Stephen Gaghan (born May 6, 1965) is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning American film writer and director. He is noted for writing the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic, based on a Channel 4 series, for which he won the Academy Award, as well as the Academy Award-nominated Syriana which he directed and wrote.
Childhood and education
Born in either in Louisville, Kentucky or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania[1], the son of the former Elizabeth Jane Whorton and her first husband, Stephen Gaghan (d. 1980), and a stepson of Tom Haag, Gaghan attended Kentucky Country Day School, a college preparatory school in Louisville. He is a grandson of Jerry Gaghan, a newspaper columnist and drama critic for Variety and the Philadelphia Daily News, whose career inspired Gaghan's own professional pursuits.[2] As he wrote in a 2001 article in Newsweek, "I also wanted to be a writer, like my grandfather, who carried a card in his wallet that read, "If you find me, call my son [my father] at this number..."[3]
In his final days of high school before graduation, Gaghan was expelled for driving a go-cart through the halls of the school. During the release of Traffic, a critic commented on one of the teen characters in the movie who is a drug addict and a straight-A student, calling it unrealistic, which Gaghan defended by stating that he had straight A's while he was addicted to drugs and alcohol. As Gaghan wrote in an article published in Newsweek in February 2001, "I wasn't much different from my peers, except where they could stop drinking after three or six or 10 drinks, I couldn't stop and wouldn't stop until I had progressed through marijuana, cocaine, heroin and, finally, crack and freebase--which seem for so many people to be the last stop on the elevator."
Gaghan has stated that he began dealing with his addictions in 1997. "Over one long, five-day weekend, I had three separate heroin dealers get arrested," he said. "My dealer, my backup dealer and my backup-backup dealer. I was left alone, and I just hit that place, that total incomprehensible demoralization. That was the end of it; up five days straight, locked in the bathroom, convinced there was nowhere else to go, I had to kill myself, I'm going to kill myself. I just couldn't take another minute of it."[4]
He attended the University of Kentucky and was a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity.[5]
He attended Babson College in Massachusetts.[6] He also started a catalog company, Fallen Empire Inc., which he hoped would support his writing career.
Personal life
On May 19, 2007, at St. Thomas Church in New York City, Gaghan married Marion Fountain "Minnie" Mortimer (b. 1982), a fashion designer. She is the only daughter of John Jay Mortimer and his wife, the former Senga Clark Mucci, who had previous been married to Dwight Filley Davis 3d.
Gaghan has a son, Gardner (b. 1999) and a daughter, Elizabeth (b. 2001), from a prior relationship with Michael McCraine, an actress and model.
Career
Gaghan wrote the screenplay for Traffic, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2000. In addition to Traffic, Gaghan has also directed and written the screenplays for Syriana (2005) and Abandon (2002), the former receiving comparable critical acclaim as Traffic did, while the latter turning out to be a total fiasco. Other writing credits include Havoc (2005), The Alamo (2004) and Rules of Engagement (2000), as well as a handful of episodes of various television series. Gaghan turned down the chance to adapt Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code.
In his television writing career, he won an Emmy Award for co-writing a NYPD Blue episode entitled Where's Swaldo, in 1997. In addition to NYPD Blue, he has also written for The Practice and New York Undercover.
As a filmmaker, Gaghan is generally regarded as one of the two precursors of the style known as hyperlink cinema, along with the Alejandro González Iñarritu/Guillermo Arriaga writer-director team of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel. Most especially, Syriana's convoluted narrative, which mimics the confusion and lack of information of the characters yet manages to capture the complexity and feel of being in its particular milieu, is considered a prime example of the hyperlink film.
Gaghan played himself in the Entourage season 4 premiere "Welcome to the Jungle".
His next project is a film adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
He has also been hired by Warner Bros. to write the screenplay of the Dead Spy Running franchise written by author Jon Stock.[7]
Credits
Writer
Director
Actor
Producer
Personal appearances
Future projects
Gaghan is returning to his TV roots with a seven-figure deal at ABC. He will write and executive produce an hour-long project for the network. He's also attached to direct the potential pilot if his feature schedule permits. [1]
Awards & nominations
Gaghan has won an Emmy Award, Writers Guild of America Awards, Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award.
References
- ^ Multiple sources, online and otherwise, state that the director was born in Louisville. However, a woman claiming to be Gaghan's aunt, Gloria Gaghan Hamilton, a writer of science fiction, has stated in several Gaghan forums that the director was born in Philadelphia, his father's hometown and the city where his paternal grandfather achieved prominence as a journalist. In interviews, Gaghan has stated that he is from Louisville, though he does not appear to have categorically stated that he was born there.
- ^ George Skinner, a Broadcast Pioneer
- ^ The Enemy is Every One of Us | Newsweek | Find Articles at BNET.com
- ^ Screenwriter Drew on Own Experience to Write "Traffic"
- ^ Delta Tau Delta :: ukdelts.org
- ^ Screenwriter for 'Traffic' Says He Drew on His Past of Drug Use
- ^ "Stephen Gaghan set to adapt 'Dead Spy'". Hollywood Reporter. 2009-02-19. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3iffc4c7c167527636635dafd536f2ddb4. Retrieved 2009-03-31.
External links
