Mark Axelrod

Education and career

Axelrod received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and received both his B.A. and M.A. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has received numerous awards for his work including two United Kingdom Leverhulme Fellowships for Creative Writing and two from the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France. He recently received awards from the Irvine International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival and the Illinois International Film Festival for his screenplays.^[3]He recently received awards from the Irvine International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival and the Illinois International Film Festival for his screenplays. He is also a practicing screenwriter who has published four books on screenwriting: Aspects of the Screenplay; Character & Conflict; I Read It At the Movies; and Constructing Dialogue: Screenwriting from Citizen Kane to Midnight in Paris. He has written over twenty screenplays and teleplays, the latest of which is titled Malarkey starring Malcolm McDowell and is scheduled for filming in January, 2017. He has been awarded for his work by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Writers Guild of America, East; the Screenwriters Forum (University of Wisconsin); and the Sundance Institute.” He has also won awards from the Scottish Association of Filmmakers Award in Screenwriting, Edinburgh, Scotland 1993, and the London International Film & Video Festival, Silver Seal Award for Screenwriting, London, England 1991.

Writing

He has written the novels Capital Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 2000), Cloud Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1998), Cardboard Castles (Pacific Writers Press, 1996) and Bombay California (Pacific Writers Press, 1994). He has recently completed a novel in three books titled, The Posthumous Memoirs of Blase Kubash. He has also written several collections of short stories, including Dante's Foil & Other Sporting Tales, (Black Scat Press), and Secret Histories: Borges’ Travel, Hemingway’s Garage (Fiction Collective 2, 2005) which was published in fall, 2009 in Spanish by Thule Ediciones, Barcelona as Viajes Borges, Talleres Hemingway. His translation of Balzac’s play, Mercadet, was reissued in 2016 as Waiting For Godeau, by Black Scat Press and his collection of plays will be published by Black Scat in 2017.

Of his fiction, Luisa Valenzuela said, “A different voice in North American Writing…a very special, poignant sense of humor.” The itinerant scholar’s voracious appetite to find meaning in life led him to travel the world early on, and this theme of the eternal wanderer is seen in his novel Bombay California. In his review of Bombay California; or, Hollywood Somewhere West of Vine, Giose Rimanelli wrote, “…in the grand tradition of such Latin American fabulists as Machado de Assis, Borges, Cortázar, and García Márquez, Axelrod manipulates the novel form to present not just a fin-de-siècle statement on the political and social fabric of the United States, but a satire on Hollywood films, American television, American folklore, American advertising, American education, the United States presidency, Ronald Reagan, publishing prejudices, "literary" agent incompetence, plus a panoply of gibes, jabs, and gestures at American culture in general. Chapter 33, for example, titled "An Agent's Tools," is nothing other than an order slip one might get at any fast-food restaurant. Chapter 49, titled "Wanted Dead or Alive," is a "wanted" poster of someone who looks a lot like Ronald Reagan for, among other things, stealing a script that Katz had written about the presidency.” From 2009 he has contributed a blog on Huffington Post.com.

Books and Anthologies

Film Work & Screenwriting Awards

Fellowships, Grants and Awards