Whit Stillman

Whit Stillman (born John Whitney Stillman in Washington, D.C. on January 25, 1952^[1][2]) is an American writer-director known for his sly depictions of the "urban haute bourgeoisie" (as a character in one of his films terms the upper-class WASPs of the U.S. socio-cultural elite).

Films

Stillman has filmed three comedies of manners (or "comedies of mannerlessness"): Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998); he also published a novel based on the last of these films. His Manhattan-based, mannerist comedies influenced the films of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.^{[citation needed]}

Stillman's protagonists voice admiration for opposition political theorists and literary figures like Charles Fourier, Jane Austen, or Samuel Johnson. His films, correspondingly, show an interest in the rise and fall of beneficent social situations, the expression and alteration of human vice and virtue, and the influence upon these trends exercised by culture and the cultured. In Metropolitan, this is expressed by one of the characters' obsession with the "Urban Haute Bourgeoisie" and how his generation of old money is doomed to failure. In The Last Days of Disco, the theme is yuppies and how this derogatory term actually characterizes positive features and qualities.

Metropolitan

Stillman wrote the screenplay for Metropolitan between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustration agency in New York, and financed the film by selling his apartment (for $50,000) and with the contributions of friends and relatives. It tells the story of the alienated Princetonian Tom Townsend's introduction to the "Sally Fowler Rat Pack" (SFRP), a small group of preppy, Upper East Side Manhattanites making the rounds at debutante balls during Christmas break of their first year in college. Though he is a socialist who is deeply skeptical about the upper-class values of the SFRP, Tom (Edward Clements) grows increasingly attached to the cynical Nick (Chris Eigeman) and plays an important part, of which he's largely unaware, in the life of Audrey (Carolyn Farina). Many of the exclusive interior locations were lent to Stillman by family friends and relatives. Stillman received a 1991 Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for the film^[3] and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize (Drama) at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival. He won the 1990 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best New Director.^[4]

Barcelona

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. Serendipitously, one of the film's stars, Taylor Nichols, met a Spanish woman during production, whom he later married, thus echoing what Stillman had done years before.

The Last Days of Disco

The Last Days of Disco was loosely based on Stillman's experiences in various Manhattan nightclubs, including Studio 54. The film concerns a group of Ivy League and Hampshire graduates falling in and out of love in the disco scene of Manhattan in the "very early 1980s". It concludes a trilogy loosely based on his own life and contains many references to the previous two films: a character considers a move to Spain to work for American ad agencies there and the heroine of Metropolitan reappears as a successful publisher, as do other characters from that film, as clubgoers. In 2000 Stillman published a novelization of the film, The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards.

Background

Stillman was raised in the upstate New York town of Cornwall, the son of an impoverished debutante (Margaret Riley Stillman) from Philadelphia and a Democratic politician (John Sterling Stillman, an assistant secretary of commerce under President John F. Kennedy^[5]) from Washington, D.C. His godfather is E. Digby Baltzell, who coined the term WASP.^[6][7] He attended Harvard University where he was a member of the Fly Club and tapped by Michael Kinsley to take over the humor columns for the The Harvard Crimson. After graduating from Harvard in 1973^[8], Stillman began working as a journalist in New York City.

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 Barcelona and Madrid as a sales agent for directors Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo, and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, such as his role in Trueba's Sal Gorda.

After completing his film trilogy, Stillman departed from independent comedy and started researching and writing a series of scripts set abroad. The weekend that The Last Days of Disco was released, he left his loft conversion in Manhattan's SoHo and relocated to Paris. He returned to New York in 2009.

Current projects

Though Stillman has not made a film in over a decade, he said in 2006 that he was working on several unfinished scripts^[9]. He was for a time slated to direct a film adaptation of Christopher Buckley's novel Little Green Men^[10], but in a recent interview, Stillman says the adaptation is not "happening, at least with me." He has long been writing another film, Dancing Mood, set in Jamaica in the 1960s. ^[11]

External links

• Whit Stillman at the Internet Movie Database

References