Convocation: James Schamus

James Schamus is an award-winning screenwriter (The Ice Storm) and producer (Brokeback Mountain), and is CEO of Focus Features, the motion picture production, financing, and worldwide distribution company whose films have included Lost in Translation, Milk, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Pianist, Coraline, and The Kids Are All Right. The author of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Gertrud”: The Moving Word, Schamus is also Professor of Professional Practice in Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches film history and theory. It is generally assumed that Hollywood movie studios and their brethren in the television industry are the epicenter of our culture’s mass production of narrative. But Schamus suggests that the greatest narrative-producing machines ever assembled in the history of the world are located not in Hollywood, but in Bethesda, Maryland; Alexandria, Virginia; and Washington, D.C. The title of his presentation was "My Wife is a Terrorist: Lessons in Storytelling from the Department of Homeland Security."