WILLIAMS, Tod (Culpan) 1968-

PERSONAL:

Born September 27, 1968, in New York, NY; son of an architect (father) and a dancer (mother); married Famke Janssen (an actress), 1995 (divorced, 2000); married Gretchen Mol (an actress), 2004. Education: Studied painting and literature at Bard College and Columbia University; attended American Film Institute.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY, and Alden, MI. Agent—c/o Focus Features, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, CA 91608.

CAREER:

Writer, director, actor, and producer. Worked as a stringer for the New York Times Los Angeles bureau. Produced and appeared in the film The Big Bend.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Independent Spirit Award nomination for best screenplay, for The Adventures of Sebastian Cole.

WRITINGS:

SCREENPLAYS

(And director) The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, Paramount Classics, 1998.

(And director) The Door in the Floor (adapted from the novel A Widow for One Year by John Irving), Focus Features, 2004.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Writing and directing a film version of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer, director, and producer Tod Williams studied painting and literature and worked briefly as a journalist before turning his attention to movies and attending the American Film Institute. His first film was the semiautobiographical The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, which he wrote and directed. Although it began as a low-budget project filmed on Super-8, the film eventually ended up on 35 mm due to increased financial backing and was released to theaters in 1998. In an interview with Aaron Krach on the indieWIRE Web site, Williams noted, "I didn't think it turned real until the day we sold it. We had never even screened it before. We screened it at Toronto and we sold it that night. We were kind of unfinished. We ran out of money. We screened it and it went over huge and Paramount bought it."

The Adventures of Sebastian Cole follows the teenage Sebastian, who lives in 1983 upstate New York and, like many teenagers, is intent on breaking the rules that parents and other authority figures insist on enforcing. A classic underachiever, Sebastian lives with his transgender stepfather, who may become his stepmother. Their relationship, however, does not overpower the film. Krach pointed out that Cole resists the temptation to focus on this "ripe" plot device. "Instead, the film is about a series of adventures in Sebastian's life—his girlfriend, his self-obsessed parents, his lame friends and troubled school life—all told with a subtlety often lacking in American independent films," noted Krach. Owen Gleiberman, writing in Entertainment Weekly, called the movie "a coming-of-age drama at once awkward and full of feeling." Noting that the movie has a "fluky, downbeat charm," Gleiberman added, "Williams provides a fresh glimpse into the randomness of adolescence, when not knowing what comes next is the defining taste of life."

For his next film, The Door in the Floor, Williams based his screenplay on the first part of the John Irving novel A Widow for One Year. As told by Williams in his film, the story revolves around Ted Cole, who is a successful children's author and illustrator, his wife, Marion, and a young interloper named Eddie O'Hare, who comes to work as Ted's intern but begins to develop a crush on Marion. Ted cheats on his wife with women who pose for his paintings, and Marion remains emotionally withdrawn because of the death years earlier of their adolescent sons in a car crash, even though the couple went on to have another daughter. As time goes on, Marion and Eddie embark on a passionate affair that may perhaps signal the end of the Coles' marriage. Writing in People, Leah Rozen called the movie "a flawed film, but one made with obvious intelligence and care by writer-director Tod Williams." Entertainment Weekly contributor Gleiberman called The Door in the Floor "the most robust and compelling movie ever spun off from Irving's work." Nevertheless, Gleiberman was somewhat put off with the movie's "overly symmetrical design" and commented, "Everything in the movie—family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing—ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too." Calling the film a "tragicomic rumination on life and death and love and sex," Michael Rechtshaffen commended Williams in the Hollywood Reporter for making a movie in "Irving's own words, which have made the transition quite intact thanks to a faithful but still filmic adaptation."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Advocate, May 25, 1999, Gregg Kilday, "Reel Transsexuals," p. 95.

Entertainment Weekly, August 13, 1999, Owen Gleiberman, review of The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, p. 53; July 23, 2004, Gleiberman, review of The Door in the Floor, p. 59.

Film Journal International, July, 2004, Doris Toumarkine, review of The Door in the Floor, p. 71.

Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 2001, "Williams Stalks 'Owl' for BBC, Bender Prods," p. 4; June 18, 2004, Michael Rechtshaffen, review of The Door in the Floor, p. 20.

Newsweek, July 26, 2004, review of The Door in the Floor, p. 55.

New York Times, July 11, 2004, Caryn James, "The Director Who Drilled The Door in the Floor.

" People, July 26, 2004, Leah Rozen, review of The Door in the Floor, p. 30.

ONLINE

indieWire, http://www.indiwire.com/ (August 25, 2004), Aaron Krach, "Interview: The Adventures of Tod Williams, Writer/Director of Sebastian Cole."

ReelMovieCritic.com,http://www.reelmoviecritic.com/ (August 25, 2004), George O. Singleton, "A Conversation with Tod Williams."

Sundance Channel,http://www.sundancechannel.com/ (August 25, 2004), "The Door in the Floor. "

WashingtonPost.com,http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (June 14, 2004), "Movie: The Door in the Floor, Bringing Literature to the Screen," online discussion.*