Stephen Most
Stephen Most (born January 21, 1943) is an American playwright and documentary screenwriter. In a career spanning more than four decades, Most has written or collaborated on nine plays and twenty-four documentaries, including four Academy Award nominees.
Early life
Stephen Most was born in San Diego, California the son of May (née Lazarus) and Nathan Most, a businessman. Most has two brothers, John and Robert, and a sister, Barbara.
At Harvard College, Most studied myth, history, and society under the guidance of Erik H. Erikson. In 1964, he received a Cornell University field studies grant to do anthropological research in Perú. After graduating from Harvard cum laude, Most returned to Perú as a Peace Corps Volunteer. In 1967, he became a graduate student at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. His professors there were Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, and Marshall Hodgson. Most left with an MA in 1970.
Playwriting career
Most began his playwriting career with the award-winning Poe, which the Organic Theater Company produced twice in Chicago. Together with playwright Joan Holden and director Jael Weisman, he wrote Loon's Rage, which launched the Dell'Arte Players Company. As dramaturg for that company, he collaborated with Weisman and the actors on Intrigue at Ah-Pah and Whiteman Meets Bigfoot (based on the comic book by Robert Crumb). Most wrote book and lyrics for the sci-fi musical comedy Raven's Seed, which Sansei Productions staged in San Francisco in 1984. (The non-musical, 21st century version of Raven's Seed premiered at the Matrix Theatre in Detroit in 2012.) In 1985, Most wrote Crossing Borders for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In 1992 and '93, Tale Spinners Theater and Turtle Island Ensemble produced Watershed, which draws from oral history interviews with a California Indian (Yurok) family. Most wrote the "Theater of History" for the permanent exhibit of the Washington State History Museum in the mid-'90s: more than ninety audio voices spoken by characters from various aspects of the State's history represented by masks, monochromatic mannequins, and photographs on stage sets and in dioramas. His play A Free Country, which was produced by the Seattle Group Theatre in 1997, is based on the characters in the Hooverville shack diorama. Another historical play, Forces of Nature, had a staged reading in Hartford, Connecticut in 2007, with Tony award-winners Brian Dennehy and James Naughton playing Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir.
Film career
Documentary films that Stephen Most has scripted include Oil On Ice, which is about the controversy over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; The Greatest Good, a history of the United States Forest Service; A Land Between Rivers, a history of central California; and Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time. Wonders of Nature, which he wrote for the Great Wonders of the World series, won an Emmy for best special non-fiction program. The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story, won a best-documentary Emmy. Promises (film), on which Most worked as consulting writer and researcher, won Emmys for best documentary and outstanding background analysis and research and was nominated for an Academy Award. Berkeley in the Sixties, which Most co-wrote, also received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary. He was consulting writer for two other Academy Award nominees: Mothers of the Plaza and Freedom on My Mind. For director Abby Ginzberg, Most wrote Time for Justice; Doing Justice: The Life and Trials of Arthur Kinoy; and Cruz Reynoso: Sowing the Seeds of Justice . He was associate director as well as co-writer on Places for the Soul, a film about the architect Christopher Alexander, and he originated and co-produced the internationally distributed PBS science series Life Beyond Earth. Most produced and wrote River of Renewal, which won the best documentary feature award at the American Indian Film Festival. His book River of Renewal, Myth and History in the Klamath Basin was co-published by the University of Washington Press
and the Oregon Historical Society.
Most is the screenwriter for museum videos as well as for documentary films. These include all of the videos in the permanent exhibit of the Washington State History Museum as well as the three-screen film River of the West, and three videos in a climate change exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. For the Computer History Museum, Most wrote a conceptual design for all of the video presentations within the permanent exhibit.
Personal life
Stephen Most lives in Berkeley, California. He and Claire Schoen have two children: Rachel Most, who was born in 1985, and Jonah Most, born in 1989.
Bibliography
- Rebecca Jaroff and Bob Shuman, 2009. DUO! The Best Scenes for Two for the 21st Century. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 362—366
- Stephen Most, 2006. River of Renewal, Myth and History in the Klamath Basin, University of Washington Press and the Oregon Historical Society Press.
- Alan Rosenthal, 1996. Writing, Directing and Producing Documentary Films and Videos. Southern Illinois University Press, 60—62
- Stephen Most, 1996. In the Presence of the Past. Legacy Publications
- Stephen Most and Lynn Grasberg, 1989. The Broken Circle: A Search for Wisdom in the Nuclear Age. Consulting Psychologists Press.
- West Coast Plays 10, 1981. "Playwrights' Polemic," California Theatre Council, 73—100
- West Coast Plays 8, 1981. Intrigue At Ah-Pah. California Theatre Council, 121—171