Carl Kurlander

Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (“St. Elmo's Fire”), TV writer/producer (“Saved By the Bell”) and award-winning documentary filmmaker. During his multi-decade career in Hollywood, Kurlander wrote screenplays under contract for Universal, Columbia/Sony, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Orion and Disney Studios, and has written and produced over a hundred episodes of television for NBC, CBS, and Fox, co-creating and serving as showrunner for “Malibu, CA” a co-production between NBC and Tribune Entertainment.

Kurlander's first documentary “My Tale of Two Cities” was inspired after he appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” for moving back to his hometown to teach at the University of Pittsburgh. For that film, Carl tossed a football about the Steeler great Franco Harris, went cheese shopping with philanthropist Teresa Heinz Kerry, and spoke with Joanne Rogers and David Newell “Mr. McFeely” in The Fred Rogers Studio, asking them and other Pittsburgh neighbors how the city which built America with its steel could reinvent itself for a post-industrial age. Carl subsequently produced “The Shot Felt Round the World” about the Salk polio vaccine, “Burden of Genius” about transplant pioneer Thomas Starzl, and “The Chair”, a ten-part Starz docu-series about two directors making different movies from the same script. These films have been broadcast on The Smithsonian Channel, the BBC, and PBS, and won numerous awards including “Best Doc” prizes at film festivals, the CINE Golden Eagle Award, and Best Reality Program from the Television Critics’ Association.

Current projects include “Becoming August Wilson” about the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright’s formative years in Pittsburgh which inspired his ten play American Century Cycle, and “Jack and the Jukebox” about his grandfather Jack Cohen and his fellow Cleveland coin-operators who broke down cultural and racial barriers that helped give birth to “Rock and Roll” and founded the Cleveland Phonograph Merchant Association which was accused by a young Robert F. Kennedy working for Senate Hearings on Organized Crime as being a front for the mob.

Carl is the co-author with comedian Louie Anderson of “The F Word: How to Survive Your Family,” and has written articles which have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Deadline.com, and been reprinted in publications around the world. A piece Carl wrote on "The Deadly Polio Epidemic and Why it Matters for Coronavirus" led to an appearance on the CBS Sunday Morning for a segment on “How The Polio Fight Was Won” and a short documentary “Chasing Covid” Kurlander produced and directed. Through the non-profit Steeltown Entertainment Project which Carl co-founded, he developed innovative “youth and media” programs including “Take a Shot at Changing the World” in which students made their own videos about the history of the Salk polio vaccine. He continues to teach at the University of Pittsburgh. For more information, see carlkurlander.com