Craig Shilowich

Craig started out as a child actor. He never quite broke out, appearing mostly on late-night cable television and in regional industrial videos. A review of a play he did at Rochester's Geva Theatre offers what can only be described as a backhanded compliment.

He spent years on set as an LP, UPM, and AP, with early credits including the Academy Award–nominated Frozen River, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008. He had the privilege of working with Todd Solondz, Wayne Wang, and Ted Hope.

In 2012 he was the UPM on David Gordon Green's Joe — an excellent and peculiar film he later wrote a book about. The first chapter is here; he'd happily share the rest if asked.

To pay rent he also produced commercials, dramatic re-enactments of parasitic infestations for Animal Planet, and music videos including Beyoncé's “1+1.”

In 2013 he produced Benjamin Dickinson's Creative Control, a prescient and tonally singular indie about an unhappy ad executive working on augmented-reality glasses. Oddly, right around the same time, Craig was producing a branded piece for Google Glass following a tennis player at Wimbledon. He got stuck at the airport with the glasses because he hadn't declared them properly, and they made him feel dizzy and vaguely ill.

Christine, which he wrote and produced for director Antonio Campos, is about a young woman whose unraveling no one around her quite reads in time. It declines most of the shapes that kind of story usually takes. Rebecca Hall, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, J. Smith-Cameron, and Maria Dizzia star. He's especially fond of this conversation with Antonio about the film, some of the press, and this piece in The New Yorker.

He then produced Robin Comisar's Great Choice, a beloved cult short starring Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector about a woman's strange experiences at a Red Lobster, shot in a catering hall down the street from his house in Flatbush. A feature is in the works.

From 2017 to 2019 he was an executive producer on Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Laura Dern in an Oscar-winning performance — a film as precise about the administrative cruelties of divorce as it is about the affection that survives them. He learned a great deal on it, most importantly that if you are ever going to get divorced, you should file first in the city of your choosing and poison the well of available lawyers by visiting them all before your spouse does.

During Covid he wrote and produced on Antonio Campos's HBO miniseries The Staircase, starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette and adapted from Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's documentary of the same name — less interested in whether Michael Peterson did it than in what a family becomes when it has to keep performing itself for sixteen years of cameras and courtrooms. He developed a paralyzing fear of stairwells that persists to this day and has spread, unfairly, to his children. Here is a podcast about Episode 5, “The Beating Heart.”

He is currently writing a script on assignment about the 1973 Houston Mass Murders and the unlikely detective who reopened the case after it was seemingly solved. He is also writing an original called Trash Men, about two brothers who grew up around junkyards and scrap recycling in Philadelphia.

He also writes short stories. Here is one he's particularly proud of, in Joyland.

He lives in Los Angeles with his family.