SMITH, Mark Haskell

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: American Film Institute, graduate study; Playwright's Horizon Theater, studied theatrical writing and directing.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

CAREER:

Screenwriter, novelist, and cinematographer.

WRITINGS:

Playing God (screenplay), Buena Vista, 1997.

Moist (novel), LA Weekly/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Film credits include Playboy—Inside Out, 1992, and The Inheritance (in Portuguese), released in Brazil. Television writing credits include Martial Law, Star Trek: Voyager, and The Magnificent Seven. Theatrical writing credits include Cost of Doing Business, produced in Los Angeles.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Adapting the 2002 Korean film Marrying the Mafia for Warner Brothers.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mark Haskell Smith has written for theater, television, and film, his first major screenplay being Playing God, starring David Duchovny. Duchovny plays Eugene Sands, a surgeon who was stripped of his right to operate after losing a patient while in a drug-induced haze. Sands goes into a Los Angeles bar looking for a score and performs emergency surgery when another patron is shot. His heroics are observed by Claire (Angelina Jolie), girlfriend of gangster Raymond Blossom (Timothy Hutton), and Blossom approaches Sands about being his private surgeon, beginning with the stitching up of a one of Blossom's mobsters. Variety critic Leonard Klady wrote that Smith's screenplay "is a wild ride of ideas and mayhem, ambiguity and collisions" and "so frenzied in delivery that one can do little but hold onto the sides of the roller-coaster and experience the ride."

Booklist's Joanne Wilkinson commented that Moist, Smith's debut novel, "reads like an homage to Elmore Leonard." The story is set in Los Angeles, where Bob, a slacker pathology technician, spends most of his lab time surfing the Internet and playing computer games. When his desk is graced with a severed arm upon which the pornographic image of a naked woman is tattooed, Bob falls for the inked-in female. The arm, which belonged to Amado, an enforcer for the Los Angeles branch of the Mexican mafia, was ripped off in an encounter with a garage door. As Bob transports the arm to a forensics facility, he is waylaid by Esteban and his gang, who want to recover the arm that could connect them to the murder of an informant. Bob, who is recently separated from Maura, his sex-therapist girlfriend, is looking for some excitement, and he agrees to replace the arm with another for one night with Felicia, the woman who posed for the tattoo. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that "pace and plotting are all in this Pulp Fiction-esque tale."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, December, 1997, James Bowman, review of Playing God, p. 72.

Booklist, September 15, 2002, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Moist, p. 211.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2002, review of Moist, p. 1260.

New York Times, October 17, 1997, Stephen Holden, review of Playing God, p. B18.

Publishers Weekly, September 23, 2002, review ofMoist, p. 50.

Variety, October 20, 1997, Leonard Klady, review of Playing God, p. 71.*