Kevin DiNovis

Kevin DiNovis studied dramatic craft with Pulitzer Prize winning Absurdist playwright Edward Albee. His first feature film, Surrender Dorothy (1998), won multiple awards, including the Grand Jury prize for Best Feature at the Slamdance, Chicago Underground, and New York Underground Film Festivals. Hand-picked by critic Roger Ebert as one of only ten films to inaugurate his Overlooked Film Festival, Surrender Dorothy is distributed by TLA releasing; the DVD version was praised as one of the "best releases of 2000" by the Internet Movie Data Base. Since then, DiNovis has worked as a writer (adapting Mary Higgins Clark's bestselling thriller Loves Music, Loves to Dance for USA Networks) while making his second feature, Death & Texas (2004), a satire about the execution of a beloved American football hero; the film was produced by Stephen Israel (Swimming With Sharks) and stars Academy-Award Nominee Charles Durning, Steve Harris, Mary Kay Place and Billy Ray Cyrus. Recently DiNovis has teamed with veteran producer and former Paramount President Frank Yablans on an adaptation of the bestselling non-fiction book Soul Surfer, the inspiring true story of 13-year-old professional surfer Bethany Hamilton's struggle to return to the sport after losing her arm to a shark. Other scripts DiNovis has written for Yablans include: The Bellringer, an epic biopic about William and Catherine Booth, the nineteenth-century social reformers who founded the Salvation Army; and The One-Minute Millionaire, a romantic comedy loosely based on the eponymous book by self-help guru Mark Victor Hansen. In 2009, DiNovis was the first writer selected to inaugurate Marvel Studio's Writers Program. In addition to adapting two features and one short subject for the celebrated 'House of Ideas', DiNovis participated in an uncredited dialogue polish of the script for Thor.