Acclaimed screenwriter and novelist Stephen Molton has amassed a lauded portfolio of impactful credits in several media. After breaking into television through writing screenplays for the Paul Newman-produced PBS's Children's Television Workshop, Stephen wrote his first novel, Brave Talk, which was published by Harper & Row in 1987 and provided a riveting, multi-angled introspective portrait of life in the Navy. He served as a creative executive for HBO, Showtime and MTV in the years which followed, while writing his second novel, and co-directed and produced L.A. Homefront: The Fires Within, a Showtime documentary about the Los Angeles Riots, in 1994. Other features he authored for Showtime include SmarTalk and The Accident; the adaptive mini-series, Live By the Sword (Gus Russo) and Weaveworld (Clive Barker). With the former, Stephen co-authored Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros and the Politics of Murder, endorsed for Pulitzer Prize consideration by the book’s publisher and winner of the New York Book Festival’s prize for history in 2009. Films Stephen has written include Deep Blue (Stealth) for New Line Cinema (based on Brave Talk); The Road to East Jesus; and The Drowning for Netflix in 2017 (Josh Charles; Julia Stiles; Leo Fitzpatrick), a Bette Gordon directed adaptation of the book Border Crossing, which he also executive produced. Stephen is an adjunct assistant professor of screen-writing at Columbia University and an instructor at the Jacob Krueger Studio in New York; he attended University of Chicago, MIT and Oberlin College. In our conversation, we discussed his unique upbringing as the son of a progressive Baptist minister; the Navy infrastructure which laid the backdrop for his first novel; Generation 9/11, his documentary, and Elvis Meets Nixon, which he was involved with as an executive for Showtime and inspired Elvis & Nixon (Kevin Spacey; Michael Shannon; Evan Peters); rock and roll and folk music; and the differentiability between the east coast and the midwest.
Opening Credits: 1st Contact - On the other Side I Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0); Closing Credits: 1st Contact - Beware of the Cow I Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)