Background
KASDAN, Lawrence was born on January 14, 1949 in Miami Beach, Florida, United States. Son of Clarence Norman Kasdan and Sylvia Sarah (nee Landau) Kasdan.
director producer screenwriter
KASDAN, Lawrence was born on January 14, 1949 in Miami Beach, Florida, United States. Son of Clarence Norman Kasdan and Sylvia Sarah (nee Landau) Kasdan.
After receiving a B.A. and then an M.A. from the University of Michigan, Kasdan became an advertising copywriter in Detroit and then in Los Angeles.
By the late seventies he was trying his hand as a screenwriter. This led to a cowriting credit on The Empire Strikes Back (80, Irvin Kershner), and then to the start of his owm directing career.
Body Heat was a brilliant thriller: it captured place and weather as well as a real feeling for erotic moment. It used William Hurt cleverly; it made Kathleen Turner’s career, so that several other less focused roles hardly shook her from her place. Body Heat was old-fashioned, and as simpleminded as it was complicated. But it works better than Kasdan’s later efforts to give us people truer to ordinary life.
The Big Chill seems to me like a smart gloss rather than a real portrait; so much is going on nothing searching is expected. Silverado felt relentlessly wooden. The Accidental Tourist underlined the fact that Anne Tyler could be a TV dramatist as well as a novelist il she had lived in Britain, whereas in America she has no reason to go beyond the page. On I Love You to Death, Kasdan later believed he had erred in rejecting awkward, ugly elements in favor of smoothness.
Grand Canyon was something more. It has large faults—too much tidiness, an overly benevolent view of blacks, an inescapable but hollow ending, and the insistent unreality of Steve Martin in a cast striving for the mundane. But Grand Canyon caught the mood of L.A. in the age of Rodney King, and it is an unconscious record of Hollywood’s pious liberalism. Verv few American films outside Altman have had so interesting a sense of the crowded context in which we live. The film gave a hint of a Kasdan who w'as not happy with his own narrative choices, and had found a reason to put them aside. But if he developed and improved along that resolute line, could lie be employed? His next picture proved to be not an advance into danger, but a throw'baek— Wyatt Earp, with Kevin Costner seeking to rekindle memories of My Darling Clementine.
Wyatt Earp was 195 minutes, and not just the dullest Eaip film but one exposed by Tombstone, made in the same year. Not that Kasdan’s picture was bursting with new ambitions, or a fresh vision of the frontier. But French Kiss was the real disaster, far too charming for its own good. As for Mumford. it was decent, observant, and benign, but somehow' there seemed to be a pall of solemnity, drawn up above the head, by a talent that had begun to flinch from film’s essential energy or force. It’s a progress that leaves one more aware of the deep disquiet Grand Canyon represented.
Kasdan has also written or helped to waite films for others: Continental Divide (81, Michael Apted): Raiders of the Lost Ark (81, Steven Spielberg): The Return of the Jedi (83, Richard Marquand)—it might be fascinating to see Kasdan try a movie about a figure like Steven Spielberg. Though it is more likely that Anne Tyler would do a better job in a novel.
His years-on-the-shelf script led to The Bodyguard (92, Mick Jackson), which Kasdan co-produced
Writers Guild, W. America, Directors Guild, W. America.
Married Meg Goldman in 1971.