Thomas Lee Wright

Thomas Lee Wright

Thomas Lee Wright, an American writer and Academy Award nominated filmmaker, is best known for his timely and powerful documentaries, including "Edith+Eddie" (producer) which won the IDA (International Documentary Association) Best Short award and an Oscar nomination, "Eight-Tray Gangster" (director) for the Discovery Channel which tells the story of L.A.'s Rodney King riots from a gang member's perspective, and the award-winning WTO 'Battle in Seattle' chronicle "Trade Off" (producer) for Human Rights Watch. Three of his films deal with war veterans - "The Long Ride Home" (director), "To Them That's Gone" (exec producer) and "Last Flag Flying" (exec producer) which he developed as a feature film for director Richard Linklater, starring Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne. Wright also penned the original screenplay for the Warner Brothers hit "New Jack City" starring Wesley Snipes, Chris Rock and Ice-T, which the New York Times called "an urban classic" on the 25th anniversary of its premiere. A Minnesota native, Wright attended Harvard University, writing and directing plays and earning a degree in English Literature with honors, then studied Irish Theater at Trinity College, Dublin, while playing point guard for its national championship basketball team. Moving to Los Angeles, Wright became a story editor at Walt Disney and Columbia Pictures, before serving as a creative executive at Paramount Pictures, where he helped develop "48 HRS", "Trading Places", "Flashdance" and other movies. Wright's treatment for "The Godfather, Part Three" launched his screenwriting career and led to writing projects for every major studio and many of Hollywood's top producers, including Peter Guber, Dino De Laurentiis, Mike Medavoy, Daniel Melnick and Don Simpson, among others. Wright co-wrote a pair of definitive widely-used books about filmmaking - 'Working in Hollywood' traces the making of a motion picture through tasks performed by 64 different workers behind the scenes, and 'American Screenwriters' which is a collection of interviews with top writers discussing the craft and business of screenwriting.

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