Thomas H. Schulman (born October 20, 1951) is an American screenwriter best known for his semi-autobiographical screenplay Dead Poets Society, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1989.
Biography
Following high school, Schulman earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in philosophy, graduating in 1972 from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Schulman pursued his interest in film at the University of Southern California's Graduate School of Cinema.
Dead Poets Society won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1989, and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director (Peter Weir). The character of John Keating was inspired by one of Schulman's teachers at MBA.
Prior to Dead Poets Society, Schulman had already written several telemovies. However, Dead Poets Society was his first movie script to reach the screen. He was hired to rewrite the hit movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids shortly before the film was due to begin shooting; Schulman had just seven days to turn it from a drama into a comedy.
Other scripts written or co-written by Schulman include comedies Welcome to Mooseport, What About Bob?, Second Sight (which Schulman sold the same day as Dead Poets Society) and Holy Man, which stars Eddie Murphy. The Sean Connery drama Medicine Man, originally entitled The Stand, proved a critical failure. Schulman executive produced the movie Indecent Proposal.
Schulman's only film as director to date is 1997 black comedy 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, which stars Joe Pesci as a gangster attempting to transport a bag of severed heads across the United States.
In 2009, Schulman was elected vice president of the Writers Guild of America, West.
Filmography
References
External links
Dead Poets Society's Tom Schulman on the Art of Surviving Hollywood, March 15, 2004 Tom Schulman Biography (1951–)