Kirk Ellis

Author 

Award-winning writer/producer Kirk Ellis won two Emmys and the Humanitas Prize for his work on John Adams starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Ellis wrote and co-executive produced the seven-part HBO miniseries, which is based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. The miniseries scored a record 23 nominations; second only to Roots in Emmy history and won a record breaking 13 Emmys in total.

Ellis will continue his association with McCullough and the American Revolution on his next project for HBO, 1776. Like "Adams" the miniseries will be produced with Tom Hanks' Playtone Co. In addition Ellis is adapting the James Ellroy's novel American Tabloid as a potential series for Playtone and HBO.

For the big screen, Ellis is working on the feature project Blood and Thunder, an epic drama of Kit Carson and the Navajo Wars for Steven Spielberg/DreamWorks. His former collaboration with Spielberg and DreamWorks brought Ellis the Western Writers of America's Golden Spur Award for Best Drama Script for Hell on Wheels, an episode of the Emmy and Golden Globe nominated TNT/DreamWorks miniseries Into the West on which Ellis served as supervising producer and writer. He also received the Wrangler Award for Best Television Feature from the National Western Heritage Museum for his work on the miniseries.

Previously, Ellis received an Emmy nomination and won the Writers Guild of America and the Humanitas Prize for the ABC miniseries Anne Frank which he wrote and co-produced. Additional credits include writing the award-winning ABC miniseries The Beach Boys: An American Family, co-executive producing Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (which earned him a Critics' Choice Award) and writing The Three Stooges telefilm.

Ellis made his feature film debut writing and co-producing The Grass Harp based on the coming-of-age novel by Truman Capote. He has also collaborated on projects with such esteemed directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Roland Joffe and William Friedkin.

At the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television he became the first undergraduate to achieve degrees in both film production and history/criticism. He began his professional career as a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter and in 1985, at the age of 24, was named the trade paper's international editor - the youngest journalist to ever serve in the post. In 1992, he was named Editor in Chief of the London based European trade magazine, Moving Pictures, and simultaneously formed Shadow Catcher Productions, an independent production banner under which Ellis develops his own indie features and documentaries.