Manulis's projects integrate social and political themes such as drug addiction (The Basketball Diaries); repression and rebellion (Swing Kids); AIDS, individual freedom, and biracial relationships (Daybreak); the Vietnam War (Intimate Strangers); female empowerment (Foxfire, V.I.

[9] Promoted to casting director in 1980, he continued to work with Mason, co-directing John Bishop's The Great Grandson of Jedediah Kohler[10] and assistant directing[11] Lanford Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning trilogy, Talley's Folly, Fifth of July and A Tale Told; Hamlet, starring William Hurt, and Murder at the Howard Johnson's, which was produced on Broadway.

[13][14] Manulis has also produced several plays, including 1988's Three Ways Home at the Astor Place Theater in New York, and The Umbilical Brothers: THWAK, which was produced in 1999/2000 at Off-Broadway's Minetta Lane Theatre and at the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles In 1979, Manulis was chosen by Arthur Penn, Elia Kazan and Joseph Mankiewicz to become a Founding Member of the Actors Studio Playwrights and Directors Unit.

[15][16] He created the Comedy Zone, a weekly one-hour series on CBS, which brought together writers and actors such as Neil Simon, Kathleen Turner, Wendy Wasserstein, Joe Mantegna, Jules Feiffer and Christopher Durang.

He produced the short filmmaking competitions for Microsoft's Imagine Cup in both Brazil (2004) and Japan (2005), and the Liberty Hill Foundation's annual Upton Sinclair Award dinner (2003, 2004, 2005).