Whit Stillman wrote the screenplay for the independent film “Metropolitan” between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustration agency in New York. He went on to produce and direct it for $225,000.
A comedic chronicle of a middle-class college student’s romantic misadventures among a group of wealthy Park Avenue teenagers, “Metropolitan” (1990) earned Mr. Stillman an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay and grossed around $3 million. Not a bad debut for a novice filmmaker-screenwriter.
Mr. Stillman, who has since directed four other films and written two novels, will be at the Sag Harbor Cinema Thursday evening at 6 for a screening of “Metropolitan.” He will be joined by the film’s editor, Christopher Tellefsen, who lives in Sag Harbor.
Set over the Christmas holidays, the film opens as a group of young people leaves the Plaza Hotel after a dance in search of a taxi. Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), a Princeton student who hails a cab at the same time, offers to let the tuxedoed teenagers take the taxi, but they insist on his joining them.
He tries to resist, but he winds up with them at an after-party at the luxurious apartment of one of their parents. Eventually, despite his socialist leanings and his own family’s relatively meager resources, he becomes part of the group of young socialites.
“It is a tribute to Whit Stillman’s observant eye, his flawless directing style, and the humanity he finds in his characters that all his films seem to carry within a very special evergreen quality,” says Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, the cinema’s artistic director. “ ‘Metropolitan’ is as fresh and surprising as it was thirty plus years ago.”
The New York Times critic Vincent Canby called the film “a comedy of manners of a very high order,” while The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote, “Stillman films these rounds of romance and jealousy, old mind-sets and new friendships, as scintillating dialectical jousts in which verbal blows take the place of action and leave lasting emotional wounds.”
Mr. Stillman’s subsequent films are “Barcelona” (1994), which was inspired by his own time working in Spain during the early 1980s; “The Last Days of Disco” (1998), based in part on his experiences at Manhattan nightclubs; “Damsels in Distress” (2011), which starred Greta Gerwig, and “Love & Friendship” (2016), a loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” that starred Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny.
An Oscar-nominated editor, Mr. Tellefsen has worked with such directors as David O. Russell, Bennett Miller, M. Night Shyamalan, Casey Affleck, John Krasinski, Wayne Wang, Robert Benton, and many others.
A question-and-answer session will follow the screening.
