John Whitney Stillman (born January 25, 1952) is an American writer-director and actor known for his 1990 film Metropolitan, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

[9][10] After graduating from Harvard in 1973, Stillman began working as an editorial assistant at Doubleday in New York City, followed by a stint as a junior editor at The American Spectator, a conservative magazine.

[9]: 41 [11][12] Stillman has subsequently distanced himself from his work for the Spectator, stating that he now hates "to be drawn into ideological debates" and prefers to remain "apolitical".

[19] Loosely based on Stillman's Manhattan days, with his divorced mother during the week of Christmas break 1969[20] during his first year at Harvard, Metropolitan tells the story of the alienated Princetonian Tom Townsend's introduction to the "Sally Fowler Rat Pack" (SFRP), a small group of preppy, Upper East Side Manhattanites making the rounds at debutante balls during Christmas break of their first year in college.

Though he is a socialist deeply skeptical of the SFRP's upper-class values, Tom (Edward Clements) grows increasingly attached to the cynical Nick (Chris Eigeman) and plays an important part, of which he is largely unaware, in the life of Audrey (Carolyn Farina), a young debutante.

[34][35] On July 11, 2016, Tom Grater reported that Stillman was commissioned by Amazon to write six new scripts to continue his original pilot film for The Cosmopolitans.

"- Whit Stillman, shortly before the world premiere of Love & Friendship at Sundance[37]In 2016, Amazon stated that: "Our agreements with the content provider don’t allow purchases of this title at this time.

The first is a party: the male trio, plus Aubrey, head to a soirée at the posh apartment of an arrogantly wealthy Parisian acquaintance (or perhaps a German in Paris), Fritz (Freddy Åsblom).

"- Richard Brody, 27 August 2014[41]Love & Friendship (2016) A film version of one of Jane Austen's early short novels Lady Susan was reported by Entertainment Weekly on January 22, 2016.

Although the plot of the film is adapted from Lady Susan, the actual title used (Love & Friendship) is from another, unrelated early epistolary novel by Austen, unpublished during her lifetime.

The promotional announcement by Little, Brown and Company summarized Stillman's adaptation stating; "Recently widowed, Lady Susan arrives, unannounced, at her brother-in-law's estate to wait out colorful rumors about her dalliances circulating through polite society.

As Lady Susan embarks on a controversial relationship with a married man, seduction, deception, broken hearts, and gossip all ensue.

With a pitch-perfect Austenian sensibility, Stillman breathes new life into Austen's work, making it his own by adding original narration from a character comically loyal to the story's fiendishly manipulative heroine, Lady Susan.

"[43] Stillman wrote and directed three comedies of manners[44] released in the 1990s: Metropolitan[45] (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998); he published a novel based on the last of these films.

[46] After completing his film trilogy, Stillman left independent comedy and started researching and writing a series of scripts set abroad.

[47] The Guardian in 2012 compared Stillman to Terrence Malick, another filmmaker who has "come to owe a good part of their mystique to the very paucity of their oeuvre...The lengthy gaps in between (films) have created expectations that are hard to fulfil, and admirers have been inclined to overestimate their achievement.

You can't always tell at whom he's poking fun, or why, and it becomes unfortunately easy to typecast him as the WASP answer to Woody Allen and conclude that his movies are insufferably irritating documents of privilege.

Stillman, in an AOL interview following the twenty-fifth anniversary of Metropolitan, refers to himself as having been put into "director's prison" for more than 10 years before he made Damsels.

Stillman responded by stating that: "Love & Friendship doesn't loom as a costume drama, because it's a pretty funny comedy, so it's really not what you might anticipate.

[53] Stillman wrote a novelization of The Last Days of Disco published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under the same title, with the added subtitle "...With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards".