Background
Ward was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Miriam (née Schad) and Robert McCollum Ward.
Ward was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Miriam (née Schad) and Robert McCollum Ward.
Ward has degrees from Pomona College (Bachelor), as well as both University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles Film School (Master of Fine Arts).
After this initial success, his follow-up projects were less critically and commercially well received, including Ward"s maiden directorial effort,, and a sequel The Sting II (1983). He then wrote the comedy Saving Grace (1985) under a pseudonym. Sting star Robert Redford contracted Ward in 1986 to work on the Redford-directed The Milagro Beanfield War.
The response to this project enabled Ward to convince Morgan Creek Productions and Mirage Productions to bankroll, a baseball comedy that he"d been pitching to producers without success since 1982.
Major League was a labor of love for Ward, who had lived in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid as a child and who had rooted for the Indians" teams of the 1950s, including the 1954 American League Champions. Within 10 years, the Indians would appear in the World Series twice.
Major League and Ward"s subsequent efforts as a writer and director, and, were about underdogs who triumphed over the gadflies and nay-sayers of the world. He later scored a box-office coup with his screenplay (in collaboration with Nora Ephron) for 1993"s Sleepless in Seattle.
He went back to the well, directing the sequel Major League II, and then moved on to the Naval comedy starring Kelsey Grammer.
He also did uncredited rewrites on The Mask of Zorro (1998) Ward currently is a professor at Chapman University, in southern California, where he teaches screenwriting and directing, and acts as a Filmmaker in Residence for the campus. Another ten years would pass before Ward was credited on another film, Flyboys, a 2006 World War I drama starring James Franco directed by Tony Bill (who was a producer on The Sting). In 2010 it was announced that there would be a Major League 4, starring many of the same cast as the previous films.
As of late 2012, the script for the film is reportedly finished, but the film is still in pre-production.
