
He is a Golden Globe Award winner and multiple Academy Award nominee for his screenwriting and songwriting (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and producing (Brokeback Mountain) among his other honors, he was awarded the prize for Best Screenplay at the 1997 Cannes International Film Festival for The Ice Storm. An integral contributor to the American independent film business for over two decades, Schamus has the unique distinction of being an award-winning screenwriter and producer who is also a film executive. James Schamus is chief executive officer (CEO) of Focus Features and Professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches film history and theory. The film is scheduled for release in 2009. Lee is currently working on Taking Woodstock, a film based on Elliot Tiber’s autobiography of the same name. Lust, Caution won Best Picture at the 2007 Venice Film Festival and swept the 2007 Golden Horse Awards by winning seven awards, including Best Feature Film and Best Director. The former received eight nominations at the 78th Academy Awards, more than any other film of that year, where it won Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score. Lee directed Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Lust, Caution (2007). The film won four Academy Awards including Best Foreign Language Film. He received a Golden Globe Award and a Directors Guild Award for Best Director. Lee directed the highly acclaimed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee’s other films included Sense and Sensibility (1995), which garnered many awards including Best Screenplay Adaptation from the Academy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Ice Storm (1997) went on to become one of the year’s best reviewed films. Both films received multiple nominations and awards including Best Foreign Language Film nomination from the Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. His next films were the critically acclaimed The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). Lee’s first feature film, Pushing Hands, was viewed internationally and nominated for nine Golden Horse Awards, the Taiwanese equivalent to the Oscar. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater from the University of Illinois, he went on to New York University to complete a Master of Fine Arts Degree in film production. In addition, much of Schamus and Lee’s work has been historical, so that we might also consider what makes a good historical film and how the cinema shapes our very notions of the past.”īorn and raised in Taiwan, Ang Lee moved to the United States in 1978. We hope students will enjoy exploring the question of what is gained and lost when works are “translated” from one medium to another. Lee and Schamus have worked on several adaptations of novels to the screen, for example, Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen), The Ice Storm (Rick Moody), and Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx). “The work of Lee and Schamus also illuminates interactions between different types of creative endeavor.


Bringing both Schamus and Lee to Berkeley enables us to learn more about collaboration in the arts. The two films we are highlighting this year, The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, deploy two very different genres to explore these timeless themes in two very different settings: suburban Connecticut in the 1970s and ancient China. Schamus and Lee have explored many central realms of the human experience in their films: love, fantasy, sex, and death. “Ang Lee is an Academy Award-winning director who has made several films in collaboration with producer and screenwriter James Schamus, holder of a PhD in English from Berkeley. At its best, cinema challenges the boundaries between entertainment and art, and these two movies provide classic examples of how this is done.

In studying the work of Ang Lee and James Schamus, we will try to understand the structures and techniques that give films their power to stir us.
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Our culture has become increasingly visual, and yet many of us know little about how to “read” films. We will discuss two of their most important films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm. “How do artists interpret and ultimately transform our world? This year On The Same Page will feature two leaders of current cinema, Ang Lee and James Schamus. We asked Tyler Stovall, Dean of the Undergraduate Division, to explain what compelled the deans to choose Ang Lee and James Schamus as the featured artists for On the Same Page for 2008-09. This year, we’re all on the same page viewing The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. On the Same Page gives new students in the College of Letters & Science something to talk about: a work by a figure who has changed the way we view the world. The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
