Kurt Andersen ~ film&theater

I’VE WRITTEN TWO SCREENPLAYS during the last few years, and both are unproduced. The first is called Warp, an original science fiction comedy (Men In Black Meets Time Bandits Meets Indiana Jones) that I wrote with my friend Bruce Feirstein for Walt Disney Pictures. The second is an adaptation of my novel Turn of the Century for Village Roadshow Pictures and the director Curtis Hanson. (Turn of the Century is now under development by GreeneStreet Films.)

Home And in a short film comedy from 1994 called Home, written by Bruce Feirstein, I appear as the fawning protégé of a Peter Eisenmanian architect played by actual movie actor John Glover. (I appear in a single scene, at left, and have six words of dialogue: “Sir?... Genius! He is a genius!”)

Lisa Birnbach, Jamie Malanowski and I created Loose Lips with the director Martin Charnin. We unearthed actual verbatim transcripts – from government wiretaps, voiceover recording sessions, courtroom and congressional testimony, wherever – and turn them into a satirical stage revue. Stage dramas based on transcripts have been around for years, but Loose Lips may have been the first theatrical comedy drawn from such sources. The 1995 debut production ran for six months at the Triad Theater in New York, starring Bebe Neuwirth and Peter Boyle, and a production at the Santa Monica Playhouse starring Martin Mull and Buck Henry opened later that year and ran for several months. In 1998, inspired by the tape-recorded Clinton-Lewinsky-Tripp revelations, we produced a limited-run revival starring Andy Richter at Eighty-Eights, a New York cabaret.

In 2003 and 2004 I wrote the book for a musical called Broomhilda (Men In Black Meets Harry Potter Meets Urinetown); Martin Charnin wrote the lyrics, and the score is by the late Leroy Anderson.

And currently I'm writing the book for a musical about Harry Houdini; Danny Elfman and David Yazbek are writing the music and lyrics, respectively; David Rockwell is designing the sets and co-producing; and Jack O'Brien is the director.