Lawrence Kasdan

• 1. Introduction

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  Lawrence Kasdan was late for a movie in 1963, and that lateness changed everything. His brother, Mark, took him to see David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, and when they arrived a few minutes late, Mark insisted they wait six hours for the next full showing. Kasdan recalled, "I thought my brother was crazy. But when the show was over, I knew I had done the right thing. As I stumbled from the theater, having seen the whole movie, I had a new hero. It was not T. E. Lawrence, but David Lean." He was born on the 14th of January 1949 in Miami Beach, Florida, and grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. What carried a boy who once scraped meat from butcher machines on a supermarket night shift into the writers' rooms behind some of the biggest films ever made? And what did that early, difficult home life leave behind in the work itself?

• 2. A Childhood Rebuilt on Film

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  Kasdan's father, Clarence, managed an electronics store, and his mother, Sylvia, worked as an employment counselor, though both saw themselves as failed writers. Clarence had wanted to be a playwright, and he died when Kasdan was 14. Sylvia claimed she had studied under novelist Sinclair Lewis at the University of Wisconsin. In the 1950s she sold a handful of stories to what Kasdan called "confessional magazines." She later bought self-help books and typed out their contents, hoping to write one of her own. She also talked to strangers on the bus, calling it "grist for the mill." Kasdan later wrote, "I wonder if maybe I owe her everything. Whether by nature or nurture, I became a writer."

  Money was tight in the Kasdan household, and he said going to the movies was "the happiest thing about my childhood." He recalled that theaters in Wheeling would take calls asking when a film started, and answer, "What time can you get here?" He especially loved The Great Escape, from 1963, and The Magnificent Seven, from 1960, both directed by John Sturges. He later said, "Film made its values tangible for me in the ways that parents, school, Sunday School had not. I wanted to live in the world I found in the movies."

  Kasdan graduated from Morgantown High School in 1966. To pay for college he worked at a glass factory and took a night shift at a Wheeling supermarket. He chose the University of Michigan partly because it offered the Hopwood Award, the same prize that had reportedly paid Arthur Miller's way through school. Miller's old teacher, Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, still taught there, and Kasdan studied drama writing under him. Between 1968 and 1970, Kasdan won the Hopwood Award four times, earning $2,000 in total. He said the acceptance letter told him, for the first time, that becoming a writer wasn't just a hopeless dream, and that he never doubted his path again despite discouraging years.

  While at Michigan, Kasdan marched in Washington to protest the Vietnam War, and made one short film, a crude 16mm study of a professor infatuated with a student. He pursued a master's degree in education at Michigan, graduating in 1971, and planned to teach high-school English until he broke into Hollywood. But there were no teaching jobs available, and he said finding one was "almost as hard to get that kind of work as being a movie director." He later said that on set, "being hard is giving someone a look where another director might scream at them." Unable to find teaching work, Kasdan instead took a copywriting job at an ad agency in Detroit, a career he would come to call "hellacious."

• 3. The Long Apprenticeship

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  At the W. B. Doner agency, Kasdan won a Clio Award for his first television commercial and an award from The One Show. His supervisor, Jim Dale, recalled that Kasdan "always said he was better at writing for TV than for print, and that was certainly prophetic." Kasdan spent five years in advertising, writing screenplays at night, before moving toward Hollywood.

  In 1975, Kasdan finished his sixth screenplay, The Bodyguard, about a singer who falls for the man hired to protect her. His new agent, Norman Kurland, shopped the script for two years, and it was rejected 67 times. Kurland later said, "We couldn't even get him a job writing Starsky and Hutch." Warner Bros. finally optioned The Bodyguard in 1977 for $20,000. The script passed through years of rewrites, at various points attached to Diana Ross or Whoopi Goldberg. Kasdan had written the bodyguard, Frank, with Steve McQueen in mind, and in an early draft the president Frank failed to save was John F. Kennedy. In 1991, Kevin Costner, whom Kasdan had directed in Silverado, asked him to finally make the film with Costner in the lead. Kasdan felt too burned out to direct it himself, so he produced it instead. He hired Mick Jackson, fresh off L.A. Story, to direct, and cast Whitney Houston as the singer, Rachel Marron. Despite what Kasdan called "probably the worst reviews I've ever had," The Bodyguard earned more than $411 million worldwide. Kasdan doubted his own direction could have reached that number.

  While The Bodyguard circulated, Kasdan wrote Continental Divide, a romance between a brash Chicago journalist and a woman studying eagles in the mountains. He conceived the outline while eating lunch on the lawn of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kurland brought it to Steven Spielberg, then on the dubbing stage for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Universal bought the script in October 1977 for $150,000. Spielberg called it "a very intense bidding situation" among four studios, and praised Kasdan for writing "about the '30s and '40s in a fascinating, exciting way." The film, starring John Belushi and Blair Brown and directed by Michael Apted, opened on the 18th of September 1981, three weeks after Kasdan's own directorial debut. Kasdan later said the finished film had lost the "Howard Hawksian speed" of his original script, one of his first painful lessons about handing a screenplay to another director.

• 4. Old Hollywood, New Themes

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  Kasdan said his training was "classical dramatic training, in which you learn how plays have been constructed since they started writing plays." He believed that grounding served him well, since many screenwriters, in his view, grew up watching television rather than reading or attending plays. Alvin Sargent, screenwriter of Julia and Ordinary People, once told Kasdan that all their inspiration "always starts with character. Not plot. Not story." Sargent joked his tombstone would read, "Finally, a plot," a line Kasdan said he identified with strongly.

  Of his own directing, Kasdan said, "I think that my personality is shy, reticent, in some ways; I'm conservative, I don't wear flashy clothes." He admired Akira Kurosawa for "the Zen perfection of his camera placement," saying camera position mattered more to him than showing off style. On actors, he said he wanted "great listeners" who support other performers rather than compete with them, since his films are "cut and acted on the reactions, not the actions."

  In 2012, when Sight and Sound polled directors for its once-a-decade list of the greatest films ever made, Kasdan named ten. His choices, in alphabetical order, were Army of Shadows, The Battle of Algiers, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, The Grapes of Wrath, Lawrence of Arabia, Out of the Past, The Rules of the Game, Seven Samurai, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. As a director, Kasdan worked almost exclusively from his own scripts, a preference that would put him in constant contact with the same handful of actors.

• 5. Star Wars and the Ark

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  Spielberg's enthusiasm for Continental Divide led him to hire Kasdan to write Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film Spielberg was developing with George Lucas. In a meeting also attended by producer Frank Marshall, Kasdan recalled, "George, Steven, and I talked for about 20 minutes. Then we stood up and shook hands, and George said, 'Let's make this movie.'" The premise came from Lucas: "We're going to do a movie that's like the old serials," Kasdan recalled, "the hero is named after my dog, Indiana." The idea that the artifact would be the Ark of the Covenant came from writer-director Philip Kaufman, who said he got it from his orthodontist when he was 11 years old.

  Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan pitched the entire film in about five days, recording the session on tape and producing a hundred-page transcript. Kasdan then wrote the screenplay in Spielberg's office while Spielberg was busy making 1941, a process that took him six months. For Indiana Jones, Kasdan drew on old Hollywood stars like Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, and Clark Gable, along with what he called the "stylized movement" of Steve McQueen. Lucas wanted a more James-Bond-like playboy touch, but Kasdan resisted, feeling the character's dual life as "professor and adventurer" was complicated enough on its own. Raiders of the Lost Ark opened on the 12th of June 1981, made more than $390 million internationally, and won five of its nine Academy Award nominations.

  Lucas had first hired science-fiction novelist Leigh Brackett, who had also written for Howard Hawks, to script the Star Wars sequel. Brackett died in March 1978 during pre-production, and Lucas, dissatisfied, wrote the next draft himself before asking Kasdan to polish it once Kasdan turned in his Raiders script. Lucas reportedly told him, "If I hate Raiders, I'll call you up tomorrow and cancel this offer, but basically I get a feeling about people." The Empire Strikes Back came out on the 21st of May 1980, marking the first time Kasdan's name appeared in a movie's credits. Kasdan said his main job was developing character. He returned the following year to co-write Return of the Jedi with Lucas, feeling he owed Lucas for having quietly produced Body Heat uncredited. Return of the Jedi opened on the 25th of May 1983 and made $475 million; in 1981, Kasdan had already guessed it would be his last Star Wars script for years.

  When Disney bought Lucasfilm, new president Kathleen Kennedy asked Kasdan back, and he agreed only once she told him, "We want to do a movie about Han." Kasdan had long believed Han Solo, not Luke, was the character audiences loved, and in The Force Awakens he and actor Harrison Ford finally got to kill the character off, an idea Lucas had rejected years earlier. The Force Awakens opened on the 18th of December 2015, made more than $2 billion internationally, and broke the North American record for the top-grossing film of all time. Reviewer Todd McCarthy wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that the film bore "the hand of Lawrence Kasdan," who had also "authored Raiders of the Lost Ark, the film this new one most resembles." Kasdan, Abrams, and Arndt won the Saturn Award for Best Writing, Kasdan's first Star Wars writing win after two earlier nominations.

  Kasdan wrote Solo: A Star Wars Story with his son Jonathan, the one Disney assignment he had originally signed on for, and their first script written together. Alden Ehrenreich took over the role Harrison Ford had originated, and original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired mid-shoot and replaced by Ron Howard. Solo opened on the 25th of May 2018 and made just under $393 million worldwide, the lowest total for any live-action Star Wars film to that point. Kasdan blamed the shortfall on Lucasfilm "blowing it," and afterward he stopped responding to the studio's efforts to bring him back, even when they sent a messenger with a new script. He did, though, quietly return once more in 2007, helping David Koepp write romantic dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

• 6. His Repertory Company

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  William Hurt made his film debut in Altered States in 1980, and a year later Kasdan insisted on casting him, over the producers' objections, as the lead in Body Heat. Hurt went on to star in three more Kasdan films: The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, and I Love You to Death.

  Kevin Kline first joined Kasdan's ensemble in The Big Chill, then returned as lead cowboy Paden in Silverado, and later appeared in I Love You to Death, Grand Canyon, French Kiss, and Darling Companion.

  Kasdan's wife, Meg, curated the 1960s pop soundtrack for The Big Chill, an album that sold more than six million copies. She also had a bit part in Silverado, alongside their son Jonathan, and Kasdan later co-wrote Grand Canyon with her. His brother, Mark Kasdan, co-wrote Silverado and produced Dreamcatcher. His son Jonathan, an actor since The Big Chill, later co-wrote Solo: A Star Wars Story with him. His other son, Jake Kasdan, wrote and directed The TV Set, a film Kasdan produced in 2006.

  Composer James Newton Howard scored Grand Canyon in 1991 and has worked with Kasdan on every film since. Cinematographer John Bailey shot The Big Chill, and his wife, Carol Littleton, edited it. Danny Glover, cast in Silverado, would reunite with Kasdan a few films later in Grand Canyon, part of a company he kept returning to picture after picture.

• 7. Triumphs and Underperformers

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  Body Heat opened on the 28th of August 1981 and made more than $24 million domestically on a $7 million budget. Most critics praised it. Variety called it "an engrossing, mightily stylish meller in which sex and crime walk hand in hand down the path to tragedy," and said it "could clinch star status for William Hurt."

  Kasdan wrote The Big Chill with Barbara Benedek, his lawyer's wife, who had begun writing for two ABC comedy series, drawing on composites of people they each knew. He pitched the ensemble film to seventeen different places, and all of them passed, before producer Marcia Nasatir convinced Johnny Carson, who had a deal at Columbia, to make it. The Big Chill came out on the 30th of September 1983, ran in theaters for six months, and made more than $56 million on an $8 million budget. Critic F. X. Feeney wrote that "Kasdan fashioned a national conversation piece," and that people spoke of "The Big Chill Generation."

  Silverado, shot in New Mexico during the winter of 1984, brought in $32 million on a $26 million budget after Columbia rushed its release following a strong test screening in Seattle. The Accidental Tourist, a surprise hit on the 23rd of December 1988, made more than $32 million and carried Geena Davis to an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

  I Love You to Death, based on a true story out of Pennsylvania about a wife who survived multiple attempts to kill her cheating husband, opened on the 6th of April 1990 and made $16 million. Kasdan later called it his biggest regret, saying he reshot the ending after test audiences "hated the movie, despised it," and that "I ruined the movie."

  Wyatt Earp, shot over 19 weeks in 1993 with a cast of more than 100 speaking roles, made only $20 million on a $60 million budget. Its box office suffered partly because of Tombstone, a rival Earp film released on Christmas Eve of 1993, six months before Kasdan's version reached theaters. Editor Carol Littleton said Tombstone "hurt us, because it's a completely different kind of film, and it was a little more hip and it was not quite as serious." Both The Bodyguard and Wyatt Earp went on to collect Golden Raspberry nominations, an ironic footnote to two of the bigger budgets of Kasdan's career.

  Mumford, about a psychologist with a secret past who treats a town's troubled citizens, came out on the 24th of September 1999 and made only $4.5 million. Dreamcatcher, adapted from Stephen King's 2001 novel and co-written with William Goldman, opened on the 21st of March 2003, made $82 million worldwide, and became known as Kasdan's most poorly received film. King wrote much of the novel while recovering from being hit by a van in 1999, reportedly on Oxycontin. Darling Companion, financed independently on a $5 million budget after Kasdan's own dog got lost in the mountains of Colorado, came out on the 27th of April 2012. By 2022, Kasdan had directed only two feature films in the preceding 22 years.

• 8. Beyond the Frame

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  In I Love You to Death, Kasdan cast himself as River Phoenix's lawyer, one of several cameo roles across his own films. He also played a director in Grand Canyon, a gambler in Wyatt Earp, and a man walking a dog in Darling Companion. Outside his own work, Kasdan played Jack Nicholson's psychiatrist in As Good as It Gets, directed by James L. Brooks in 1997.

  As a producer, Kasdan also backed films he didn't direct: Cross My Heart in 1987, Immediate Family in 1989, Jumpin' at the Boneyard in 1991, Home Fries in 1998, and In the Land of Women in 2007, written and directed by his son Jonathan.

  Kasdan received the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award in 2001 and the Writers Guild's Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 2006. He holds three honorary doctorates: in Humane Letters from the University of Michigan in 1983 and from West Virginia University in 1999, and in Fine Arts from the American Film Institute in 2015. On the 22nd of May 2016, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and ArtsATL.org named him the inaugural recipient of their ICON Award, honoring him at the Woodruff Arts Center.

  Kasdan married Meg, born Mary Ellen Goldman, on the 28th of November 1971, after the two met as English majors at the University of Michigan. Their sons, Jake and Jonathan, both work in film as actors, writers, producers, and directors, and Kasdan has three grandchildren. In 2025, Kasdan donated his archives to the University of Michigan, where they are joining the Screen Arts Mavericks and Makers collection. As of 2020, Kasdan was developing a documentary about record label executive Mo Ostin, alongside a film adaptation of the novel November Road, the two projects he had waiting in the wings.