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James Schamus

James Schamus

Production

Biography

James Allan Schamus (born September 7, 1959) is an American screenwriter, producer, business executive, film historian, professor, and director. He is a frequent collaborator of Ang Lee, the co-founder of the production company Good Machine, and the co-founder and former CEO of motion picture production, financing, and worldwide distribution company Focus Features, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal. He is currently president of the New York–based production company Symbolic Exchange and is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University, where he has taught film history and theory since 1989. Schamus was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a Jewish family.He is the son of Clarita (Gershowitz) Karlin and Julian John Schamus and was raised in Los Angeles. He is married to writer Nancy Kricorian, with whom he has two children. His output includes writing or co-writing The Ice Storm, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Hulk (all directed by Ang Lee) and producing Brokeback Mountain and Alone in Berlin. At Focus he oversaw the production and distribution of Lost in Translation, Milk, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Coraline, and The Kids Are All Right. In addition to his tenure at Columbia University, he has also taught at Yale University and at Rutgers University. He is the author of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud: The Moving Word, published by the University of Washington Press. He earned his BA, MA, and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Schamus made his feature directorial debut with Indignation, an adaptation of Philip Roth's novel of the same name. Schamus also wrote the script for the film, which stars Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, and Tracy Letts, and is the story of a Jewish student at an Ohio college in 1951. The film premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically released by Roadside Attractions on July 29, 2016. He was president of the jury for the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. He has also been on the jury of the New York International Children's Film Festival and has served on the editorial boards of Film Quarterly and Cinema Journal, as well as on the board of Creative Capital and the Heyman Centre for the Humanities. Description above from the Wikipedia article Stephen Rosenbaum, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For

The Boroughs
7.1

In a seemingly perfect retirement community, a crew of unlikely heroes must stop an otherworldly threat from stealing the one thing they don't have: time.

The Boroughs

2026
Lust, Caution
7.3

During World War II, a secret agent must seduce and assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai.

Lust, Caution

2007
Brokeback Mountain
7.8

In 1960s Wyoming, two men develop a strong emotional and sexual relationship that endures as a lifelong connection complicating their lives as they get married and start families of their own.

Brokeback Mountain

2005
Hulk
5.6

Bruce Banner, a genetics researcher with a tragic past, suffers massive radiation exposure in his laboratory that causes him to transform into a raging green monster when he gets angry.

Hulk

2003
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
7.4

Two warriors in pursuit of a stolen sword and a notorious fugitive are led to an impetuous, physically-skilled, teenage nobleman's daughter, who is at a crossroads in her life.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

2000
Son-in-Law
5.7

José Sánchez has big ambitions, terrible instincts, and a mustache to match. After a string of bad deals, he accidentally bluffs his way into becoming El Serpiente, a political boss feared for all the wrong reasons. Now he must pull off one final deal to stay alive — a deal far beyond anything he can fake.

Son-in-Law

2026
Happiness
7.4

The lives of several individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts which society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.

Happiness

1998
Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms
7.1

Based on the most well-known classical fantasy novel of China, Fengshenyanyi, the trilogy is a magnificent eastern high fantasy epic that recreates the prolonged mythical wars between humans, immortals and monsters, which happened more than three thousand years ago.

Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms

2023
Sense and Sensibility
7.4

The Dashwood sisters, sensible Elinor and passionate Marianne, learn that their prospects of marriage seem doomed by their family's sudden loss of fortune. After Henry Dashwood dies unexpectedly, his estate must pass on by law to his son. These circumstances leave Mr. Dashwood's wife and daughters without a home and with barely enough money to live on. As Elinor and Marianne struggle to find romantic fulfillment in a society obsessed with financial and social status, they must learn to mix sense with sensibility in their dealings with both money and men.

Sense and Sensibility

1995
The King's Daughter
7.0

King Louis XIV's quest for immortality leads him to capture and steal a mermaid's life force, a move that is further complicated by his illegitimate daughter's discovery of the creature.

The King's Daughter

2022
Eat Drink Man Woman
7.6

Retired and widowed Chinese master chef Chu lives in modern day Taipei, with his three attractive daughters, all of whom are unattached. Soon, each daughter encounters a new man in their lives. When these new relationships blossom, stereotypes are broken and the living situation within the family changes.

Eat Drink Man Woman

1994
The Ice Storm
6.9

In the weekend after thanksgiving 1973 the Hood family is skidding out of control. Then an ice storm hits, the worst in a century.

The Ice Storm

1997
The Wedding Banquet
6.8

Frustrated with his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris and running out of time, Min makes a proposal: a green-card marriage with their friend Angela in exchange for her partner Lee's expensive IVF. Elopement plans are upended, however, when Min's grandmother surprises them with an extravagant Korean wedding banquet.

The Wedding Banquet

2025
Suffragette
7.2

Based on true events about the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.

Suffragette

2015
Buffalo Soldiers
6.3

A criminal subculture operates among U.S. soldiers stationed in West Germany just before the fall of the Berlin wall.

Buffalo Soldiers

2002
The Wedding Banquet
7.2

A Taiwanese-American man is happily settled in New York with his American boyfriend. He plans a marriage of convenience to a Chinese woman in order to keep his parents off his back and to get the woman a green card. Chaos follows when his parents arrive in New York for the wedding.

The Wedding Banquet

1993
Ride with the Devil
6.3

Friends Jake and Jack Bull join up with Civil War guerrilla fighters, yet after the realities of war set in, they must decide what honor truly means.

Ride with the Devil

1999
Taking Woodstock
6.2

The story of Elliot Tiber and his family, who inadvertently played a pivotal role in making the famed Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the happening that it was. When Elliot hears that a neighboring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers thinking he could drum up some much-needed business for his parents' run-down motel. Three weeks later, half a million people are on their way to his neighbor’s farm in White Lake, New York, and Elliot finds himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life–and American culture–forever.

Taking Woodstock

2009
Safe
7.0

Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s, comes down with a debilitating illness with no clear diagnosis.

Safe

1995
The Assistant
6.3

A searing look at a day in the life of an assistant to a powerful executive. As Jane follows her daily routine, she grows increasingly aware of the insidious abuse that threatens every aspect of her position.

The Assistant

2020