Like indie cult fave writer-director Kevin Smith, Todd Solondz is the one other filmmaker proud of his birthplace of New Jersey. Originally, he wanted to be rabbi but, eventually, set his sights on writing screenplays. He even wrote several while he had a job as a delivery boy for the Writers' Guild of America. Solondz was born in Irvington, New Jersey, and because of his early rabbinical aspirations, he went to a series of public and private schools.

Solondz first film was Schatt's Last Shot, playing a high schooler who wants to get into Stanford, but his gym teacher hates him and fails him because he can't make a shot in basketball. He also has no luck with the girl of his dreams, but he wishes he was more like the coach, whom he challenges to a game of one-on-one. It was unseen by many and not a reaper of big bucks, but Solondz had put his foot in the door.

His second was yet another little-seen short film he wrote and directed, Fear, Anxiety & Depression, a heavily autobiographical piece about Solondz and his experience writing a play and sending it to Samuel Beckett, hoping that they could collaborate together. The film was obviously largely inspired by the films and writing of Woody Allen, but it was not a piece where Solondz had carte blanche--or any kind of creative control over at the same time.

The third time was the charm as Solondz brought to the screen the highly original and popular Welcome to the Dollhouse, a movie about the cruelty of junior high school, parents, adult figures, and life--particularly suburban Jewish life--itself. Reviewers and audiences alike praised this movie to high heaven; it won trophies at Sundance, Berlin, and countless others; and it introduced Heather Matarazzo to film. With it's cruel realism, true-to-life facts, bitter humor, and unflinching attack on early teen life in general, Solondz had finally arrived.

His sophomore effort was a wildly edgy and provocative film about a group of people who were miserable in their ordinary conventional lifestyles and were pursuing happiness from the strangest forms of perverse sexuality. Ironically, it was titled Happiness, although the movie was more about the endless futile pursuit of it than what the title actually suggested. It featured a murder, a rape, an obscene phone caller, and a pedophile. It caused a lot of uproar even with the distributors and was dropped, only to be scooped up by another company. One of the most controversial things about the film was the element of the child psychologist as a repressed pedophile. In the movie, he molests his son's friend at a sleep-over, but the character was sympathetic and three-dimensional, and he loved his son, which really raised a lot of eyebrows. Once again, the movie was lauded with numerous awards and strong critical praise for Solondz.

Solondz made it clear he was not softening up with his third effort, Storytelling, about the process of artists. The first story took place in a creative-writing class about the cruel and harsh process of creative writing, and a first-time documentary feature by a desperate filmmaker making a movie about a depressed, listless, unmotivated teenager. The first story, "Fiction," was about how all fictional stories are largely autobiographical in some way, how unforgiving certain people can be, and how a naïve and somewhat untalented writer gets herself in a situation that's more than for which she bargained. The movie was in danger of getting the dreaded NC-17, which is considered commercial death in the United States, due to a sodomy sex scene with racist undertones. Solondz did something quite radical: instead of trimming the scene, he blocked the sight with a big orange neon box. Thus the movie got an R rating. The second story, "Nonfiction," about a struggling documentary filmmaker, was loaded with social commentary. A listless teenager and his overbearing family, the theory of how homosexuality is like the scarlet letter, drug use, gun control in the home, and even how everyone is capable of murder, solondz even made criticism about the topics of his movie within the movie in a somewhat self-conscious kind of way.

Solondz's next film was Palindromes, which was also extremely controversial because the main role was played by twelve people of differing heights, sexes, and genders. Solondz has established himself a solid and reliable filmmaker instead of just one more cookie-cutter conformist director making his movies on the Hollywood assembly line. Solondz is a real writer and filmmaker, agent provocateur, and a true force with which to be reckoned.


Solondz went to Yale University, graduating in 1981. He worked as a messenger for the Writers Guild. He spent his entire life savings on making Palindromes (2004) because no studios would back it.