Lawrence Kasdan

• 1. A Bicycle And A Theater

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  Lawrence Edward Kasdan was born on the 14th of January 1949 in Miami Beach, Florida. He grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia during the fifties. His father worked as an electronics-store manager and his mother served as an employment counselor. Both parents were thwarted writers who dreamed of literary success but never achieved it. His father died when Lawrence was fourteen years old. The family had little money and going to the movies was the happiest thing about his childhood. He recalled owning the town if you had a bicycle. Movies made their values tangible for him in ways that parents or school could not. He particularly loved The Great Escape from 1963 and The Magnificent Seven from 1960. These films shaped his ideas of manhood and heroism. In 1963 his brother Mark took him to see David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. They arrived late and waited six hours until the next showing. When the movie ended he knew he had found a new hero named David Lean.

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• 2. The Hopwood Award Letter

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  Kasdan graduated from Morgantown High School in 1966. He worked at a glass factory and the night shift at a supermarket to earn money for college. He scraped meat from butcher machines to pay his way. He applied to the University of Michigan because it offered the best-paying college writing contest in the country. The contest was called the Hopwood Award. Kasdan won this award four times between 1968 and 1970. He earned a total of two thousand dollars from these victories. Receiving the letter telling him he had won changed his life forever. It was the first sign the outside world had given him hope. Even though he faced many discouraging years after that moment he never doubted he would make his way as a writer. He pursued a master's degree in education and graduated in 1971. Plans to support himself as a high-school English teacher failed when no teaching jobs were available. He then took a job as an advertising copywriter at the W. B. Doner agency in Detroit. He earned a Clio Award for his first TV commercial and another award from The One Show. His supervisor Jim Dale remembered Kasdan always said he was better at writing for television than for print.

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• 3. Sixty-Seven Rejections

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  Kasdan wrote his sixth finished screenplay in 1975 about a singer who falls in love with her bodyguard. This script became known as The Bodyguard. With this work he was able to get an agent named Norman Kurland. Kurland sent the script around town for two years but it was rejected sixty-seven times. They could not even get him a job writing Starsky and Hutch. The script was finally optioned by Warner Bros. in 1977 for twenty thousand dollars. It was rewritten many times over the years and attached to different actresses including Diana Ross and Whoopi Goldberg. Kasdan wrote it with Steve McQueen in mind as the bodyguard Frank. In the original draft the U.S. president Frank failed to save was John F. Kennedy. Kevin Costner read the screenplay when Kasdan directed him in Silverado. In 1991 Costner asked Kasdan to make The Bodyguard with himself in the title role. Kasdan felt too burned out so he chose instead to produce it with Costner. Whitney Houston was cast as superstar singer Rachel Marron. Despite receiving probably the worst reviews he ever had the film earned more than four hundred eleven million dollars worldwide.

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• 4. The Empire Strikes Back

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  Steven Spielberg hired Kasdan to write Raiders of the Lost Ark after seeing Continental Divide. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg talked for about twenty minutes then stood up and shook hands. They decided to make this movie together immediately. Most of the plot elements and characters were already in place before Kasdan arrived. He helped make the story darker than the first Star Wars film. When The Empire Strikes Back came out on the 21st of May 1980 it was the first time his name appeared in a movie's credits. He felt his main contribution was developing character. Lucas thought if you play the commercial movie game you have to play for big stakes. Kasdan launched his directing career after writing this script. He was uninterested in writing another Star Wars movie initially. But Lucas had supported him on Body Heat as an uncredited producer. So when Lucas asked him to write Return of the Jedi Kasdan felt obliged to repay him. He spent the summer of 1981 co-writing the shooting script with Lucas based on a story by Lucas. Return of the Jedi came out on the 25th of May 1983 and made four hundred seventy-five million dollars.

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• 5. Body Heat And Miami

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  Kasdan directed his own film called Body Heat which opened on the 28th of August 1981. Alan Ladd Jr. gave him the deal but Sherry Lansing put many existing deals in turnaround. Ladd started The Ladd Company in 1979 and offered to produce Body Heat on one condition. An established director would sponsor the untested Kasdan so he reached out to George Lucas. The producers wanted Kasdan to cast a star but he insisted on William Hurt. Kasdan cast another unknown Kathleen Turner as Matty and Ted Danson as one of Ned's colleagues. The heat-centric story was originally set in New Jersey but an actors' strike delayed production until December. The location was moved to Miami instead. It made more than twenty-four million dollars domestically on a seven-million-dollar budget. Variety's review called it an engrossing mightily stylish meller in which sex and crime walk hand in hand down the path to tragedy just like in the old days. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association nominated Kasdan for Best Director and the Writers Guild of America nominated his screenplay for a WGA Award.

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• 6. The Big Chill Generation

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  While editing Body Heat Kasdan had the idea for a large ensemble film partly in reaction to the claustrophobic experience of working with just two actors. His lawyer's wife Barbara Benedek began writing screenplays and Kasdan proposed co-writing with her. She was enormously influential on the tone of the script. They wrote characters who were composites of real people they each knew as well as a little bit of themselves. Kasdan pitched it to around seventeen different places but they all passed. Johnny Carson had a deal to make movies at Columbia and producer Marcia Nasatir convinced Carson to make The Big Chill. The ensemble cast included Hurt and Kevin Kline both of whom became regulars in Kasdan's directing career. After four weeks of rehearsal the film was shot in a real house in South Carolina. The '60s pop soundtrack was curated by Kasdan's wife Meg. The album sold more than six million copies and is one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time. The Big Chill came out on the 30th of September 1983 and made more than fifty-six million dollars on an eight-million-dollar budget. It ran in theaters for six months and received mostly praise.

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• 7. Four Academy Nominations

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  Kasdan has been nominated for four Academy Awards throughout his career. He was nominated as a producer for Best Picture nominee The Accidental Tourist from 1988. For that same film he was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. He received nominations for Best Original Screenplay for both The Big Chill and Grand Canyon from 1991. In addition to these Oscar nods he received the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award in 2001. He won the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement from the Writers Guild of America in 2006. He holds three honorary doctorates including one in Humane Letters from the University of Michigan awarded in 1983. Another honor came from West Virginia University in 1999 and a third from the American Film Institute in 2015. On the 22nd of May 2016 he was honored by the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and ArtsATL.org as the inaugural recipient of their ICON Award for Contributions to the Cinematic Arts. This ceremony took place at the Woodruff Arts Center.

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