Screenwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan, who's been nominated for four Academy Awards (for The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, and Grand Canyon), and who also played a role in creating two of Hollywood's most successful franchises (Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars), knew from an early age what he wanted to do with his life. That ambition brought him to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate.
Today, Kasdan is the most successful filmmaker ever to have graduated from the university.
And now his papers — which document the making of some of the most significant films of the last half century — have come home to the University of Michigan Library's Screen Arts Mavericks and Makers Collection. Kasdan is the first Michigan alum represented among a cohort that also features Orson Welles, Robert Altman, John Sayles, Jonathan Demme, Nancy Savoca, and Alan Rudolph (among others).
Kasdan (BA 1970, MA 1972) won four Hopwoods during his time at Michigan, which provided critical but insufficient funds; he still needed part-time jobs to get by. And yet, he still made time for the Cinema Guild — a student-run organization that screened a wide range of films at a time when it would have been otherwise almost impossible to see anything other than current Hollywood releases.
