When was David Mirkin born?
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David Mirkin (born September 18, 1955) is an American feature film and television director, writer and producer. Mirkin grew up in Philadelphia and intended to become an electrical engineer, but abandoned this career path in favor of studying film at Loyola Marymount University. After graduating, he became a stand-up comedian, and then moved into television writing. He wrote for the sitcoms "Three's Company", "It's Garry Shandling's Show" and "The Larry Sanders Show" and served as showrunner on the series "Newhart". After an unsuccessful attempt to remake the British series "The Young Ones", Mirkin created "Get a Life" in 1990. The series starred comedian Chris Elliott and ran for two seasons, despite a lack of support from many Fox network executives, who disliked the show's dark and surreal humor. He moved on to create the sketch show "The Edge" starring his then-partner, actress Julie Brown.
David Mirkin
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Mirkin was born and raised in Philadelphia and graduated from Northeast High School in 1973. His father was a computer engineer until his death in 1960. Mirkin's older brother Gary worked as a television engineer for the Philadelphia NBC affiliate, KYW-TV, now a CBS owned-and-operated station. Throughout his childhood, Mirkin had an interest in film, and explored both writing and filming. Mirkin has described himself as a "nerd" and was often in trouble as a child because he was "in another world". At high school, he felt the teaching was "too slow" and was allowed by his teachers to "skip class two to three days a week".
David Mirkin
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Mirkin was the executive producer and showrunner for the animated sitcom "The Simpsons", during its fifth and sixth seasons (1993–1995). Following the end of the show's fourth season, most of the original staff members left the show; only Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, Conan O'Brien and Dan McGrath remained, and O'Brien soon left to replace David Letterman as host of "Late Night". Executive producers James L. Brooks and Richard Sakai hired Mirkin following his exit from "The Edge". He had been asked to join the show's writing team when it started in 1989, but decided instead to work on "Get a Life". He was a fan of "The Simpsons" before being hired for the show, and started work in . Due to the show's long production cycle, season five did not air until the following September. Mirkin was the program's first solo showrunner. Due to the high staff departure at the end of season four, Mirkin "pretty much had to build [the] show from the ground up again", and noted that this "was exciting but also a big challenge". He hired several new writers, including Richard Appel, David X. Cohen, Jennifer Crittenden, Greg Daniels, Bob Kushell, Jace Richdale and Mike Scully.
David Mirkin
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Mirkin started out as a stand-up comedian in 1982 and performed across the United States, including at The Comedy Store, where he became a regular, and at The Improv. The first joke he used in his routine was, "Is it just me or has everybody been coughing up blood lately?" Mirkin considers the joke to be "an insight into the way [he writes]". Stand-up comedy was the most profitable and easily accessible route Mirkin found into the comedy industry, but "it wasn't a lifestyle that [he] particularly coveted," especially due to the traveling required.
David Mirkin
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He got his first job writing for television on the sitcom "Three's Company" in 1983. Through his cousin, Mirkin met writer George Tricker who became his mentor. Tricker wrote for the "Three's Company" spin-off "The Ropers" so Mirkin wrote a spec script for an episode of "The Ropers". Although rejected by the producers of "The Ropers", "Three's Company" creator Bernie West was impressed by the script and Mirkin began pitching ideas for that series instead. Mirkin pitched to the series' story editors for several years without success because they had very limited script buying power. He was eventually able to pitch to the show's producers, who bought a script from him, and then hired him as a staff writer. Mirkin was apprehensive about the job because he was aiming to work on "Cheers", a show more focused on character-driven humor which Mirkin preferred writing, but felt he could not turn the opportunity down. Mirkin considered "Three's Company" to have "a classic French farce structure", as "the characters were so stupid they could never say anything clever." This meant Mirkin had to adapt his preference for character-driven comedy to fit the show; it "forced you to put all the cleverness into the plot, a much more difficult thing to do. The plot had to get all the laughs". Mirkin felt the experience "taught [him] a lot about structure" which greatly aided his later work on character-focused shows.
Still hoping to work on "Cheers", Mirkin sent a spec script of an episode of "Taxi" to "Cheers" writers Ken Levine and David Isaacs. The two approved and offered Mirkin a freelance job writing one of the final nine episodes of the show's first season, pending their commissioning by NBC. The episodes were commissioned, but Mirkin's agent rejected the "Cheers" job without telling his client, failing to see why Mirkin would want to work on what was then the lowest-rated comedy on television. Mirkin sacked the agent and signed on with Robb Rothman. Rothman knew Dan Wilcox, the executive producer of "Newhart", which like "Cheers" was more character-focused. Rothman persuaded Wilcox to hire Mirkin. Mirkin wrote a freelance script and in 1984 beat seven other writers to a staff position on the series. He served as a writer and supervising story editor, before being promoted to executive producer and showrunner after one and a half years. Mirkin "felt ["Newhart"] was where I belonged. I'd finally come to a place in my life where everything I'd ever wanted had come together." In 1987, he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series for "Newhart". It was the first nomination the show had received in that category and for the first episode Mirkin wrote as the series' showrunner. Mirkin directed several of the "Newhart" episodes he wrote because he saw directing as "a means of protecting the writing". A philosophy he carried into his later work, Mirkin felt that "being the head writer... was not enough; you had to see the material through its execution – especially the weirder stuff. You had to be right there to make sure every sick idea didn't lose any disturbing nuance." Mirkin left "Newhart" in 1988, desiring to work on a single-camera sitcom.
David Mirkin
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In 1991, Mirkin wrote a pilot with Julie Brown entitled "The Julie Show", starring Brown, but NBC did not produce it. Several people at the network enjoyed it and commissioned "The Edge", a sketch comedy show also written by Mirkin and Brown, with Mirkin directing. NBC opted against production, but Fox ran it from 1992 to 1993. Mirkin had long wished to produce a sketch show, and designed "The Edge" to be "fast-paced" and "some skits overlap, end abruptly or are broken into segments", in order to maintain attention. "The Edge" was a ratings success and was supported by the network. Mirkin considered it "the first time I experienced the feeling of having a hit that I created. It just kept building and growing." The show's material often inflamed its targets, particularly producer Aaron Spelling. Spelling objected to a sketch mocking his series "Beverly Hills, 90210", another Fox show, and its lead actress Tori Spelling, who is his daughter. He demanded a public apology and that no further episodes contain the parody, threatening to sue. The show's production company TriStar Television refused, while Mirkin responded: "The thing about these parodies is they don't hurt a show. It's only cross-promotion. The viewers who like the show always come back the next week. What's upsetting to me is it shows absolutely that Mr. Spelling has no sense of humor." Mirkin left his role as executive producer of "The Edge" during its run. The "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" reported that Mirkin had been "forced off the show", due to the negative reaction of Spelling and others, though in 2012, Mirkin stated that he left the series after refusing to accept a substantially reduced budget. The show's producers Sony failed to persuade him to stay but he returned to the series to produce its final "Best Of" compilation.
David Mirkin
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Zinaida Mirkina was born on 10 January 1926 in Moscow. Her parents were Alexander Mirkin, an engineer, and Alexandra Mirkina, an economist. Her grandfather, Aaron Mirkin, had been a watchmaker in Saint Petersburg. Her family was Jewish.
Zinaida Mirkina
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Mirkin was born November 23, 1963, in Phoenix, Arizona. He received his B.S. degree from Dickinson College in 1986 and his PhD from Penn State University in 1989. He was an NSF postdoctoral research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked with Professor Mark S. Wrighton on microelectrode devices for electrocatalysis. He became a professor at Northwestern University in 1991.
Chad Mirkin
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"Heartbreakers", Mirkin's second film as a feature director, was released in 2001. Mirkin rejected the project three times because he disliked the script. While he liked the idea of a mother and daughter con-woman team, he found the writing "really broad", and "it had no emotion in it." Eventually, Mirkin was allowed to rewrite the script himself, which he did in a year's time. He filmed the project in Florida and Los Angeles and had a cameo appearance in the film as Jack's lawyer. Reactions to both the film and Mirkin's direction of it were more varied compared to "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion". Roger Ebert said the film was not "as sly and has no ambition to be [as] charming" as "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion", "but in a season of dreary failed comedies it does what a comedy must: It makes us laugh". Chris Hewitt of "Empire" wrote that "Mirkin's direction is a little flat, but he's clearly having tremendous fun," but Susan Wloszczyna of "USA Today" opined that Mirkin "never gets the timing right and allows the story to drag with little internal logic".
David Mirkin
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In 1999, several of the Fox executives who had disliked "Get a Life" came to Mirkin and apologized for the way they had treated the show, stating that they now found it funny. They commissioned Mirkin to write, produce and direct a similarly-themed show of his choice. Mirkin produced a pilot for "Jeff of the Universe", a "sarcastic" parody of the science fiction genre. The executives who had disproved of "Get a Life" had since moved from the Fox Network to Fox Studios, and they liked this new show. However, the new executives at Fox did not, and chose not to air the show. Mirkin often plays clips from the show at the talks he does at colleges; they receive a positive response.
David Mirkin