Thomas Lee Wright

Thomas Lee Wright is an Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmaker who writes, directs and produces feature films and documentaries. As a screenwriter, he has worked for every major studio and wrote the original story and screenplay for the Warner Brothers hit "New Jack City" (Wesley Snipes, Chris Rock, Ice-T) which the New York Times called "an urban classic" upon the 25th anniversary of its premiere. As a director, he made the prize-winning Discovery Channel documentary "Eight-Tray Gangster: The Making of a Crip", which explores L.A.'s 1992 Uprising from a gang member's perspective. He produced an activist's chronicle about the turn-of-the-century WTO 'Battle in Seattle' protests, "Tradeoff", which won SIFF's Golden Space Needle Award and toured internationally with Human Rights Watch. For Team Jesse, a nonprofit dedicated to military families, he directed "The Long Ride Home", a full-length film following an Iraq War veteran on a grueling 90-day cross-country bike trip to honor a fallen friend, arriving at Ground Zero on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Wright developed the book and screenplay for Amazon Studio's "Last Flag Flying" (Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, Laurence Fishburne), and executive produced this sequel to "The Last Detail" from a novel by Darryl Ponicsan. Directed by Richard Linklater, the film was chosen to be the opening night selection of the New York Film Festival and earned Laurence Fishburne an NAACP Image Award nod. Wright received an Academy Award nomination for producing "Edith+Eddie", a love story about America's oldest interracial newlyweds, directed by Laura Checkoway. The film was awarded Best Short of the year by the International Documentary Association, and also earned an Emmy nod after airing in NBC's 'Meet the Press' film festival, among other honors. As an author, Wright co-wrote a pair of books about filmmaking - "Working in Hollywood", an oral history of the movie business that traces the making of a motion picture through 64 jobs performed by workers behind-the-scenes, and "American Screenwriters", a collection of interviews with top writers discussing the art and business of their craft. Wright began his career as a story editor at Walt Disney and Columbia Pictures and as a creative executive at Paramount where he worked on such films as "48 Hours", "Trading Places" and "Flashdance" before writing a draft of "The Godfather, Part Three" - his first studio writing assignment. He earned a degree in English Literature from Harvard College and studied Irish theater at Trinity College, Dublin.