Paul Schrader Biography
Born: July 22, 1946
Raised in a strict religious household in Michigan, writer/director Paul Schrader studied theology at Calvin College and didn't see a movie until he was in his late teens. His stern background would fuel many of the themes throughout his career: downbeat stories of characters who violently break down in oppressive situations. Transfixed by the cinema and encouraged by critic Pauline_Kael, he moved to Los Angeles and became a film scholar at U.C.L.A. He wrote movie reviews for newspapers, edited the magazine Cinema, and wrote the highly influential critical essay "The Trancendental Style: Ozu, Bresson, Dryer." After a period of heavy drinking and serious depression, he sold his first screenplay, The_Yakuza, a Japanese thriller co-written with his brother, Leonard, and Robert_Towne. The next year, Schrader wrote Taxi_Driver, the grim tale of urban alienation. Taxi_Driver started his successful collaborative relationship with director Martin_Scorsese, another so-called "film school brat" who was also raised in a religious household.
After writing the screenplays for Obsession and Rolling_Thunder, Schrader made his directorial debut with Blue_Collar in 1978, a forceful exposé about auto workers. The following year he directed Hardcore, a poorly received but shocking account of a Midwestern girl escaping her family for a porno career in L.A. He would continue to explore the seedy underbelly of the sex industry in American_Gigolo, a glossier look at another troubled hero that gained Schrader some attention. He teamed up with Scorsese for the second time with the emotionally brutal Raging_Bull, one of the most acclaimed American films of the '80s, and a good example of Schrader's reoccurring destructive male protagonists suffering from violent desperation. This high point in his career was followed by a sporadic period during which he returned to evocative sexual themes with the remake of Cat_People and won a Cannes prize for Mishima. Never ceasing to address controversial subject matter, he scripted The Last Temptation of Christ in his third collaboration with Scorsese, and then went on to write Patty_Hearst, based upon the real-life terrorist-kidnapping plot. Light_Sleeper, which he wrote and directed in 1992, can be thought of as the last entry in a trilogy of films -- together with Taxi_Driver and American_Gigolo -- investigating self-destructive urban loners driven to near madness.
For many of his other directorial projects in the '90s, Schrader turned to literature adaptations. The Comfort of Strangers was based upon the Ian McEwan novel , Touch, on an Elmore_Leonard novel, and Affliction, on a Russell_Banks novel. The latter enjoyed critical success for Schrader's abilities, in addition to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for James_Coburn. Unfortunately, the writer's fourth pairing with Scorsese for Bringing out the Dead did not do as well as hoped, compared with their triumphs in the past. After writing and directing Forever_Mine, which debuted on cable, Schrader switched gears and worked only as a director for Auto_Focus in 2002. This dark biopic of television star Bob_Crane combines his frequent themes of sexual discrepancies and inevitable breakdowns. Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi
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