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Michael Lehmann

 
Director: Michael Lehmann
  • Born: 1958 in San Francisco, California
  • Occupation: Director, Writer
  • Active: '90s-2000s
  • Major Genres: Comedy
  • Career Highlights: Heathers, Ed Wood, The Truth About Cats & Dogs
  • First Major Screen Credit: Beaver Gets a Boner (1988)

Biography

Director Michael Lehmann is best known for his quirky, jet-black comedies, although the late '90s and early 2000s found him delving into the worlds of episodic television and chick-flick romantic comedy. Before becoming a filmmaker, Lehmann studied painting at New York's School of Visual Arts. He then studied philosophy at Columbia University, and after graduating began studying in West Germany to be an academic. He then changed direction and became project manager for the video department at Zoetrope studios. Just as that company crumbled, he found himself accepted to the University of Southern California. He began his career after making his now-notorious thesis film, Beaver Gets a Boner (1988), for USC. This film attracted Hollywood interest, and he soon found himself represented by the prestigious William Morris Agency. In addition to his thesis, he also wrote a very strange screenplay that became his 1989 hit Heathers, the tale of two high-school outsiders who begin killing popular girls while making the deaths look like suicides. His 1991 film Meet the Applegates, which features actors dressed as giant beetles living in a suburban American home like any other family, made a bid for cult status but went nowhere; his next film, the mega-budgeted Bruce Willis vehicle Hudson Hawk (1991) was a notorious bomb. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
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Michael Lehmann
Born Michael Stephen Lehmann
March 30, 1957 (1957-03-30) (age 52)
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
Occupation Film and Television director

Michael Stephen Lehmann (born March 30, 1957 in San Francisco, California) is an American film and television director.

Lehmann attended Columbia University. His first job in the film industry was answering phones at Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope film company. Later he supervised cameras on films that included 1983's The Outsiders. Lehmann attended film school at USC and graduated in 1985. While at USC he made a student film, Beaver Gets a Boner, the title of which he believes helped get the attention of film executives who would later hire him.

Lehmann is probably most noted for directing the black comedy Heathers. He also directed 40 Days and 40 Nights, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Hudson Hawk, Meet the Applegates, Airheads and Because I Said So.

Lehmann also directs for television, and has worked on the short lived HBO comedy series The Comeback and NBC's The West Wing. He has also guest directed on The Larry Sanders Show, Watching Ellie and Century City. Lehmann also directed one episode of the HBO drama, Big Love.

Lehmann's upcoming films include Your Word Against Mine.

At a Q & A session during 2007's South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, Lehmann claimed he would never make a sequel to Heathers. He claimed Wynona Ryder wanted to do Heathers set in Washington, D.C., but he saw no potential for the project.

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Copyrights:

Director. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Michael Lehmann" Read more