Hollywood Screenwriter and Visiting Pitt Professor Carl Kurlander to Present a Lecture and Screening of His Film "St. Elmo's Fire"

PITTSBURGH––Hollywood screenwriter Carl Kurlander, a visiting professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of English, will present a free lecture and screening of his film "St. Elmo's Fire" from 7 to 10 p.m. Nov. 9 in the Seventh-Floor Masonic Temple Auditorium, Fifth Ave., Oakland. The 1985 film helped to launch the careers of a group of actors, including Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, who became known as the Brat Pack.

With the threat of a writer's strike last March, Kurlander, a Pittsburgh native, decided to fulfill a longtime fantasy and return to Pittsburgh, where he is now teaching in Pitt's Film Studies Program. He began his career in 1982 as an intern to the president of Universal Studios. The internship was part of a scholarship award he had won for "St. Elmo's Fire," a short story he wrote while attending Duke University. He turned the story into the screenplay that became the Columbia Pictures release of the same name.

Since then, Kurlander has written screenplays under contract for Orion, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, and Disney. He also has been a writer/producer for more than 100 television episodes, including "Saved by the Bell," "Hangtime," "The Louie Show," "USA High," and "Malibu, CA," as well as a writer of TV pilots and movies of the week for various networks. In 1988, he participated in the first reality-based television show, a Fox TV special called "3000 Miles, 21 Days, 21 Cents," for which he was forced to work his way across America on only a dime.