After attending Rosemary Hall (where she was a classmate of Glenn Close) and graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1968, she worked as a ghostwriter for The Village Voice for about a year. After quitting that job, she became interested in documentary filmmaking and soon gained national prominence in the United States as co-director and co-producer of the 1972 film Marjoe (about evangelist Marjoe Gortner), which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
During the next two years, she released two albums on RCA Records as a singer-songwriter, House of Pain and Beat Around the Bush.
In 1977 Kernochan's novel Dry Hustle (ISBN 0688031498 in hard cover, ISBN 0425036618 in paperback) was published.
Kernochan's first screen credit as a screenwriter came with the 1986 film 9½ Weeks. She commented on her contribution to that film in an interview with Salon.com:
- I don't like the film very much, and I don't think it represents my sensibility. It was valuable to get my first screen credit as a screenwriter, and I enjoyed working with the director very much, but basically I just came in at the end and did his revisions.
By the time she was brought in to work on the 1993 film Sommersby, she had became known for a particular style of writing in Hollywood:
- I think people know that there's no point in calling me in if you want the other kind of women characters: a featureless "help me" character, or the saint, the whore — you know, any of the archetypes. I don't think all women are powerful, intelligent, any of those things. I just require that female characters be very real, that they have all the dimensions that the male characters do.
Since then, she has been primarily a screenwriter. She
- wrote Dancers (1987);
- wrote Impromptu (1991), the debut film directed by her husband James Lapine with a script she characterized as "maybe the best thing that I will ever do";
- co-wrote the screenplay for Sommersby (1993);
- wrote and directed The Hairy Bird (1998);
- wrote the story for What Lies Beneath (2000); and
- directed Thoth (2002).
Her second documentary, Thoth, also won an Academy Award in 2002, this time for Best Documentary Short Subject.
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Last updated on Monday June 02, 2008 at 21:27:50 PDT (GMT -0700)
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