Mike Lee Scott Meyers Popular Books

Mike Lee Scott Meyers Biography & Facts

Nancy Jane Meyers (born December 8, 1949) is an American filmmaker. She has written, produced, and directed many critically and commercially successful films. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Private Benjamin (1980). Her film Baby Boom (1987) was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. She co-wrote Father of the Bride (1991), Father of the Bride Part II (1995), and both wrote and directed The Parent Trap (1998), What Women Want (2000), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), It's Complicated (2009), and The Intern (2015). Meyers was married to filmmaker Charles Shyer, with whom she had two children, including filmmaker Hallie Meyers-Shyer. Early life and education Meyers was born in Philadelphia. Her father, Irving Meyers, was an executive at a voting machines manufacturer. Her mother, Patricia Meyers (née Lemisch), was an interior designer who also worked as a volunteer with the Head Start Program and the Home for the Blind. The younger of two daughters, Meyers was raised in a Jewish household in the Drexel Hill area. After reading playwright Moss Hart's autobiography Act One at the age of twelve, Meyers became interested in theater and started to act in local stage productions. Her interest in screenwriting did not emerge until she saw Mike Nichols' film The Graduate in 1967. Meyers attended Lower Merion High School in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. In 1970, Meyers graduated from American University with a degree in journalism. Career After graduating from college, Meyers spent a year working in public television in Philadelphia. When she was 22 years old, Meyers moved to Los Angeles, living with her sister, Sally, in the Coldwater Canyon area. She quickly got a job as a production assistant on the CBS game show The Price Is Right. Inspired by the popular TV show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Meyers decided she wanted to write. She eventually got work as a story editor where she read scripts, wrote coverage, and worked with screenwriters on projects that the producers were developing. One of the companies she worked at was producer Ray Stark's company, Rastar. She worked her way up from there to writing her own scripts. Two years after coming to Los Angeles, Meyers was able to quit her job to focus on a career in screenwriting and took film-making classes where she connected with directors such as Martin Scorsese. To support herself, she started a small cheesecake business after positive reactions to a cake she made for a dinner party. Meyers was eventually hired as a story editor by film producer Ray Stark, who later fired her after Meyers objected to having two writers working on the same script without the other knowing. 1980s In the late 1970s, Meyers started work with Charles Shyer when she was a story editor in the film division at Motown. The pair became friends and, along with Harvey Miller, created the script for the comedy Private Benjamin (1980) together, a film about a spoiled young woman who joins the U.S. Army after her husband dies on their wedding night during sex. The film starred actress Goldie Hawn, who along with Meyers and Shyer executive produced the project. It was Hawn's agent who made Warner Brothers executive Robert Shapiro buy the script after practically "everybody [had] turned it down. Everybody. More than once," according to Meyers. Meyers described how hard it was to get the film made, noting, "Every single studio in Hollywood read it and passed on it... One studio called Goldie and said 'if you make this movie it's a career ender.'” Contrary to the conventional wisdom at the time, that a female lead with no male star was box office poison, Private Benjamin became one of the biggest box office hits of the year 1980, grossing nearly $70 million in total. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, as were Hawn and her co-star, Eileen Brennan, for their performances, and won the team a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. In addition, the film spawned a same-titled short-lived but Golden Globe-winning television series that aired from 1981 until 1983. Meyers and Shyer's next project, Irreconcilable Differences (1984), marked Shyer's directorial debut. Shelley Long and Ryan O'Neal played a Hollywood couple whose obsession with success destroys their relationship with their daughter, played by eight-year-old Drew Barrymore. Released to a mixed reception by critics, the collaboration became a moderate box office with a gross of $12.4 million, but received multiple Golden Globe nominations, including Best Actress nods for Long and Barrymore. Also in 1984, Meyers, Shyer and Miller penned Protocol, another comedy starring Goldie Hawn, in which she portrayed a cocktail waitress who prevents the assassination of a visiting Arab Emir, and thus is offered a job with the United States Department of State as a protocol official. Hawn reportedly disliked their screenplay and hired Buck Henry for a major overhaul, prompting the trio to go into arbitration to settle their differences. While neither Meyers nor Shyer became involved in producing or directing the film, it fared slightly better at the box office than Irreconcilable Differences, garnering $26.3 million in total. Meyers eventually returned to producing with Baby Boom (1987), a film about a New York City female executive, who out of the blue becomes the guardian of her distant cousin's 14-month-old daughter. The film marked her debut collaboration with Diane Keaton. The catalyst for the project was a series of situations that Meyers and Shyer and their friends had experienced while managing a life with a successful career and a growing family. Baby Boom was favorably received by critics and audiences alike. It was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy and earned a respectable $1.6 million in its opening weekend in the US, and approximately $26.7 million in its entire run. As with Private Benjamin the film was followed by a short-lived television series starring Kate Jackson. 1990s In 1990, Meyers and Shyer, working from earlier material for the first time, re-teamed with Keaton to remake the 1950 Vincente Minnelli film Father of the Bride. Starring Steve Martin as a father losing his daughter and his bank account at the same time, their 1991 version was released to generally positive reception. It became a hit among audiences, resulting in the pair's biggest financial success yet at a worldwide gross of $90 million. A sequel to the film which centered around the expansion of the family, entitled Father of the Bride Part II, was produced in 1995. Loosely based on the original's 1951 sequel Father's Little Dividend, it largely reprised the success of its predecessor at the box office. A third installment, also penned by Meyers and Shyer, failed to materialize. Also in 1991, Meyers contributed to the script for th.... Discover the Mike Lee Scott Meyers popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Mike Lee Scott Meyers books.