title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I have a feeling that by nature I will never make a film that popular because there's something about popular films and the simplicity to them that I may not be able to achieve. I wish I could. All of my objections were personal. The movie did work on some level that I did not anticipate. I have a good friend who called me up after seeing "The Bodyguard" and said, 'You know, I think that's my favorite one of your movies.' Well, I was terribly insulted because I didn't like the movie and I didn't like him saying, by implication, that all my other movies were crap. I said, 'What is it you liked so much?' He said, 'There's something heartbreaking to me about their relationship and this love that can never be satisfied. He's willing to do anything for her but they can never be together.' And I thought, 'Well, you're giving it a lot more weight and feeling than I think the movie deserves,' but in retrospect, there was something about that relationship that spoke to people, mainly to women, but to people all over the world, everywhere it went. It was a huge success. The critics said it was a piece of crap.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: While "The Bodyguard" was being passed around town, Kasdan wrote "Continental Divide"—a script about a brash Chicago journalist who falls in love with a woman living in the mountains studying eagles, in the vein of an old Spencer Tracy / Katharine Hepburn comedy. He came up with the outline while eating lunch on the lawn of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kurland shopped it around, and took it to Steven Spielberg, who was on the dubbing stage for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977). Spielberg had Universal buy the script for $150,000 in October 1977, with a desire to serve as executive producer. "I was looking for a love story to do," Spielberg said. "Actually, it was a very intense bidding situation. There were four studios bidding for it and Universal made the highest bid. The script was wonderful. Larry is an excellent writer. He writes the sort of material we haven't seen around here for a long time. He writes about the '30s and '40s in a fascinating, exciting way. He loves old movies and draws on them for his work. He's exploring new territory based on old ground."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The movie was eventually made several years later, starring John Belushi and Blair Brown and directed by Michael Apted. It came out on September 18, 1981, three weeks after the release of Kasdan's directorial debut, "Body Heat".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan proposes a return to basics in screenplays: clean narrative lines, understandable characters, tantalizing plot precipices. His scripts live comfortably within the conventions of their genres. ... "Continental Divide" may be the most reductive of his screenplays, but in reviving the romantic-comedy format of the '30s, it offers lessons to the student of the structure—and pleasure to any moviegoer out for a good time.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: According to Kasdan, the original script was "very different from the film which resulted. The script had a kind of [Howard] Hawksian speed, momentum, hopefully wit about it. I don't think the film turned out that way, which was one of those painful experiences I had early on."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Spielberg's enthusiasm for "Continental Divide" led him to hire Kasdan to write "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which he was developing with George Lucas. "I think that what they were looking for was someone who could write "Raiders" in the same way that Hawks would have someone write a movie for him—a strong woman character, a certain kind of hero," Kasdan said. In a now-famous meeting (with producer Frank Marshall also in the room), "George, Steven, and I talked for about 20 minutes. Then we stood up and shook hands, and George said, 'Let's make this movie.' I had just met the guy, and a few minutes later I'm in business with him."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "George said, 'We're going to do a movie that's like the old serials, Kasdan recalled. I don't know too much about it, but the hero is named after my dog, Indiana. I know the hero wears a fedora and a leather jacket and carries a whip. Having the artifact be the Biblical Ark of the Covenant came from writer-director Philip Kaufman, who got the idea from his orthodontist when he was 11 years old. (At one point, Kaufman was going to be involved with "Raiders". He ended up with a "story by" credit.)


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: We had a tape recorder going, and George essentially guided the story process and the three of us pitched the entire movie in about five days. And that's where the fantasy of all our pent-up, wet-movie dreams coalesced. Most of the time we were on our feet, trying to out-shout each other with ideas.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: They wound up with a hundred-page transcript, and Kasdan wrote the screenplay in Spielberg's office while the director was making "1941". It took him six months.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Writing "Raiders" was a big job. Our outlining was immense, but not detailed. We knew who the three main characters would be, but there wasn't a word in anybody's mouth. ... I also had to do a good bit of research. My first draft of "Raiders" had a lot of information about the Ark of the Covenant, most of which has survived into the final film. It's been simplified and might sound like a lot of hocus pocus, but the majority of the superstitions and history that the picture attributes to the Ark are beliefs that have been held by people for years. Additionally, I did a lot of reading about archeology, the attitudes and lifestyles of 1930s America, and that time's international alliances.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: For the character of Indiana Jones, Kasdan said he wanted to capture the essence of old Hollywood stars like Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, and Clark Gable. "One of my favorite actors is Steve McQueen," he said. "I loved the poetry in the way he moved—his stylized movement. I wanted "Raiders" to have that heightened reality. That's where I came together with George's love of serials and Steven's fascination with kinetic thrust."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Lucas wanted the character to be more like James Bond, so Kasdan had to write a different version of the scene where Brody goes to his house, he said. "George wanted Indy to be a playboy, so Jones was going to answer the door wearing a tuxedo. Then, when Brody went into the house, he would see a beautiful, Harlow-type blonde sipping champagne in Indy's living room. My feeling was that Indiana Jones' two sides (professor and adventurer) made him complicated enough without adding the playboy element."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Originally the Staff of Ra headpiece was divided into two pieces; Marion Ravenwood had one, and the other was stored in the museum of a Chinese warlord. After leaving America, Indy went directly to Shanghai, and Kasdan wrote an entire sequence with a gong rolling along a floor and Indy running behind it to avoid gunfire—which was later repurposed in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". "That scene would have been great," said Kasdan, "but we cut it before shooting because it would have broken up the film's pace and it also probably would have been too costly to shoot."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Following that scene Indy was going to be on a plane, and while he's asleep all of the other passengers parachute off. Just before the plane crashes in the Himalayas, Indy uses an inflatable raft and rides down the slopes to Marion's bar. "We took that scene out because we thought it would be too unbelievable", Kasdan said. It, too, was recycled in "Temple of Doom".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Spielberg shot a long dialogue sequence when Indy and Marion first reunite, but dropped it in the editing room. "There was an enormous amount of exposition we all agreed was terribly important, and then there was their relationship to be established for the whole picture," Kasdan said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I must have written the scene ten times, slowly, painfully, when all of a sudden it clicked in. It all just started flowing. It was funny, and real, and romantic, and yet hard-edged. And, maybe a little long. At any rate, everybody loved it. In fact, Steven used it to test the actors. Steven shot the scene in London. And soon after—in Steven's cut or George's cut of Steven's second cut—it came out. George and Steven decided it wasn't necessary. It slowed the movie down. There were a couple fragments of exposition that had to be saved. And they did have to meet. So the beginning and the end of the scene were saved and cut together.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film came out on June 12, 1981, and made more than $390 million internationally, winning five Academy Awards out of nine nominations. Kasdan eventually warmed to the finished film. "I look at "Raiders" now and I'm very proud of it," he wrote in 1999. "I think it's a terrific movie and I think Steven did a magnificent job with it." He was later asked to write "Temple of Doom", but Kasdan declined because he didn't want to associate with the film due to perceiving it as "horrible, mean and unpleasant" due to it being developed during a chaotic period in the lives of Spielberg and Lucas, though several elements from Kasdan's earlier "Raiders" draft found their way in the prequel. Kasdan semi-returned to the franchise in 2007 when he assisted David Koepp in writing some romantic dialogue for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: George Lucas initially hired Leigh Brackett, the sci-fi novelist who also wrote screenplays for Howard Hawks—including "The Big Sleep" (1946)—to write the sequel to "Star Wars" (1977). Brackett died in March 1978 while the film was still in pre-production, though, and Lucas wasn't satisfied with her script. Lucas wrote the next draft himself, which established structure and twists close to the final film, but suffered from dialogue. When Kasdan delivered his script for "Raiders", Lucas asked him to rewrite "The Empire Strikes Back". Kasdan suggested he read "Raiders" first, but Lucas reportedly said: "If I hate "Raiders", I'll call you up tomorrow and cancel this offer, but basically I get a feeling about people."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Most of the plot elements and characters were already in place, but Kasdan made it darker than the first "Star Wars". "George was open to it and ready to have it happen," he said. "Over the three "Star Wars" films, he saw a trajectory. "The Empire Strikes Back" was the second act, and traditionally, the second act is when things start to go bad. George had made his [most important] decision when he hired Irvin Kershner to direct, even though Kershner and I were acting as his tools."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Once involved in the saga I related to it strongly because it's elemental stuff. But I sometimes kid around and say it's about Hollywood. It's about imposing your fantasies upon others. A Jedi knight has the ability to take a weaker mind and control it, and that's what Hollywood's about. If the studio says to you, 'We're not going to make this movie,' you, as a Jedi knight, say, 'We "are" going to make it.' And then the studio agrees. That's what the "Star Wars" saga is about—it's about following those things which are strongest in you and imposing them on the world. Making a career in Hollywood is like that if you want to do your own work. If you want to do what they want you to do, it's easy. You just say yes. But if you want to do what "you" want to do, you're constantly manipulating the chaos of the system.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: When "The Empires Strikes Back" came out on May 21, 1980, it was the first time Kasdan's name appeared in the credits of a movie. He felt his major contribution to Lucas' series was developing character. "George is one of the good guys," Kasdan said in 1981. "But he and I have some disagreements, too. George thinks if you play the commercial movie game, a very expensive game, you have to play for big stakes."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan launched his directing career after writing "The Empire Strikes Back", and he wasn't interested in writing another "Star Wars" movie. But Lucas had supported him on "Body Heat" as an uncredited producer, so when Lucas asked him to write the screenplay for the third chapter (then titled "Revenge of the Jedi"), Kasdan felt obliged to repay the favor.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: He spent the summer of 1981 writing the shooting script, based on a story by Lucas. "In both the "Star Wars" movies it's really George's story," Kasdan said. "I came into "Empire" after there was already a draft. On "Jedi", George had done a draft, which we changed radically. Then he and I really collaborated on the script."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The "Star Wars" audience is huge and rabidly devoted, almost fanatical, so at this point, there’s an emotional responsibility involved in writing them. "Jedi" will be a mix of "Empire" and "Star Wars". All the humanistic, positive values put forth by Yoda, he'll continue to teach those things. They may not be new and they're not especially deep, but I think they're good for people to hear. I'd also like this movie to be funny, as funny as the first film.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Return of the Jedi" came out on May 25, 1983, and made $475 million. Lucas had already publicly spoken about making both a prequel and sequel trilogy; the prequels he would go on to write and direct himself 20 years later, and episodes 7 through 9 were made by the Walt Disney Company after the studio purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. Back in 1981, Kasdan surmised that "they'll probably shoot the before-Luke trilogy next, about young Darth and young Ben. But with George, you can't be sure. For myself, I can only say this will be my last "Star Wars" movie. On the other hand, you never know. I didn't think I'd be working on this one." Over the development of the "Star Wars" prequels, Lucas constantly approached Kasdan about giving him a hand in writing them, but Kasdan resisted returning to the franchise, opining that Lucas should do the prequels as he wished following creative clashes Lucas had with him, Kershner and Richard Marquand during the original trilogy's development, despite Lucas thinking that it would have been great for Kasdan to take a second pass at the screenplays.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: When Disney bought Lucasfilm with plans to make more "Star Wars" films, Kathleen Kennedy, the new president of Lucasfilm, asked Kasdan to be involved. "I said, 'I don't really want to ... I just feel like I've done this,'" he recalled. "They said, 'We want to do a movie about Han.' That got me. That was the only one that could possibly have gotten me."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kennedy had hired Michael Arndt to write "", and she asked Kasdan if he would consult on that script as well. He always felt that "Han Solo is really the character that people find irresistible, not Luke," he said. "Luke is too good for people to invest in. Han is right out of the classic mold. He's William Holden. He's Jimmy Cagney. He's Humphrey Bogart. Han is the one who is compromised and reluctantly forced to be altruistic and heroic." He had been in favor of killing Han off in "Return of the Jedi". "We're closing off the trilogy," he said. "And we want to lose somebody important. It would give some stakes to this thing. And George did not like it." In "The Force Awakens", both he and actor Harrison Ford finally got their wish.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It had been 30 years since we saw Han. We'd all gone through 30 years of life, and what it tells you is, you make the same mistakes again and again. I'd gotten older. But my personality hadn't changed, and I didn't think Han's would change. But what do you learn, one way or another? What does life teach you? How does your experience make you a more interesting person? And all the regrets you have, and all the disappointments? That was the basis of Han.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" came out on December 18, 2015. It made more than $2 billion internationally, breaking the North American record for top-grossing film of all time. In his review for "The" "Hollywood Reporter", Todd McCarthy wrote: "One notably feels the hand of Lawrence Kasdan, who ... co-wrote "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" and, perhaps more significantly, authored "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the film this new one most resembles in terms of its incident and exuberance."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan, alongside Abrams and Arndt, won the Saturn Award for Best Writing for "The Force Awakens". This marked Kasdan's first win for a "Star Wars" film, after losing his previous nominations for "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Despite not working in the following sequels, Kasdan later talked with Abrams, alongside Lucas and Rian Johnson, to discuss the story for last film of the saga, which was titled "".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan wrote the screenplay for a Han Solo origin story—the one assignment with Disney and Lucasfilm he initially signed on for—along with his son, Jonathan Kasdan, a writer and director. The younger Kasdan had small roles in his father's movies since as early as "The Big Chill", but they had never written a script together.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "" details the character's backstory: how he got his name, how he met Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, and the beginnings of his internal battle between self-interested scoundrel and hero. Alden Ehrenreich was cast in the role originated by Harrison Ford. The production was plagued with drama; most notably, the original directors—Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—were fired during the shoot and replaced by Ron Howard. The film opened on May 25, 2018, and made just under $393 million worldwide (the lowest box office results for any live action "Star Wars" movie to date). Kasdan later attributed the underperformance of "Solo" to Lucasfilm "blowing it", after which he left the "Star Wars" universe just as promised, not responding to any of Lucasfilm's subsequent attempts to woo him back, even sending him a Messenger with a new script.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: After writing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Empire Strikes Back", Kasdan had the cachet to direct his own film.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Alan Ladd Jr., the head of Twentieth Century Fox and a key player on "Star Wars", gave Kasdan the deal—but by the time the script was finished Ladd was no longer at Fox. The new president, Sherry Lansing, put many of the existing deals in turnaround, including Kasdan's. Ladd started The Ladd Company in 1979, and he offered to produce "Body Heat" on one condition: that an established director would "sponsor" the untested Kasdan. So Kasdan reached out to George Lucas:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: George said to me, "Look, I just started Lucasfilm. It's about family films, and "Body Heat"s a very provocative, sexual movie. I don't think it's a good idea for me to put my name on it. But what I will do is sponsor you without any credit." What I did not know is that he went to Laddy, and said, "I will sponsor Larry, and I will back him up, and if there's a problem, I'll be helpful. I will take a fee for doing that, but I will not take any credit. But if Larry should go over budget, you can use my fee for any overages." It was an extraordinarily generous thing to do. He did it in the best possible way, which is he told me nothing about it.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film is about a lawyer, Ned Racine, who gets sexually entangled with a married woman, Matty Walker, and the two plot to kill her husband and collect the insurance. The producers wanted Kasdan to cast a star, but he insisted on William Hurt, a stage actor who had just made his film debut in "Altered States" (1980). Kasdan cast another unknown, Kathleen Turner, as Matty, and Ted Danson as one of Ned's colleagues. (Danson was offered the part of Sam Malone on "Cheers" while filming "Body Heat".) The heat-centric story was originally set in New Jersey, but an actor's strike delayed production until December, so the location was moved to Miami.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Body Heat" opened on August 28, 1981. It made more than $24 million domestically, on a budget of $7 million, and was praised by the majority of critics. The "Variety" review called it "an engrossing, mightily stylish meller [melodrama] in which sex and crime walk hand in hand down the path to tragedy, just like in the old days. Working in the imposing shadow of the late James M. Cain, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan makes an impressively confident directorial debut with a vehicle which could clinch star status for William Hurt."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Turner received a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA nomination for her role. Kasdan was nominated for Best Director by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and his screenplay was nominated for a WGA Award by the Writers Guild of America.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: While editing "Body Heat" Kasdan had the idea for a large ensemble film, partly in reaction to the "claustrophobic" experience of working with just two actors in intimate settings. He had removed most of the overt generational commentary from "Body Heat", and he wanted to make a movie that would address that head-on.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: We were the children of the sixties. "The Big Chill" is about ten years after the fact and what happens when they get together and are reminded of what they thought ten years earlier and what their hopes were and what they had thought their lives would be like. ... The origin of the picture was the thought of telling the story and ending it with a flashback that showed us what they were really like in 1970, after having watched them for an hour and a half in 1980.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: His lawyer's wife, Barbara Benedek, had begun writing screenplays (and was a story editor on two comedy TV series for ABC), and Kasdan proposed co-writing with her. She was "enormously influential on the tone" of the script, he said, and they wrote characters that were composites of real people they each knew—as well as "a little bit of ourselves."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: During the course of a weekend, a group of close college friends reunite for the funeral of their friend, who died by suicide. Kasdan had trouble finding a buyer, because "no one believed that an ensemble film could be commercially successful. Hollywood always wanted you to have a protagonist, hopefully a white male who the audience could invest in, and possibly a sidekick or possibly a woman that he was involved with. When I presented them with a movie that had eight protagonists, they were only confused." He pitched it to "around seventeen different places," but they all passed. Johnny Carson had a deal to make movies at Columbia, and producer Marcia Nasatir convinced Carson to make "The Big Chill".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The ensemble cast included Hurt and Kevin Kline, both of whom became regulars in Kasdan's directing career, as well as Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, Mary Kay Place, Tom Berenger, and JoBeth Williams. (Kevin Costner, another Kasdan regular, played the deceased friend Alex, but his scenes were cut along with the other flashbacks.) After four weeks of rehearsal, the film was shot in a real house in South Carolina, which had been used in "The Great Santini". John Bailey, husband of editor Carol Littleton, was the cinematographer. The '60s pop soundtrack, which plays an outsized role in the movie, was curated by Kasdan's wife, Meg. The album sold more than six million copies and is one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "The Big Chill" came out on September 30, 1983. It ran in theaters for six months, making more than $56 million (on a budget of $8 million), and received mostly praise. In his review for "The New York Times", Vincent Canby wrote:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It represents the best of mainstream American filmmaking. Among other things, it's a reminder that the same people who turn out our megabuck fantasies are often capable of working even more effectively on the small, intimate scale ... Mr. Kasdan is one of the finest of Hollywood's new young writers but "The Big Chill", like "Body Heat", demonstrates that he is a writer who works as much through images as through words. ... The performances represent ensemble playing of an order Hollywood films seldom have time for.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "The Big Chill" is a splendid technical exercise. It has all the right moves. It knows all the right words. Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts and ambitions. But there's no payoff and it doesn't lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it's the movie's message.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film was nominated for three Academy Awards: for best original screenplay, best supporting actress (Glenn Close), and best picture. The screenplay was nominated for a BAFTA Award and a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, and it won the WGA Award. Kasdan earned a DGA Award nomination by the Directors Guild of America. He later said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It was a kind of a lightning rod to controversy. I think I was surprised by everything that happened to "The Big Chill" because it was so personal. It was so much about my life, Barbara's life, and my wife's life that when it became very popular I was surprised.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It's about a cocoon of people who come together for a weekend and care about each other in a scary world. The music was like a drug pumped into the theater, putting everyone in a great mood. People my age at that time had not yet been conveyed in the movies. And it was not just the film's music that resonated with audiences, but also the music of the dialogue. The characters talked the way real people talk to their friends, a voice not heard in the movies to that time. ... "The Big Chill" is really about ... finding a new family. One's own family is often difficult and unsatisfying or has left you damaged in some way. So we constantly go out to find new connections. "The Big Chill" is very explicitly about that search, and very powerful.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Film writer F.X. Feeney argued that "Kasdan fashioned a national conversation piece. People spoke thereafter of "The Big Chill" Generation.' Films made by later generations, about those generations ... would have to endure being dubbed 'The Little Chill' by critics. (So, in a sense, Kasdan founded a new genre.)"


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I loved the way it looked, I loved the way the guys related to each other, I loved the clothes they wore, and I loved the horses and the landscape and the music. I was totally enamored of what westerns could be and the freedom you had to tell any kind of story within that context. I wanted to go out to that land, which I had had only limited experience with, and choose among all the beautiful settings and places that are out there to make my movie.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: He co-wrote the screenplay for "Silverado" with his older brother, Mark Kasdan. The story, set in 1880, is about a motley crew of cowboys who team up and set aside self-interest in order to protect a small town from a corrupt sheriff. Kasdan said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: My brother and I wrote a kind of post-modern western. We didn't call it that at the time. I don't know that that's what we intended but we knew always that it had a modern viewpoint on several sorts of classic situations. That we would assemble a group of heroes and they would go on a certain kind of journey and would encounter many of the basic themes and issues that all the westerns we liked involved. It meant that the movie would not be as serious as some westerns I admired, but it would have all the kind of exuberance and fun that many of my favorite westerns had.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: He cast Kevin Kline for the second time, as lead cowboy Paden, along with Scott Glenn, Danny Glover (who reunited with Kasdan in "Grand Canyon"), and Kevin Costner (who re-teamed with Kasdan for another western, "Wyatt Earp"). Brian Dennehy was cast as the wicked sheriff, and Kasdan's son Jonathan and wife Meg both had bit parts.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film shot in New Mexico during the winter of 1984, and an entire town set was built near Santa Fe that was later reused in several pictures, including "Wyatt Earp". During production some of the cast developed hypothermia, and Kasdan had to contend with both blizzards and flash floods.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I had made two films that were essentially room-bound. Talking heads. I like talk. I don't mind that. But I wanted to do something that would allow me to break out. To see a horse ride fast across the plain. To see men draw guns and fall down and jump and run and shoot.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film was so popular at its test screening in Seattle that Columbia rushed its release by several months, without arranging the usual marketing and merchandising efforts in time. It came out on July 10, 1985, and did decent business—$32 million on a budget of $26 million—but Kasdan felt it would have done better with a more concerted release strategy.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: This movie is more sophisticated and complicated than the Westerns of my childhood, and it is certainly better looking and better acted. But it has the same spirit; it awards itself the carefree freedom of the Western myth itself ... "Silverado" is the work of Lawrence Kasdan, the man who wrote "Raiders of the Lost Ark", and it has some of the same reckless brilliance about it.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film earned Oscar nominations for best sound and best original score (composed by Bruce Broughton). Kasdan won the Young Venice Award—Special Mention at the Venice Film Festival.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan received the highest industry recognition of his career for "The Accidental Tourist", with an Academy Award nomination for best picture. After making "Silverado", he passed on "The Untouchables" (1987) because he didn't like the script; it was ultimately directed by Brian De Palma. He had also been developing "Man Trouble" (1992), but disagreed with the producers over Carole Eastman's screenplay. (Bob Rafelson ended up making the film.) Then he was offered "The Accidental Tourist", a novel by Anne Tyler, and despite its surface similarities to "Man Trouble"—both stories are odd-couple romances with a character who trains dogs—he "fell in love with it."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: In "The Accidental Tourist", you have a man, Macon Leary, whose world has been shattered by the unexpected tragedy of the death of his son before the movie starts. The world cannot be controlled, and he sinks deeper and deeper into this hole. His wife rejects him for his lack of responsiveness to the tragedy, and he takes refuge in the tightness of his world as a travel writer. Then he meets someone who accepts chaos in the world and saves his life. Control and fear—those are very strong themes.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Anne Tyler is an unbelievable writer ... She's a consummate stylist. When I read the book I felt not only that it should be a movie but also that it should be a movie that doesn't violate the book. ... There's not a lot of action in it, hardly anything, in fact, that Hollywood looks for. ... It's very slow. It's about tiny things. It's grim. The hero has a stick up his ass.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: John Malkovich had been developing the project, and he hired theater director Frank Galati to write a script. When Kasdan took over, he wrote his own adaptation—ultimately sharing writing credit with Galati. Like many of Kasdan's own stories, this one was "about creating a new family to replace a dysfunctional one," he said. For the lead, he cast William Hurt for the third time. Kasdan said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I have two sons of my own, and so the thought of Macon Leary's loss was so enormous to me that I understood his behavior completely. To me, it's not self-pity; it's devastation, and he's been incapacitated by it. Frankly, I don't know that I would react as well as he did. Making the film, I knew he was a difficult hero. That's why I love William Hurt's performance, because he doesn't pander for a second; he doesn't ask you to like him, and he is a hard guy to like.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan and Hurt reunited with "Body Heat"s Kathleen Turner, playing Macon's estranged wife. For the eccentric dog trainer, Muriel, Kasdan screen-tested four women:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: When I looked at the screen tests, it was clear to me that Geena [Davis] was the right person to play that part. All of her instincts were right. What little I had to tell her, she responded to very completely, fully, and quickly. That's what you're looking for in an actor. ... The better the actor, the better you are as a director.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film was shot on location in Baltimore and Paris, and on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. Anne Tyler drove Kasdan around Baltimore when he was scouting for locations.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "The Accidental Tourist" was a surprise hit when it came out on December 23, 1988. It made more than $32 million, and rode a wave of critical praise through the awards season. It won the New York Film Critics Award despite sharp criticism from several critics—including Pauline Kael, who wrote:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The discreet, painstaking Lawrence Kasdan, who directed, and wrote the screenplay with Frank Galati, is so conscious of how he could go wrong by obtrusiveness that he hangs back. Temperamentally, he may have a real affinity with Tyler—they both like schematic whimsy. And Macon neatly packing his suitcase is almost uncannily like the dressing of the corpse in Kasdan's "The Big Chill". But Tyler keeps perking along, while Kasdan is cautious—paralyzed. He doesn't risk dubbing in his own voice (which isn't a strong one anyway). This "Accidental Tourist" has no voice.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: In stark contrast was Andrew Sarris of "The New York Observer", who took credit for being the deciding vote in the film's favor. Sarris wrote:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: What the movie does capture from its literary source are the sudden spasms of remembered pain and loss, followed by emotional redemption and regeneration. They hardly even try to make movies like this anymore. ... [Macon] is also a cold fish, at least on the surface, and for this, many reviewers have reviled both the character and the actor (William Hurt) who plays him. It is said that he lacks 'passion,' whatever that means in this age of hyped-up hysteria. Anyway, that is the whole point of this archetypal plot of the Great Awakening of a laid-back Lazarus and a Scrooge for all seasons. ... That a movie could be made in these feel-good times that does not glorify one character at the expense of all the others, and provides a reasonable approximation of the ambiguities and ambivalences that bedevil us all, is enough cause for me to rejoice over "The Accidental Tourist".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The textures are too specific and the humor is too quirky and well-timed to be borrowed. The filmmakers have reinvented the same story in their own terms. ... What Hurt achieves here seems almost impossible: He is depressed, low-key and intensely private through most of the movie, and yet somehow he wins our sympathy. What Kasdan achieves is just as tricky; I've never seen a movie so sad in which there was so much genuine laughter. "The Accidental Tourist" is one of the best films of the year.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film earned two Golden Globe nominations (for Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Score), a BAFTA nomination (Best Adapted Screenplay), and four Oscar nominations: Best Original Score (composed by John Williams), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. Davis won an Oscar for her supporting role.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "I have sometimes been frustrated by the size of my audience, but not on that movie," said Kasdan. "I'm amazed we got as many people in to see it as we did. It was one of the most satisfying experiences I've ever had. I'm as proud of "The Accidental Tourist" as anything I've done."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan wanted to do something "light and irreverent" after the grief-heavy "The" "Accidental Tourist", and he was sent a script by John Kostmayer based on a true story out of Pennsylvania: a woman tried to kill her husband multiple times over his infidelity, he survived all attempts, she and her accomplices went to prison, and when she got out the husband forgave her and took her back. "I was fascinated by that story," Kasdan said. "I thought it would make a wonderful film."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It was the first film he directed from another writer's script, and a tonal departure for Kasdan: a black comedy with a broad performance by Kevin Kline, as pizzeria owner and serial cheater, Joey, and a straight performance by Tracy Ullman as his wife, Rosalie. The ensemble cast included River Phoenix, Joan Plowright, William Hurt, and Keanu Reeves. The film was shot in Tacoma, Washington.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I have more regrets about "I Love You to Death" than anything I've done, because Kostmayer had written an odd and interesting script. It was very funny to me, but there were things in it that were ugly. In postproduction we started sneaking [test screening] it, and most of the sneak audiences hated the movie—despised it. They hated certain things, and I started taking those things out. We reshot the ending, added new scenes, and took out scenes that were difficult. I wanted to make the movie more popular, and that was weak, because it got worse and worse. As a result, I've never used those sneak preview cards since. It wasn't as if the studio was making me change things. I ruined the movie.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "I Love You to Death" came out April 6, 1990. It made $16 million, and reviews were largely negative—although Roger Ebert's appraisal was more mixed:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It is the first time Kasdan has directed from a screenplay he didn't write, and I assume he was attracted to it for the obvious reason—because it seemed all but impossible to do. I am not sure if the film is a success because I am not sure what it is trying to do. It founders in embarrassment, but not boringly.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: For the first time I was directing a film I had not written. I discovered what it must be like for an actor to try to understand the screenplay. I had never had that. The movies had always come from out of my head. But when I was directing someone else's screenplay, I found I had to work harder to understand each day what should this scene be? What should it sound like? What is the tone? In addition, it was not a straight movie in any way. It's a black comedy and probably the least popular American form. One of my favorite movies of all time is "Doctor Strangelove", one of the greatest movies ever made. When it came out, it did no business. Couldn't find an audience. That's typical. There have been maybe two, three, or four black comedies that have ever been successful. It's a form that makes Americans very uneasy. This was a movie about a wife trying to kill her husband.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Now in his 40s, with his oldest son leaving for college, Kasdan began writing a screenplay about marriage and parenting. He said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Seeing your children grow throws your own life into relief. They're a daily reminder that you're moving on because they're so clearly coming up from behind. That driving lesson [in "Grand Canyon"] is about more than the difficulty of making left turns in Los Angeles. Giving your son the wheel is about letting go ... and the threat of disaster in the most mundane actions.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The screenplay, which he wrote with his wife Meg Kasdan, swelled into a larger canvas that dealt with race relations in Los Angeles and the existential crises of the era. On a budget of $20 million, Kasdan cast two of his regular actors—Kline and Glover—along with Steve Martin, Mary McDonnell, Mary-Louise Parker, and Alfre Woodard. (The actors took smaller salaries in exchange for profit participation.) The film follows separate but intersecting stories of multiple characters across the social and racial divides of Los Angeles, and deals with themes of fate, death, relationships, the ethics of violence in moviemaking, and more. The score was composed by James Newton Howard, who has worked with Kasdan on every film since.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: To tell that story we could draw to us all the people we most valued in our creative life. We could do the kind of thing I had done in "The Big Chill". We wrote that story very much out of our own lives and our feelings about the city and the country and race relations, about the haves and have-nots, about the possibility of joy and of pain no matter what economic situation you're in. We were trying to deal with all these things that you wake up with every day in Los Angeles or America. How do you have positive, hopeful, what I call humanist contact with the other people in your world, whether you know them or not?


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Grand Canyon" came out on December 25, 1991. The ensemble cast and social/generational commentary immediately drew comparisons to "The Big Chill", and reviews were mostly positive. Roger Ebert wrote:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It is uncanny, the way the movie tunes into the kinds of fears that are all around us in the cities—even those we're not always aware of. In a film that vibrates with an impending sense of danger, the single most terrifying scene is a driving lesson. ... By the end of it Kline is explaining to his son that you only have a split second to act, or you'll get creamed. How many of those split-second choices do we make every day without even thinking about them? Various kinds of romance act as counterpoint to the dangers in this film.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, as well as a Golden Globe and a WGA Award. Some critics found the finale, which has the ensemble staring in awe at the actual Grand Canyon, as a cop-out happy ending. The film "eventually pulls its punches," Janet Maslin wrote in the "New York Times", "taking an unconvincingly beatific look at the problems and dangers that have been so persuasively outlined in what has come before." But Kasdan's intentions were more ambiguous, he said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: One character sees the canyon as the abyss between people who are comfortable and those who are living in desperate circumstances. What fills it is rage—from which we're all getting the fallout. Another sees it as a symbol of the timelessness, the beauty, of the planet. Instead of coming away feeling small, he looks to his own life in an effort to make it meaningful. That's the challenge: to accept the reality of change, but to act as though you're going to live forever. To live in the moment, but make long-term commitments to people.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Within months of the film's release, the 1992 Los Angeles riots occurred. "There was an enormous amount of press about the fact that "Grand Canyon" had predicted the explosion of rage and violence," Kasdan said. "Anyone walking around L.A. at that time could feel it. The riots were a natural kind of explosion that anyone could have predicted."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: One of Kasdan's abandoned projects over the years was "a sexy melodrama" titled "Pair-A-Dice", written by "Blade Runner" (1982) screenwriter David Webb Peoples, which he developed for four years with Kevin Costner set to star. In 1992, Costner approached him with the script for a six-hour miniseries about the life of Wyatt Earp. "I told him that I was about to commit to another picture," Kasdan said. "[Costner] said, 'Why are you doing that? Why don't you do "Wyatt Earp"? I said, 'I don't like the screenplay.' And he said, 'Well, then, write a new screenplay.'" Kasdan agreed on the condition that they shoot the following summer, which Costner accepted. Kasdan wrote a screenplay in three months.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I had always been drawn to the story of Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral. I don't know that I should have made the movie "Wyatt Earp". We knew that there were inherent problems in it commercially, in that Wyatt Earp is not a particularly appealing or sympathetic character.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan was pleased with his screenplay—but less so Costner, who was still attached to the original miniseries concept. "Kevin and I were visualizing a 'Western Godfather,'" said Dan Gordon, who wrote the miniseries script. "It was to be two movies, in fact, centering on three families: the Earps and two organized crime families. Mike Gray, a bizarro mirror image of Earp, managed to get Tombstone, the richest town west of the Mississippi, deeded to his private company. It was a land grab worth $10 million to $20 million in 1880 dollars—and the only thing between him and that money was Wyatt Earp."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: At that point we probably should have called the whole thing off, but we didn't. Instead, we reached a kind of compromise script. I had never had that experience before, because everything that I had ever written I had just gone out and shot as is. Here I had this kind of hybrid. It was my script plus elements from his previous script.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan ultimately shared writing credit with Gordon, who also served as an executive producer on the film.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I think it confused the whole situation, and if I had my wits about me I probably would have said, 'Kevin, look, because we're very good friends let's preserve our friendship and not do this movie.' Well, we preserved our friendship, but unfortunately we did do the movie.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Surrounding Costner as Earp were Joanna Going, Catherine O'Hara, Tom Sizemore, JoBeth Williams, Mark Harmon, and Gene Hackman. Dennis Quaid lost 43 pounds on a supervised diet to play Doc Holliday, a performance that Kasdan felt was "the most satisfying part of the movie."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Wyatt Earp" was a far more ambitious production than Kasdan's previous western, "Silverado". It was shot in the summer of 1993 over the course of 19 weeks (with an entire week of rehearsals), on location in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two massive sets used to portray eight different Western towns, and employing a cast of more than a hundred speaking roles and thousands of extras. It was shot on film in anamorphic format by Owen Roizman, the cinematographer on "The French Connection" (1971).


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "It's an epic film on an epic scale," Kasdan said. "It shows the building of the railroad and a span of Wyatt's life. So in many ways it presented the challenges I was looking for. It's a big bite of a movie and there are things in it that are as good as anything I've ever done."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The film suffered at the box office—only making $20 million, on a budget of $60 million—not least because of "Tombstone", the concurrent film starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. "Tombstone"s writer and original director, Kevin Jarre (who was eventually fired from the project), had actually planned to make a Wyatt Earp story with Costner, but the two men had different ideas about its tone and direction, and each went their own way. "Tombstone" was in production at the same time, but released on Christmas Eve, 1993—six months before "Wyatt Earp".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: ""Tombstone" hurt us," said editor Carol Littleton, "because it's a completely different kind of film, and it was a little more hip and it was not quite as serious."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It was almost universally panned when the movie came out. But then there were these odd reviews that were wonderful. The fact that it wasn't popular was not a surprise to me.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Meg Ryan, who at the time was married to "Wyatt Earp" star Dennis Quaid, brought Kasdan a script she'd commissioned for herself. Written by Adam Brooks, it was about a woman who overcomes her fear of flying and goes to Paris to confront her cheating fiancé, and in the process falls for a French thief. Kasdan was drawn to the project, he said, because "I wouldn't have to write something new. I'd just done this really difficult movie and I thought, well, I'll go to France with my family for a while. I love France."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: He cast Timothy Hutton as the cheating fiancé, Charlie, and Kevin Kline as Luc Teyssier the thief. About his go-to star, Kasdan said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kevin Kline is an amazing collaborator and as smart as anyone I've ever met. He's one of the funniest people on earth. ... We don't have to say all that much to each other. There are so many references about tone and about level of humor and about the size of the character and how can we fill in the details better. He comes from a musical background. He wanted to be a concert pianist and gave it up when he thought he wasn't good enough. He had won two Tony Awards by the time I met him. He was just a little over thirty. He's an astounding stage actor. He has had this wonderful film career that sometimes people underestimate, because he hasn't been the traditional kind of superstar.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "French Kiss" was released on May 5, 1995. It earned nearly $39 million in the U.S., and more than $101 million internationally.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: After "French Kiss", Kasdan wrote a spec script for Disney called "Sojourner"—a large-scale fantasy film set in the 1930s about a father and son. "I love effects," he said, "but they very rarely are married to a story that interests me. So I wrote one of my kind of stories, one involving effects. It made for a very expensive project, requiring not just one but two movie stars." He went into pre-production on the film with Mel Gibson attached to star—but then pulled the plug, and instead wrote the screenplay for "Mumford".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: The story is about a psychologist named Mumford with a secret past, who moves to a "town" called Mumford and starts treating its troubled citizens. Kasdan cast Loren Dean in the title role, alongside Hope Davis, Jason Lee, Mary McDonnell, Alfre Woodard, Martin Short, and Ted Danson.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: It fared poorly at the box office when it came out on September 24, 1999, only making $4.5 million, and critics were divided. Roger Ebert wrote:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Mumford is so carefully visualized in Lawrence Kasdan's new film that you'd sort of like to live there. ... It's a feeling movie, a mood movie, an evocation of the kind of interaction we sometimes hunger for. ... There are no earth-shaking payoffs here. No dramatic astonishments, vile betrayals, or sexual surprises. Just the careful and loving creation of some characters it is mostly a pleasure to meet. And at its deepest level, profoundly down there below the surface, it is something more, I think: an expression of Kasdan's humanist longings, his wish that people would listen better and value one another more. It is the strangest thing, how this movie sneaks up and makes you feel a little better about yourself.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Arguably Kasdan's most poorly received film was "Dreamcatcher", an adaptation of the 2001 book by Stephen King. Written during King's recovery from getting hit by a van in 1999, the story is about four friends and a boy with special powers, involving aliens, telepathy, and extreme body horror. The author later said he wrote much of it while on Oxycontin.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan co-wrote the adaptation with William Goldman, screenwriter of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) and "The Princess Bride" (1987). "If you read the book," Kasdan said, "the pain is all over the book."


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: There are all these fevered dreams ... and a lot of the action takes place in this sort of hospital of the brain, you know? ... He didn't spend a lot of time tying everything together. I think he wasn't in the mood for that. So, when we adapted the book, I simplified some things and I changed some things—which he's been great about. The great thing about Stephen is that he sees the movie as a separate thing, I think. He wants it to capture the essence of the book, and if he feels that's been done, then he's not too particular about the details. I think that's why he's happy.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Dreamcatcher" was produced by Castle Rock Entertainment and shot in British Columbia. The cast included Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, and Donnie Wahlberg. It came out March 21, 2003, and made $82 million worldwide.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Nine years elapsed between "Dreamcatcher" and Kasdan's next film, "Darling Companion". During that time he adapted a script from Richard Russo's novel, "The Risk Pool", which he was developing with Tom Hanks as the lead, as well as a few other aborted projects. He eventually decided to make an independent film, based on an incident from his and Meg's own life, when their dog got lost in the mountains of Colorado.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: He co-wrote the screenplay for "Darling Companion" with Meg, as he'd done on "Grand Canyon". The film is a synthesis, in many ways, of his body of work: an ensemble film touching on social and generational concerns, like "The" "Big Chill" and "Grand Canyon"; an aging mother finds a helpless creature, bathes it, and keeps it (here a dog, in "Grand Canyon" a baby); characters wander around in the mountain wilderness like in "Continental Divide"; and there is a central dog/human relationship like in "The" "Accidental Tourist". There's even a direct quote about the "dark side" from "The Empire Strikes Back".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Darling Companion" was independently financed by his company, Kasdan Pictures, along with Werc Werk Works and Likely Story. Since it was made on a modest budget ($5 million), the ensemble cast—which included Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Richard Jenkins, Dianne Wiest, and Mark Duplass—worked for scale. Kasdan shot the film on digital for the first time, on location in Utah. It came out on April 27, 2012.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: As of 2020, Kasdan is working on a documentary about record label executive Mo Ostin, and the adaptation of a novel called "November Road".


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: "Directing is the greatest job in the world, but the process is so hard," he said in 1991. "Each picture is like a child, a huge investment of heart and work. I decided that I want to work a lot while I have the interest in and the energy for it. Then if the time comes when I’m not having fun, I can walk away." As of 2022, Kasdan has directed only two feature films in the preceding 22 years.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: As a screenwriter, Kasdan was influenced by classic English literature, plays, and the literary films of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. He said:


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: If you're trained the way I was, it's classical dramatic training, in which you learn how plays have been constructed since they started writing plays. I think that has served me very well in Hollywood, because a lot of the people writing screenplays don't have a literary background. Many young screenwriters today come from television. It's not that they worked in television; it's that they grew up on television and they think the way narrative is presented on television is narrative, but it ain't. And so, if anything, I believe in classic dramatic construction, and I believe in the force and momentum that good narrative creates as it builds on itself.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Characters present themselves, and the story follows. Alvin Sargent [screenwriter of "Julia" (1977) and "Ordinary People" (1980)] said a great thing to me. We were talking about how all of our inspiration always starts with character. Not plot. Not story. And that we wish it were otherwise; and that, in fact, the American movie tradition is about narrative. It's not about character. And he said, 'When I die, on my tombstone, it's going to say: 'Finally, a plot." I identified with that very strongly.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I think that my personality is shy, reticent, in some ways; I'm conservative—I don't wear flashy clothes. I think that's true of my style, too, not that I don't like things that are startlingly innovative. ... For me, the idea is, is the camera where you want it to be, not are you showing it off? ... What I admire about Kurosawa is the Zen perfection of his camera placement, the rightness of it. That's the idea I'm striving for—but style is not something that drives my pictures.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: I'm drawn to a very strong, non-fussy, hopefully a non-absorbed, kind of acting. I want great listeners. They aren't in competition with the other actors in the frame. They're there to support and to make the other actor better. I'm interested in people who are interested in submitting themselves to roles, to a story, to knowing that sometimes the grander action is the wrong action, the showier action is the wrong action. Sometimes repose is the most appropriate response to something. My movies are cut and acted on the reactions, not the actions. I think that's where the secrets of life are revealed. Not necessarily in what we say, but how we react to what we hear.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: In 2012, Kasdan participated in the "Sight & Sound" film polls of that year. Held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, contemporary directors were asked to select ten films of their choice. Kasdan picked the following in alphabetical order.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan has produced several films beyond those he directed: "Cross My Heart" (1987), "Immediate Family" (1989)—which was written by his "The Big Chill" co-writer Barbara Benedek—"Jumpin' at the Boneyard" (1991), "Home Fries" (1998), "The TV Set" (2006)—written and directed by Jake Kasdan—and "In the Land of Women" (2007), which was written and directed by Jonathan Kasdan.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: He has made several cameo appearances in his own films: as River Phoenix's lawyer in "I Love You to Death", as a director in "Grand Canyon", as a gambler in "Wyatt Earp", and as a man walking a dog in "Darling Companion". He played Jack Nicholson's psychiatrist in "As Good as It Gets" (1997), directed by James L. Brooks.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: In addition to his four Oscar nominations, Kasdan received the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award in 2001, and the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement from the Writers Guild of America in 2006. He has three honorary doctorates: in Humane Letters from the University of Michigan (1983) and from West Virginia University (1999), and in Fine Arts from the American Film Institute (2015).


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: On May 22, 2016, he was honored by the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and ArtsATL.org as the inaugural recipient of their ICON Award for Contributions to the Cinematic Arts in a ceremony held at the Woodruff Arts Center.


title: Lawrence Kasdan

text: Kasdan has been married to Meg Kasdan (née Mary Ellen Goldman) since November 28, 1971. They met at the University of Michigan, where they were both English majors. Their two sons, Jake Kasdan and Jonathan Kasdan, are both involved in film as actors, writers, producers, and directors. He has three grandchildren.


title: Honda J engine

text: The J-series is Honda's fourth production V6 engine family introduced in 1996, after the C-series, which consisted of three dissimilar versions. The J-series engine was designed in the United States by Honda engineers. It is built at Honda's Anna, Ohio, and Lincoln, Alabama, engine plants.


title: Honda J engine

text: It is a 60° V6 – Honda's existing C-series were 90° engines. Unlike the C series, the J-series has never been used in a longitudinal application; the J-series was specifically designed for transverse mounting. It has a shorter bore spacing (), shorter connecting rods and a special smaller crankshaft than the C-series to reduce its size. All J-series engines are gasoline-powered, use four valves per cylinder, and have a single timing belt that drives the overhead camshafts. VTEC variable valve timing is used on almost all applications, with exceptions being the J30AC (which uses Variable Timing Control [VTC] instead) and J35Y8.


title: Honda J engine

text: One unique feature of some J-family engine models is Honda's Variable Cylinder Management (VCM) system. Initially, the system turns off one bank of cylinders under light loads, turning the V6 into a straight-3. Some versions were able to turn off one bank of cylinders or one cylinder on opposing banks, allowing for three-cylinder use under light loads and four-cylinder use under medium loads.


title: Honda J engine

text: The J25A was used only in the Japanese domestic Inspire/Saber models. The J25A displaced . Its bore and stroke was . The J25A used a 10.5:1 compression ratio and was a SOHC VTEC design. Output was at 6200 rpm and of torque at 4600 rpm. It had a variable intake manifold to optimize torque output across varying engine speeds and engine response.


title: Honda J engine

text: The J30A displaces and is a SOHC VTEC design. Its bore and stroke is . Output for the lightweight (Actual complete running engine including flywheel, less starter is 152 kg) J30A1 was at 5500 rpm and of torque at 4800 rpm. The J30A4 pushed output to and using a three-way VTEC system, a higher (10.0:1) compression ratio and a novel exhaust manifold cast as one piece with the cylinder head. It weighs nearly less and is an inch shorter than J30A1. This version was on the Ward's 10 Best Engines list for 2003 and 2004. The IMA hybrid version was on the list for 2005. In 2006 Honda created the J30A5 to mark the 30th anniversary of the Accord. It boosted output to (SAE Net 08/04) and (SAE Net 08/04) of torque. According to Honda, horsepower gains were achieved with improvements to the airflow of the intake and exhaust system.


title: Honda J engine

text: The J32A displaces and is a SOHC VTEC design. Its bore and stroke is . Output was at 5600 rpm and at 4700 rpm for the J32A1, with the J32A2 raising output to at 6200 rpm and at 3500–5500 rpm. A more aggressive camshaft, more free flowing intake/exhaust, and a 2-stage intake manifold produced a increase over the J32A1. The J32A3's output in the 2004/2005 TL is . Due to changes in SAE testing methods, 2006–2008 model years have a reduced output rating of , despite being mechanically identical. The J32A3 includes a one-piece exhaust manifold cast with the cylinder head, first introduced on the J30A4.


title: Honda J engine

text: The J35A is a SOHC VTEC design. Its weight is running. The Honda Marine BF200-series marine engine shares its internals with the J35A.


title: Honda J engine

text: The J37 uses a die-cast aluminum block with aluminum cylinder liners. Primarily due to the cylinder liners being made from aluminum instead of cast-iron the engine weighs less than the J35Z engines. The intake manifold is made from a cast magnesium alloy.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Sophia of Hanover (born Princess Sophia of the Palatinate; 14 October 1630 – 8 June 1714) was the Electress of Hanover by marriage to Elector Ernest Augustus and later the heiress presumptive to the thrones of England and Scotland (later Great Britain) and Ireland under the Act of Settlement 1701, as a granddaughter of James VI and I. Princess Sophia died less than two months before she would have become Queen of Great Britain. Consequently, her son (and grandson of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia) George I, succeeded her first cousin once removed, Queen Anne, to the British throne, and the succession to the throne has since been defined as, and composed entirely of, her legitimate and Protestant descendants.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Sophia was born in 1630 to Frederick V of the Palatinate, a member of the House of Wittelsbach, and Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James VI and I. She grew up in the Dutch Republic, where her family had sought refuge after the sequestration of their Electorate during the Thirty Years' War. Sophia's brother Charles Louis was restored to the Lower Palatinate as part of the Peace of Westphalia. Sophia married Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1658. Despite his temper and frequent absences, Sophia loved him, and bore him seven children who survived to adulthood. Born a landless cadet, Ernest Augustus succeeded in having the House of Hanover raised to electoral dignity in 1692. As a result, Sophia became Electress of Hanover, the title by which she is best remembered. A patron of the arts, Sophia commissioned Herrenhausen Palace and its gardens and sponsored philosophers, such as Gottfried Leibniz and John Toland.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: The twelfth child of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart, also known as the "Winter King and Queen of Bohemia" for their short rule in that country, Sophia was born in The Wassenaer Hof, The Hague, Dutch Republic, where her parents had fled into exile after the Battle of White Mountain. Through her mother, she was the granddaughter of James VI and I, king of Scotland and England in a personal union. At birth, Sophia was granted an annuity of 40 thalers by the Estates of Friesland. Sophia was courted by her first cousin, Charles II of England, but she rebuffed his advances as she thought he was using her in order to get money from her mother's supporter, Lord William Craven.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Before her marriage, Sophia, as the daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, was referred to as Sophie, Princess Palatine of the Rhine, or as Sophia of the Palatinate. The Electors of the Palatinate were the Calvinist senior branch of House of Wittelsbach, whose Catholic branch ruled the Electorate of Bavaria.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: On 30 September 1658, she married Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, at Heidelberg, who in 1692 became the first Elector of Hanover. Ernest Augustus was a second cousin of Sophia's mother Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, as they were both great-grandchildren of Christian III of Denmark.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Sophia became a friend and admirer of Gottfried Leibniz while he was librarian at the Court of Hanover. Their friendship lasted from 1676 until her death in 1714. This friendship resulted in a substantial correspondence, first published in the 19th century (Klopp 1973), that reveals Sophia to have been a woman of exceptional intellectual ability and curiosity. She was well-read in the works of René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza. Together with Ernest Augustus she greatly improved the Herrenhausen Palace, and she was the guiding spirit in the creation of the Herrenhausen Gardens surrounding the palace, where she died.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Sophia was absent for almost a year, 1664–65, during a long holiday with Ernest Augustus in Italy. She corresponded regularly with her sons' governess and took a great interest in her sons' upbringing, even more so on her return. After Sophia's tour, she bore Ernest Augustus another four sons and a daughter. In her letters, Sophia describes her eldest son as a responsible, conscientious child who set an example to his younger brothers and sisters.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Sophia was, at first, against the marriage of her son George and Sophia Dorothea of Celle, looking down on Sophia Dorothea's mother (who was not of royal birth and to whom Sophia referred as "mouse dirt mixed among the pepper") and concerned by Sophia Dorothea's legitimated status, but was eventually won over by the financial advantages inherent in the marriage.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: In September 1700, Sophia met her cousin King William III of England at Het Loo Palace in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. This happened two months after the death of his nephew Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, son of the future Queen Anne. By this time, given the ailing William III's reluctance to remarry, the inclusion of Sophia in the line of succession was becoming more likely because she was a Protestant, as was her son. Her candidature was aided by the fact that she had grown up in the Netherlands close to William III and was able to converse fluently with him in Dutch, his native tongue.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: A year after their meeting, the Parliament of England passed the Act of Settlement 1701, which declared that in the event of no legitimate issue from Anne or William III, the crowns of England and Ireland were to settle upon "the most excellent princess Sophia, electress and duchess-dowager of Hanover" and "the heirs of her body, being Protestant". Scotland being a separate state in international law at the time, this did not mean she would also succeed Anne as Queen of Scotland, which led to a succession crisis and eventually to the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England in 1706/07.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Sophia was made second in line to cut off a claim by the Roman Catholic James Francis Edward Stuart, who would have become James III and VIII and to deny the throne to the many other Roman Catholics and spouses of Roman Catholics who held a claim. The act restricts the British throne to the "Protestant heirs" of Sophia of Hanover who had never been Roman Catholic or married a Roman Catholic. Some British politicians attempted several times to bring Sophia to England in order to enable her to assume government immediately in the event of Anne's death. It was argued that such a course was necessary to ensure Sophia's succession, for Anne's Roman Catholic half-brother was significantly closer to London than was Sophia. The Electress was eager to move to London, but the proposal was denied, as such action would mortally offend Anne, who was strongly opposed to a rival court in her kingdom. Anne might have been aware that Sophia, who was active and lively despite her old age, could cut a better figure than herself. Sophia was completely uncertain of what would happen after Anne's death, saying: "What Parliament does one day, it undoes the next."


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: When the law was passed in mid-1701, Sophia at age 70, five of her children from ages 35 to 41, and three legitimate grandchildren from ages 14 to 18, were alive. Although Sophia was 35 years older than Anne, she was very fit and healthy, and invested time and energy in securing the succession either for herself or her son. There are more than 5,000 legitimate descendants of Sophia, although not all are in the line of succession. The Sophia Naturalization Act 1705 granted the right of British (or more correctly English, as Great Britain only came into existence in 1707) nationality to Sophia's non-Roman Catholic descendants; those who had obtained the right to British citizenship via this Act at any time before its repeal by the British Nationality Act 1948 retain this lawful right today.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Although considerably older than Queen Anne, Sophia enjoyed much better health. According to the Countess of Bückeburg in a letter to Sophia's niece, the Raugravine Luise, on 5 June 1714 Sophia felt ill after receiving an angry letter from Queen Anne. Three days later, on 8 June, she was walking in the gardens of Herrenhausen when she ran to shelter from a sudden downpour of rain and collapsed and died, aged 83—a very advanced age for the era. Queen Anne died less than two months later on 1 August 1714 at the age of 49. Had Sophia survived Anne, she would have been the oldest person to ascend the British throne.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Upon Sophia's death, her eldest son Elector George Louis of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1660–1727) became heir presumptive in her place and within two months succeeded Anne as George I of Great Britain. Sophia's daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover (1668–1705) married Frederick I of Prussia, from whom the later Prussian and German monarchs descend.


title: Sophia of Hanover

text: Sophia was buried in the chapel of Leine Palace in Hanover, as were her husband and their son George I. After the destruction of the palace and its chapel during World War II by Allied aerial raids, their remains were moved into the mausoleum of King Ernest Augustus I in the Berggarten of Herrenhausen Gardens in 1957.


title: Jewish history

text: Jewish history is the history of the Jews, and their nation, religion, and culture, as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions, and cultures. Although Judaism as a religion first appears in Greek records during the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE) and the earliest mention of Israel is inscribed on the Merneptah Stele around 1213–1203 BCE, religious literature tells the story of Israelites going back at least as far as c. 1500 BCE.


title: Jewish history

text: The first dispersal began with the Israelite diaspora during the Assyrian captivity and continued on a much larger scale with the Babylonian captivity. Jews were also widespread throughout the Roman Empire, and this carried on to a lesser extent in the period of Byzantine rule in the central and eastern Mediterranean. In 638 CE, the Byzantine Empire lost control of the Levant. The Arab Islamic Empire under Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and the lands of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt. The Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain coincided with the Middle Ages in Europe, a period of Muslim rule throughout much of the Iberian Peninsula. During that time, Jews were generally accepted in society and Jewish religious, cultural, and economic life blossomed. Between the 12th and 15th centuries, Ashkenazi Jews experienced extreme persecution in Central Europe, which prompted their massive immigration to Poland.


title: Jewish history

text: During the Classical Ottoman period (1300–1600), Jews, together with most other communities of the empire, enjoyed a certain level of prosperity. In the 17th century, there were many significant Jewish populations in Western Europe. During the period of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, significant changes occurred within the Jewish community. Jews began in the 18th century to campaign for Jewish emancipation from restrictive laws and integration into the wider European society. While Jews in Western Europe were increasingly granted equality before the law, they faced growing persecution and legal restrictions in the Russian Pale of Settlement, including widespread pogroms, which caused a mass exodus of more than two million Jews to the United States between 1881 and 1924.


title: Jewish history

text: During the 1870s and 1880s, the Jewish population in Europe began to more actively discuss emigration back to Israel and the re-establishment of the Jewish Nation in the Land of Israel. The Zionist movement was officially founded in 1897. Meanwhile, the Jews of Europe and the United States gained success in the fields of science, culture and the economy. Among those generally considered the most famous were scientist Albert Einstein and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Many Nobel Prize winners at this time were Jewish, as is still the case.


title: Jewish history

text: In 1933, with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, the Jewish situation became more severe. Economic crises, racial anti-Semitic laws, and a fear of an upcoming war led many Jews to flee from Europe to Palestine, to the United States and to the Soviet Union. In 1939, World War II began and until 1941 Hitler occupied almost all of Europe, including Poland—where millions of Jews were living at that time—and France. In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Final Solution began, an extensive organized operation on an unprecedented scale, aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people, and resulting in the persecution and murder of Jews in political Europe, inclusive of European North Africa (pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and Italian Libya). This genocide, in which approximately six million Jews were methodically exterminated, is known as the Holocaust or the "Shoah" (Hebrew term). In Poland, three million Jews were murdered in gas chambers in all concentration camps combined, with one million at the Auschwitz camp complex alone.


title: Jewish history

text: Palestine, which had been under a British mandate since 1920, saw large waves of Jewish immigration before and during the Holocaust. After the mandate expired in 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed on May 14 the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel to be known as the State of Israel. Immediately afterwards, all neighbouring Arab states attacked, yet the newly formed IDF resisted. In 1949, the war ended and the state of Israel started building the state and absorbing massive waves of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the world. As of 2020, Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a population of 9.2 million people, of whom 6.7 million are Jewish. The largest Jewish communities are in Israel and the United States, with major communities in France, Canada, Argentina, Russia, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. For statistics related to modern Jewish demographics, see "Jewish population".


title: Jewish history

text: The history of the Jews and Judaism can be divided into five periods: (1) ancient Israel before Judaism, from the beginnings to 586 BCE; (2) the beginning of Judaism in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE; (3) the formation of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE; (4) the age of rabbinic Judaism, from the ascension of Christianity to political power under the emperor Constantine the Great in 312 CE to the end of the political hegemony of Christianity in the 18th century; and (5), the age of diverse Judaisms, from the French and American Revolutions to the present.


title: Jewish history

text: The history of the early Jews, and their neighbors, centers on the Fertile Crescent and east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It begins among those people who occupied the area lying between the river Nile and Mesopotamia. Surrounded by ancient seats of culture in Egypt and Babylonia, by the deserts of Arabia, and by the highlands of Asia Minor, the land of Canaan (roughly corresponding to modern Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Jordan and Lebanon) was a meeting place of civilizations.


title: Jewish history

text: The earliest recorded evidence of a people by the name of Israel appears in the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt, dated to about 1200 BCE. According to the modern archaeological account, the Israelites and their culture branched out of the Canaanite peoples and their cultures through the development of a distinct monolatristic—and later monotheistic—religion centred on the national god Yahweh. They spoke an archaic form of the Hebrew language, known today as Biblical Hebrew.


title: Jewish history

text: The traditional religious view of Jews and Judaism of their own history was based on the narrative of the ancient Hebrew Bible. In this view Abraham signifying that he is both the biological progenitor of the Jews and the father of Judaism, the first Jew. Later, Isaac was born to Abraham, and Jacob was born to Isaac. Following a struggle with an angel, Jacob was given the name Israel. Following a severe drought, Jacob and his twelve sons fled to Egypt, where they eventually formed the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Israelites were later led out of slavery in Egypt and subsequently brought to Canaan by Moses; they eventually conquered Canaan under the leadership of Joshua.


title: Jewish history

text: Modern scholars agree that the Bible does not provide an authentic account of the Israelites' origins; the consensus supports that the archaeological evidence showing largely indigenous origins of Israel in Canaan, not Egypt, is "overwhelming" and leaves "no room for an Exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness". Many archaeologists have abandoned the archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit". A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has arguably found no evidence that can be directly related to the Exodus narrative of an Egyptian captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness, leading to the suggestion that Iron Age Israel—the kingdoms of Judah and Israel—has its origins in Canaan, not in Egypt: The culture of the earliest Israelite settlements is Canaanite, their cult-objects are those of the Canaanite god El, the pottery remains in the local Canaanite tradition, and the alphabet used is early Canaanite. Almost the sole marker distinguishing the "Israelite" villages from Canaanite sites is an absence of pig bones, although whether this can be taken as an ethnic marker or is due to other factors remains a matter of dispute. However, it is accepted that this narrative does have a "historical core" to it.


title: Jewish history

text: According to the Biblical narrative, the Land of Israel was organized into a confederacy of twelve tribes ruled by a series of Judges for several hundred years.


title: Jewish history

text: Two Israelite kingdoms emerged during the Iron Age II: Israel and Judah. The Bible portrays Israel and Judah as the successors of an earlier United Kingdom of Israel, although its historicity is disputed. Historians and archaeologists agree that the northern Kingdom of Israel existed by 900 BCE and that the Kingdom of Judah existed by 700 BCE. The Tel Dan Stele, discovered in 1993, shows that the kingdom, at least in some form, existed by the middle of the 9th century BCE, but it does not indicate the extent of its power.


title: Jewish history

text: Biblical tradition tells that the Israelite monarchy was established in 1037 BCE under Saul, and continued under David and his son, Solomon. David greatly expanded the kingdom's borders and conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites, turning it into the national, political and religious capital of the kingdom. Solomon, his son, later built the First Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. Upon his death, traditionally dated to c. 930 BCE, a civil war erupted between the ten northern Israelite tribes, and the tribes of Judah (Simeon was absorbed into Judah) and Benjamin in the south. The kingdom then split into the Kingdom of Israel in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.


title: Jewish history

text: The Kingdom of Israel was the more prosperous of the two kingdoms and soon developed into a regional power. During the days of the Omride dynasty, it controlled Samaria, Galilee, the upper Jordan Valley, the Sharon and large parts of the Transjordan. Samaria, the capital, was home to one of the largest Iron Age palaces in the Levant. The kingdom of Israel was destroyed around 720 BCE, when it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire.


title: Jewish history

text: The Kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, controlled the Judaean Mountains, the Shephelah, the Judaean Desert and parts of the Negev. After the fall of Israel, Judah became a client state of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. In the 7th century BCE, the kingdom's population increased greatly, prospering under Assyrian vassalage, despite Hezekiah's revolt against the Assyrian king Sennacherib.


title: Jewish history

text: With the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 605 BCE, competition emerged between Egypt and the Neo-Babylonian Empire over control of the Levant, ultimately resulting in Judah's rapid decline. The early 6th century BCE saw a wave of Egyptian-backed Judahite rebellions against Babylonian rule being crushed. In 586 BCE, King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon conquered Judah, and destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple. The elite of the kingdom and many of their people were exiled to Babylon, where the religion developed outside the traditional temple. Others fled to Egypt. The defeat was also recorded in the Babylonian Chronicles.


title: Jewish history

text: Large parts of the Hebrew Bible were written during this period. This include the earliest portions of Hosea, Isaiah, Amos and Micah, along with Nahum, Zephaniah, most of Deuteronomy, the first edition of the Deuteronomistic history (the books of Joshua/Judges/Samuel/Kings), and Habakkuk.


title: Jewish history

text: The first Judahite communities in Babylonia started with the exile of the Tribe of Judah to Babylon by Jehoiachin in 597 BCE as well as after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Babylonia, where some of the largest and most prominent Jewish cities and communities were established, became the center of Jewish life. A short time after this under the reign of Xerxes I of Persia, the events of the Book of Esther took place. Babylon remained as a hub of Jewish life all the way up to the 11th century, when the cultural and scholarship centrality began to move to Europe, as anti-Jewish waves initiated a rapid decline, not in numbers, but in centrality. It continued to be a major Jewish center until the 13th century. By the first century, Babylonia already held a speedily growing population of an estimated 1,000,000 Judahites which increased to an estimated 2 million between the years 200 CE and 500 CE, both by natural growth and by immigration of more Jews from the Land of Israel, making up about one sixth of the world Jewish population at that era. It was there that they would write the Babylonian Talmud in the languages used by the Jews of ancient Babylonia—Hebrew and Aramaic.


title: Jewish history

text: The Jews established Talmudic Academies in Babylonia, also known as the Geonic Academies, which became the center for Jewish scholarship and the development of Jewish law in Babylonia from roughly 500 CE to 1038 CE. The two most famous academies were the Pumbedita Academy and the Sura Academy. Major yeshivot were also located at Nehardea and Mahuza.


title: Jewish history

text: After a few generations and with the conquest of Babylonia in 540 BCE by the Persian Empire, some adherents led by prophets Ezra and Nehemiah, returned to their homeland and traditional practices. Other Judeans did not return.


title: Jewish history

text: Deuteronomy was expanded and earlier scriptures were edited during the exilic period. The first edition of Jeremiah, the Book of Ezekiel, the majority of Obadiah, and what is referred to in research as "Second Isaiah" were all written during this time period as well.


title: Jewish history

text: Following their return to Jerusalem after the return from the exile, and with Persian approval and financing, construction of the Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE under the leadership of the last three Jewish Prophets Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.


title: Jewish history

text: The final Torah is widely seen as a product of the Persian period (539–333 BCE, probably 450–350 BCE). This consensus echoes a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra, the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation.


title: Jewish history

text: After the death of the last Jewish prophet and while still under Persian rule, the leadership of the Jewish people passed into the hands of five successive generations of zugot ("pairs of") leaders. They flourished first under the Persians and then under the Greeks. As a result, the Pharisees and Sadducees were formed. Under the Persians then under the Greeks, Jewish coins were minted in Judea as Yehud coinage.


title: Jewish history

text: In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great of Macedon defeated the Persians. After Alexander's death and the division of his empire among his generals, the Seleucid Kingdom was formed.


title: Jewish history

text: The Alexandrian conquests spread Greek culture to the Levant. During this time, currents of Judaism were influenced by Hellenistic philosophy developed from the 3rd century BCE, notably the Jewish diaspora in Alexandria, culminating in the compilation of the Septuagint. An important advocate of the symbiosis of Jewish theology and Hellenistic thought is Philo.


title: Jewish history

text: A deterioration of relations between Hellenized Jews and other Jews led the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes to issue decrees banning certain Jewish religious rites and traditions. Subsequently, some of the nonhellenized Jews revolted under the leadership of the Hasmonean family (also known as the Maccabees). This revolt eventually led to the formation of an independent Jewish kingdom, known as the Hasmonaean Dynasty, which lasted from 165 BCE to 63 BCE. The Hasmonean Dynasty eventually disintegrated as a result of civil war between the sons of Salome Alexandra; Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II. The people, who did not want to be governed by a king but by theocratic clergy, made appeals in this spirit to the Roman authorities. A Roman campaign of conquest and annexation, led by Pompey, soon followed.


title: Jewish history

text: Judea had been an independent Jewish kingdom under the Hasmoneans, but it was conquered and reorganized as a client state by the Roman general Pompey in 63 BCE. Roman expansion was going on in other areas as well, and it would continue for more than a hundred and fifty years. Later, Herod the Great was appointed "King of the Jews" by the Roman Senate, supplanting the Hasmonean dynasty. Some of his offspring held various positions after him, known as the Herodian dynasty. Briefly, from 4 BCE to 6 CE, Herod Archelaus ruled the tetrarchy of Judea as ethnarch, the Romans denying him the title of King. After the Census of Quirinius in 6 CE, the Roman province of Judaea was formed as a satellite of Roman Syria under the rule of a prefect (as was Roman Egypt) until 41 CE, then procurators after 44 CE. The empire was often callous and brutal in its treatment of its Jewish subjects, (see Anti-Judaism in the pre-Christian Roman Empire). In 30 CE (or 33 CE), Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant rabbi from Galilee, and the central figure of Christianity, was put to death by crucifixion in Jerusalem under the Roman prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate. In 66 CE, the Jews began to revolt against the Roman rulers of Judea. The revolt was defeated by the future Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus. In the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and, according to some accounts, plundered artifacts from the temple, such as the Menorah. Jews continued to live in their land in significant numbers, the Kitos War of 115–117 CE notwithstanding, until Julius Severus ravaged Judea while putting down the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE. Nine hundred eighty-five villages were destroyed and most of the Jewish population of central Judaea was essentially wiped out, killed, sold into slavery, or forced to flee. Banished from Jerusalem, except for the day of Tisha B'Av, the Jewish population now centred on Galilee and initially in Yavne. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina and Judea was renamed Syria Palestina, to spite the Jews by naming it after their ancient enemies, the Philistines.


title: Jewish history

text: The Jewish diaspora began during the Assyrian conquest and it continued on a much larger scale during the Babylonian conquest, during which the Tribe of Judah was exiled to Babylonia along with the dethroned King of Judah, Jehoiachin, in the 6th century BCE, and taken into captivity in 597 BCE. The exile continued after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Many more Jews migrated to Babylon in 135 CE after the Bar Kokhba revolt and in the centuries after.


title: Jewish history

text: Many of the Judaean Jews were sold into slavery while others became citizens of other parts of the Roman Empire. The book of Acts in the New Testament, as well as other Pauline texts, make frequent reference to the large populations of Hellenised Jews in the cities of the Roman world. These Hellenised Jews were affected by the diaspora only in its spiritual sense, absorbing the feeling of loss and homelessness that became a cornerstone of the Jewish creed, much supported by persecutions in various parts of the world.


title: Jewish history

text: Of critical importance to the reshaping of Jewish tradition from the Temple-based religion to the rabbinic traditions of the Diaspora, was the development of the interpretations of the Torah found in the "Mishnah" and "Talmud."


title: Jewish history

text: Cochin Jewish tradition holds that the roots of their community go back to the arrival of Jews at Shingly in 72 CE., after the Destruction of the Second Temple. It also states that a Jewish kingdom, understood to mean the granting of autonomy by a local king, Cheraman Perumal, to the community, under their leader Joseph Rabban, in 379 CE. The first synagogue there was built in 1568. The legend of the founding of Indian Christianity in Kerala by Thomas the Apostle relates that on his arrival there, he encountered a local girl who understood Hebrew.


title: Jewish history

text: The relations of the Jews with the Roman Empire in the region continued to be complicated. Constantine I allowed Jews to mourn their defeat and humiliation once a year on Tisha B'Av at the Western Wall. In 351–352 CE, the Jews of Galilee launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution. The Gallus revolt came during the rising influence of early Christians in the Eastern Roman Empire, under the Constantinian dynasty. In 355, however, the relations with the Roman rulers improved, upon the rise of Emperor Julian, the last of the Constantinian dynasty, who unlike his predecessors defied Christianity. In 363, not long before Julian left Antioch to launch his campaign against Sasanian Persia, in keeping with his effort to foster religions other than Christianity, he ordered the Jewish Temple rebuilt. The failure to rebuild the Temple has mostly been ascribed to the dramatic Galilee earthquake of 363 and traditionally also to the Jews' ambivalence about the project. Sabotage is a possibility, as is an accidental fire. Divine intervention was the common view among Christian historians of the time. Julian's support of Jews caused Jews to call him "Julian the Hellene". Julian's fatal wound in the Persian campaign and his consequent death had put an end to Jewish aspirations, and Julian's successors embraced Christianity through the entire timeline of Byzantine rule of Jerusalem, preventing any Jewish claims.


title: Jewish history

text: In 438 CE, when the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call "to the great and mighty people of the Jews" which began: "Know that the end of the exile of our people has come!" However, the Christian population of the city, who saw this as a threat to their primacy, didn't allow it and a riot erupted after which they chased away the Jews from the city.


title: Jewish history

text: During the 5th and the 6th centuries, a series of Samaritan insurrections broke out across the Palaestina Prima province. Especially violent were the third and the fourth revolts, which resulted in almost the entire annihilation of the Samaritan community. It is likely that the Samaritan Revolt of 556 was joined by the Jewish community, which had also suffered a brutal suppression of Israelite religion.


title: Jewish history

text: In the belief of restoration to come, in the early 7th century the Jews made an alliance with the Persians, who invaded Palaestina Prima in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and were given Jerusalem to be governed as an autonomy. However, their autonomy was brief: the Jewish leader in Jerusalem was shortly assassinated during a Christian revolt and though Jerusalem was reconquered by Persians and Jews within 3 weeks, it fell into anarchy. With the consequent withdrawal of Persian forces, Jews surrendered to Byzantines in 625 or 628 CE, but were massacred by Christian radicals in 629 CE, with the survivors fleeing to Egypt. The Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire) control of the region was finally lost to the Muslim Arab armies in 637 CE, when Umar ibn al-Khattab completed the conquest of Akko.


title: Jewish history

text: After the fall of Jerusalem, Babylonia (modern day Iraq) would become the focus of Judaism for more than a thousand years. The first Jewish communities in Babylonia started with the exile of the Tribe of Judah to Babylon by Jehoiachin in 597 BCE as well as after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Many more Jews migrated to Babylon in 135 CE after the Bar Kokhba revolt and in the centuries after. Babylonia, where some of the largest and most prominent Jewish cities and communities were established, became the center of Jewish life all the way up to the 13th century. By the first century, Babylonia already held a speedily growing population of an estimated 1,000,000 Jews, which increased to an estimated 2 million between the years 200 CE and 500 CE, both by natural growth and by immigration of more Jews from the Land of Israel, making up about 1/6 of the world Jewish population at that era. It was there that they would write the Babylonian Talmud in the languages used by the Jews of ancient Babylonia: Hebrew and Aramaic. The Jews established Talmudic Academies in Babylonia, also known as the Geonic Academies ("Geonim" meaning "splendour" in Biblical Hebrew or "geniuses"), which became the center for Jewish scholarship and the development of Jewish law in Babylonia from roughly 500 CE to 1038 CE. The two most famous academies were the Pumbedita Academy and the Sura Academy. Major yeshivot were also located at Nehardea and Mahuza. The Talmudic Yeshiva Academies became a main part of Jewish culture and education, and Jews continued establishing Yeshiva Academies in Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and in later centuries, in America and other countries around the world where Jews lived in the Diaspora. Talmudic study in Yeshiva academies, most of them located in The United States and Israel, continues today.