Part of the Unofficial Whit Stillman Home Page
From Fade In magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2005
text Marc Graser
Highbrow urbanites swear by his sophisticated oeuvre, but with just three films to his name, brevity may indeed be the soul of Whit - Stillman, that is.
Whit Stillman knows how to keep the critics waiting. It's been six years since the writer-director-producer earned plaudits with The Last Days of Disco, a drama about a group of young, upper-middle-class urbanites who frequent Studio 54 in the early 1980s.
That film was a follow-up to two other critically-acclaimed dramas: Barcelona, about two American cousins living in the titular Spanish city at the end of the Cold War, and Metropolitan, about a class-obsessed coterie of hyperarticulate debs and preppies in an idealized Manhattan. The latter film ended up scoring New Line Cinema its first Oscar nomination in the original screenplay category for 1990.
The trio of projects may not have been blockbusters - combined, they earned $13 million at the U.S. box office - but they cast an instant spotlight on Stillman as a pitch-perfect chronicler of discontented American yuppies. Many critics dubbed him the WASP Woody Allen.
The Last Days of Disco wouldn't just deal with the waning days of disco. It would also be the last time Stillman wrote or directed a movie. Since then, the fifty-two year-old New York native has returned to his reporting roots, penning articles for the Wall Street Journal (including one that documented his book tour) and Slate magazine and even guest-editing the New York Post's "Page Six" column (he's spotted as a regular at premieres in New York and Cannes).
A Harvard alum, former journalist and onetime film-sales rep, Stillman also spent his time away from the camera publishing his first novel, The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards. In a comic twist, the book revolves around the 1998 movie's character of Jimmy Steinway, the failed junior ad man (portrayed onscreen by Mackenzie Astin), who has been commissioned by Castle Rock Entertainment to write a novelization of the film's plot and tell the way things really happen.
Stillman hasn't danced his last dance as a writer-director, however. After having been repped by ICM, he is now a client at CAA, and his lawyer is the much-respected New York independent film-sales vet and legal eagle John Sloss.
Currently living in Paris, Stillman has been busy adapting Winchester Races, a project with British producer Stephen Evans that would combine two unfinished Jane Austen novels, The Watsons and Sanditon, into a single script. The script would merge two characters: Emma Watson, a young woman who returns to her family after a long absence during which she's been raised by her aunt, and Charlotte Hayward, an attractive country girl who is taken up by a family of comically optimistic real-estate speculators. Should it eventually get made, the film would return Stillman to familiar territory. Both Metropolitan and Barcelona were considered Austen-esque comedies of petty manners.
Stillman's disappearance from the director's chair wasn't supposed to take this long. After the success of Disco, his next pet project was expected to be the coming-of-age story Red Azalea, based on Anchee Min's memoir, with Christine Vachon's Killer Films producing. Set in China, the story details Min's upbringing during the collapse of the Maoist regime. During her teens, Min was sent to a work collective, where she was subjected to gruelling physical labor and carried on a secret affair with her female squad leader. Min later escaped and became an actress, starring in Red Azalea, a propaganda film based on an opera by Madame Mao.
The project raised some eyebrows. The Far East tale would have been a big departure for Stillman. According to Killer Films, Red Azalea is no longer in development. The company has moved on to other projects, as has Stillman.
At one point, Stillman was also developing a Colonial America drama, but the project fell by the wayside due in part to the fact that Stillman's resume consisted of dialogue-heavy character pieces, not historical epics; it was also undercut by the release of Columbia's Revolutionary War opus The Patriot, which starred Mel Gibson and was directed by Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow).
Stillman's film would have touched on similar historical elements as Emmerich's. As he put it in an interview with The National Review in 2000, his project "was based on one of the many threads on which they based that horrible movie [The Patriot]. I hated that movie so much because it is such interesting material. I felt that movie trashed absolutely everything in the most hackneyed way possible."