He is a Professor Emeritus in Film at Los Angeles City College, where he taught from 1971 to 2011.
His students at LACC included writer director, Maggie Greenwald and Karen Moncrieff, directors Tamra Davis and Emmy-award winning Mimi Leder, film editors Carole Kravitz and Academy Award-nominated Kevin Tent, Academy Award-winning short filmmaker Ron Ellis, and Rick Schmidlin who received The New York Film Critics Circle award for the re-edit of Touch of Evil.
An expert and teacher of screenwriting, he has written for Film Quarterly, Los Angeles Times, Sight & Sound, Film & History, Senses of Cinema, Slant Magazine,[1][2] and has contributed to the Journal of Screenwriting.
According to Ian Scott, Stempel's book FrameWork "sets out a number of reasons that a wave of playwrights, journalists, and short-story writers made their way to Hollywood, principally from New York, in the late 1920s and early '30s".
[4] Other film historians who have acknowledged Stempel's influence in the field and in their research include Ally Acker,[5] Douglas Heil,[6] Claus Tieber,[7] Steven Maras,[8] Steven Price,[9] and Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo.