, Kwapis has enjoyed exploring the pitfalls of romantic relationships. His next feature, License to Wed (Warner Bros., 2007), follows a young couple (Mandy Moore and John Krasinski), as they embark upon an unorthodox pre-marital course, devised by a highly mischievous and somewhat perverse minister (Robin Williams). Designed to determine their compatibility, the course effectively compresses the first ten years of marriage into one week.

Kwapis (right) directs Jennifer Aniston in a scene from He's Just Not That Into You.

Kwapis' most recent feature is an ambitious look at romantic entanglements, He's Just Not That Into You (New Line Cinema, 2009). The film is adapted from the bestselling advice book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, which encouraged people to learn to read romantic signals correctly. The film takes this kernel of tough-love wisdom and applies it to nine characters, played by Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Bradley Cooper, Ginnifer Goodwin, Scarlett Johansson, and Justin Long. He's Just Not That Into You was a box-office success, earning the most of any of Kwapis' feature films to date.

Theatrical film work

• He's Just Not That into You (2009)
• License to Wed (2007)
• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)
• Sexual Life (2005)
• The Beautician and the Beast (1997)
• Dunston Checks In (1996)
• He Said, She Said
• Vibes (1988)
• Sesame Street presents Follow That Bird (1985)

References

External links

• Ken Kwapis at the Internet Movie Database
• Ray Pride, "Where have the Grown-ups Gone?", Pride Unprejudiced, 28 June 2005, http://www.moviecitynews.com/columnists/pride/2005/050628.html . An interview with Kwapis.
• Madelyn Ritrosky-Winslow, "Ken Kwapis’s Sexual Life – His Film, That Is," Entertainment Magazine, http://emol.org/film/archives/sexuallife/. Overview of Sexual Life and Kwapis' work in 2005.
• Margy Rochlin, "Keeping Things Human Size, Despite the Stars", NY Times, January 20, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/movies/01roch.html . Profile of Kwapis.