Keynote Bios

Larry Gross
 
Larry Gross’s most recent screenwriting assignment was for Rachid Bouchareb Academy-award nominated French-Algerian director (for Les Indigenes). It is an original action comedy feature, Belleville Cop. His most recent writing credit, Veronika Decides to Die, was adapted from the best-selling novel by Paulo Coehlo, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, directed by Emily Young, and was completed in 2009. Before that as producer and writer of We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004) starring Mark Ruffalo and Naomi Watts, he won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Previously, he was co-writer of Beautiful Country (2004), starring Nick Nolte and Tim Roth which premiered at 2004 Berlin Film Festival and he co-wrote Prozac Nation (2001) starring Christina Ricci which premiered at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival.
 
Gross is perhaps best known as the co-author with Walter Hill of 48 Hours, Streets of Fire, Another 48 Hours, and Geronimo. Other projects include Chinese Box, co-written with Jean Claude Carriere, directed by Wayne Wang, (prem. Venice Film Festival 1997) writing Bill Pullman’s directorial debut , The Virginian (2000) for TNT and True Crime (1999) starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. The production of his original screenplay Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (2000) screened in Competition at Sundance (200). His adaptation of Jim Thompson’s This World Then The Fireworks screened in American Spectrum at Sundance (1997) and at Critic’s Week of the Cannes Film Festival (1997). He wrote the 4-hour TNT Miniseries David. He is a frequent contributor to film journals including Film Comment, and Sight and Sound, and the web page Movie City News.
 
He is an Adjunct Professor of Film at Columbia University School for the Arts in New York City.

Jon Raymond
 
Jon Raymond is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of the novel The Half-Life, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2004, and the short story collection Livability (2008), winner of the Ken Kesey Award for fiction, as well as the acclaimed recent novel, Rain Dragon, published in 2012 by Bloomsbury.
 
He is also the co-writer of two major independent films, Old Joy (2006), starring musician Will Oldham, and Wendy and Lucy (2008), starring Michelle Williams, as well as the screenwriter of Meek’s Cutoff (2010), all directed by Kelly Reichardt. He was the co-writer of the Emmy-nominated screenplay for the HBO mini-series, Mildred Pierce, directed by Todd Haynes.
 
Raymond’s writing has appeared in Bookforum, Artforum, Tin House, the Village Voice, and other publications. He has taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
 
 
Jill Nelmes
 
Jill Nelmes is a Reader in Film and Screenwriting at the University of East London and a scriptwriter. She is Principal Editor of the Journal of Screenwriting and her most recently published work includes Analysing the Screenplay (editor and contributor) (2010), Writing the Screenplay (2012), and has a forthcoming book The Screenwriter and the Screenplay in British Cinema (2013); she is currently co-editing Women Screenwriters an International Guide with Jule Selbo and writing a screenplay on women and early genetics research.

Kristin Thompson
 
Kristin Thompson has published many ground-breaking critical and historical books. The Classical Hollywood Cinema, co-authored with David Bordwell and Janet Staiger (1985), explores the industrial and aesthetic norms of the most enduring and successful filmmaking system to date. Exporting Entertainment (1985) measures the exposure to American films in other countries. Breaking the Glass Armor (1988) applies the formalist method to several major filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson.
 
Storytelling in the New Hollywood (1999) argues for the survival of classical narrative practice in the modern age. Storytelling in Film and Television (2002) differentiated between norms of contemporary film and television. Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood (2005) compares German and American styles in the decade after World War I by studying a director who was a master of both.  Thompson gained permission to interview the makers of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, on the basis of which she wrote The Frodo Franchise (2007).  Thompson has also co-authored, with David Bordwell, the two most-influential film textbooks in the field, Film Art and Film History.
 
Thompson blogs regularly on cinema at the web sites: “Observations on Film Art” and at “The Frodo Franchise.”