Whit Stillman
John Whitney Stillman (born January 25, 1952) is an American writer-director and actor known for his 1990 film Metropolitan, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He is also known for his other films, Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998), Damsels in Distress (2011), as well as his most recent film, Love & Friendship, released in 2016. Early life and education Stillman was born in 1952 in Washington, D.C., to Margaret Drinker (née Riley), from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a Democratic politician, John Sterling Stillman, an assistant secretary of commerce under President John F. Kennedy (a classmate of Stillman's father at Harvard), from Washington, D.C. His great-grandfather was businessman James Stillman; his great-great-grandfather, Charles Stillman, founded Brownsville, Texas. Stillman grew up in Cornwall, New York, and experienced depression during puberty. "I was very depressed when I was 11 or 12," he told The Wall Street Journal. "I was sent to the leading Freudian child psychologist in Washington, D.C. It was heck. The last thing I needed to talk about was guilt about sex." However, when his parents separated, he found that his depression ceased: "I actually felt healthier." Stillman's godfather was E. Digby Baltzell, a University of Pennsylvania professor and chronicler of the American upper class. He attended the Collegiate School, Potomac School, and Millbrook School, and then studied history at Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson. Career before filmmaking After graduating from Harvard in 1973, Stillman began working as an editorial assistant at Doubleday in New York City, followed by a stint as a junior editor at The American Spectator, a conservative magazine. Stillman has subsequently distanced himself from his work for the Spectator, stating that he now hates "to be drawn into ideological debates" and prefers to remain "apolitical". 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 Madrid and Barcelona as a sales agent for directors Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo, and sometimes acted in their films, usually playing comic Americans, as in Trueba's film Sal Gorda. Career 1990s Metropolitan (1990)Stillman wrote the screenplay for Metropolitan between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustration agency in New York, and financed the film by selling the insider rights to his apartment (for $50,000) and with the contributions of friends and relatives. Loosely based on Stillman's Manhattan days, with his divorced mother during the week of Christmas break 1969 during his first year at Harvard, Metropolitan 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 deeply skeptical of the SFRP's upper-class values, Tom (Edward Clements) grows increasingly attached to the cynical Nick (Chris Eigeman) and plays an important part,