Stephen Winter

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Stephen Winter (born 1969) is an American filmmaker, writer, lecturer and podcaster based in New York City. His films Chocolate Babies (1996) and Jason and Shirley (2015) were featured on The Criterion Collection's streaming service, The Criterion Channel in 2021.....

Education

He began teaching in 2015, and has taught Black Film History, Revolutionary Film History and Screenwriting at Cornell University, Pratt University, Williams College and Brooklyn College CUNY

Career

Film

In an NewfestNYC interview, Slave Play playwright Jeremy O. Harris called Winter “The Godfather of Queer Film” . In the Autumn 2021, Interview Magazine featured an interview with Winter’s longtime friend and mentor, filmmaker Lee Daniels .

His debut feature film, Chocolate Babies (1996), is about a group of chosen family HIV-positive Black and Asian drag queens, queers, women and trans folks who launch fiercely theatrical political street assaults on conservative politicians who oppose government action on AIDS, but when the youngest member of the gang infiltrates the office of a closeted city councilman and they fall in love, it sets off a series of events that threaten to pull the group apart.

Chocolate Babies premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and was featured at OutFest 1996, San Francisco Frameline 1997 and receiving honorable mentions at SXSW 1997 and UrbanWorld Film Festival. The film’s longtime distributor is Frameline in San Francisco.

In 2003, Winter produced Tarnation, an American documentary film by Jonathan Caouette .

As producer, Winter supervised Caouette’s final edit and post-production, then shepherded the film to the 2004 Sundance Film festival, The Cannes Film festival, NYFF and international theatrical distribution from Wellspring. Film critic Roger Ebert, an early supporter, reported $400,000 more was eventually spent by the distributor on sound, print, score and music/clip clearances to bring the film to theaters, although the actual budget was closer to $500,000. Tarnation went on to win the Best Documentary Award from the National Society of Film Critics, also was nominated for the Independent Spirits, the Gotham Awards, as well as the L.A. and London International Film Festivals Chocolate Babies has earned cult film status as a masterwork of New Queer Cinema, with multiple screenings at Brooklyn Academy of Music culminating in its 2021 streaming debut on the prestigious Criterion Channel .

Winter’s second feature-film, Jason and Shirley (2015), is a fictional re-imagining of the behind-the-scenes making of the controversial 1967 documentary about race, class, sexuality, sex work, addiction, show-business and power dynamics; Portrait of Jason (1967) by Shirley Clarke, starring the Black and gay cabaret singer Jason Holiday and filmed in Clarke’s penthouse at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. The script for Jason and Shirley was co-written by Winter and the film’s co-stars: journalist, novelist and activist Sarah Schulman (as “Shirley”), and downtown artist Jack Waters (as “Jason”) from a story conceived by Winter. The supporting cast also contributed to the development of their characters and dialogue.

Jason and Shirley had its world premiere at the BAM CinemaFest on June 18, 2015. Critic Richard Brody said in The New Yorker that Waters’ performance was “electrifying“, and that the film is ”ingenious” and “an anguished view of the power relations, societal conflicts, and cruel sacrifices from which Clarke’s film arose” . Jonas Mekas, the founder of Anthology Film Archives, The Godfather of American Avant Garde Cinema and a real-world friend of Jason Holliday and Shirley Clarke said of the film, “Jack’s recreation of Jason is so amazingly true I thought I was back in Shirley’s apartment watching “Jason and Shirley”. The face, the movements, the character was so truly Jason. The portrayal of Shirley Clarke is true to life. … the situation is fictional but this fiction is so true. I knew, from being around Shirley and Carl and Jason for many years. I told Stephen and Jack the script itself deserves an Academy Award.”

The film played for two weeks at MoMA and had its 2021 streaming debut on the Criterion Channel along with Winter’s first feature Chocolate Babies . Subsequent to the release of Jason and Shirley, the Clarke documentary Portrait of Jason was placed into The Library of Congress for significant works

Winter was story editor on How To Survive A Plague (2012), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary , and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), which was released on Netflix. Both films were directed by David France.

Podcasts

From 2018-2019, Stephen Winter directed, produced, and co-wrote with Tristan Cowen, the first sci-fi, Afrofuturistic, political satire buddy-comedy fiction podcast, Adventures In New America, on the Night Vale Presents network . The story follows two characters — IA Olivier (Winter), a Black man who cannot get arrested despite how desperately he tries and his friendship with Simon Carr (Paige Gilbert), a Black lesbian self-described sociopathic sneak-thief. As the pair try to get money for IA’s medical expenses, a band of Tetchy Terrorist Vampire Zombies work to destroy their zany dystopian world.

The New York Times reviewer Amanda Hess declared she had been unimpressed by the potential of fiction podcasts until Adventures In New America, “The moment that changed, for me, came when I was white-knuckling the pole in a crowded subway car, piping the pilot of the politically charged dystopian fantasy “Adventures in New America” into my ears... I began to sense the world developing in my head as more immediate than the human crush of my commute."

Adventures In New America was nominated for Webby Award for Podcasts - Best Writing 2019.

In 2021, Topic Studios announced that Winter would direct the upcoming science fiction drama podcast The Space Within, written by Greg O’Connor and Josh Fagin .

Music Videos

Winter has directed acclaimed music videos including “Its Different For Girls” by Of Montreal , "Bad Friend" by Cheese on Bread , "Black Like Jesus" by The Illustrious Blacks , and "Speculum Orum" by M. Lamar .

Acting

As a film actor, Winter has made memorable appearances in Xan Cassavetes’ Kiss of The Damned (2012) starring Milo Ventimiglia , and as a photographer in Bridey Elliott’s Clara’s Ghost (2018) starring alternative comedy icon Chris Elliott . He was also a talking head in the John Waters documentary Divine Trash (1998).

Other Work

In 1995, Winter was invited to join a group of writers, directors and actors gathered on Manhattan's Lower East Side for what was supposed to be a one-time-only event: write, direct, produce and perform new plays within the span of 24 hours. More than a decade and just over 300 plays later, The 24 Hour Plays have been produced on Broadway, in London, Los Angeles, Chicago and across the globe. Winter’s play “Be Still” is included in the published “24 by 24: The 24 Hour Plays Anthology.”

Winter co-wrote the Allen Hughes segment of New York, I Love You (2008) with Xan Casavettes, starring Bradley Cooper and Drea de Matteo.

References

This article "Stephen Winter" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Stephen Winter. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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