About Whit Stillman

Whit Stillman has directed five films, Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress and Love & Friendship.  Stillman also directed Homicide: Life on the Street (season 5, episode 7).  He also directed a pilot for Amazon called The Cosmopolitans.  Stillman has scripts for The Cosmopolitans, but there is no word on when the series will continue.  He has stated that it will be more “adventure” centered than the original pilot.

Stillman has also written two novels, The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards and Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated.

He has written for the Village Voice, Harper’s, The Guardian, El Pais, Vogue, and other publications. Faber and Faber published the first two screenplays as BARCELONA & METROPOLITAN: Tales of Two Cities (Faber and Faber, 1995).

From the 1998 Official The Last Days of Disco website (now only in archival form):

Whit Stillman (Writer/Producer/Director) served in the same capacities on his two previous features, METROPOLITAN (1990) and BARCELONA (1994). Prior to that he collaborated on and appeared in Spanish Director Fernando Colomo’s New York-set comedy SKYLINE (1984; Kino Video). In 1996 he also directed a well-received episode of the “Homicide” television series – – “The Heart of Saturday Night” – – with Rosanna Arquette, Chris Eigeman and Polly Holiday.

Stillman was born in Washington, D.C., where his father was administrative aide to Democratic Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and grew up in the town of Cornwall, New York, where his father was a lawyer and Democratic County Chairman. After graduating from Harvard he entered the publishing training program at Doubleday, working there from 1974 to 1978.

During the first half of Disco’s last days he worked as the managing editor of ACCESS, a nightly news summary, putting it to bed at 1 or 2 a.m. every night, occasionally meeting friends to go on to clubs.

“One Harvard friend, then an executive at a tugboat company and now a Kansas City novelist, was in the retinue of Prince Egon von Furstenberg and helped me get in,’ Stillman says. “I remember thinking, ‘this is fantastic, I’ve got to come here every night,’ but I didn’t.”

After ACCESS folded, Stillman became an unemployed job-seeker, continuing to write short fiction and beginning to get involved in the Spanish film industry, first as a foreign sales agent, then in production and as an actor (for the “ridiculous American” parts). While writing METROPOLITAN he also ran a cartoonist agency representing such artists as J.J. Sempe, Pierre Le-Tan and William Bramhall.

He has written for the Village Voice, Harper’s, The Guardian, El Pais, Vogue, and other publications. Faber and Faber published the first two screenplays as BARCELONA & METROPOLITAN: Tales of Two Cities (Faber and Faber, 1995). Having just lost the lease to the Soho loft he built, Whit plans to move out of Manhattan this June.

Taylor Nichols Metropolitan by Whit Stillman

This website is run by Chris Angerman (email) and was started by Phil Gyford.