Paul Rudnick

American writer

Paul Rudnick (born December 29, 1957) is an American writer. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world. He is also known for having written the screenplays for several movies, including Sister Act, Addams Family Values, Jeffrey, and In & Out.

Rudnick was born and raised in a Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, where his mother, Selma, was a publicist and his father, Norman, was a physicist. Rudnick attended Piscataway High School. He attended Yale College before moving to New York City, where he wrote book jacket copy and worked as an assistant to his friend, the costume designer William Ivey Long. Rudnick also wrote film criticism under the pseudonym Libby Gelmen Waxner.

Rudnick's first play was Poor Little Lambs, a comedy about a female Yale student's attempt to join The Whiffenpoofs, an all male singing group. Produced in 1982, the play's cast included the young Kevin Bacon, Bronson Pinchot, and Blanche Baker. Rudnick's first novel Social Disease, a satiric tale of New York nightlife, came out in 1986. In the late 1980s Rudnick moved into the top floor of a Greenwich Village brownstone, which had once been the 1920s home of the actor John Barrymore. This inspired Rudnick's play I Hate Hamlet, about a young TV star who, as he's about to play Hamlet, is visited by the ghost of Barrymore. The play was produced on Broadway and became notorious when Nicol Williamson, the actor playing Barrymore, began attacking his co star in a far too realistic manner during a dueling scene. In 1993, Rudnick had a breakthrough with his Off Broadway hit Jeffrey. At first no theater would produce the play, because it was described as a comedy about AIDS. But after a sold out run at the tiny WPA Theater in New York City, the show transferred for a commercial run. The play ran from December 31, 1992, to February 14, 1993, at the WPA Theatre. The play transferred to the off Broadway Minetta Lane Theatre, running from March 6, 1993, to January 16, 1994. Frank Rich, in The New York Times, called Rudnick "a born show biz wit with perfect pitch for priceless one liners". Stephen Holden, also in the Times, said that Jeffrey was "Just the sort of play Oscar Wilde might have written had he lived in 1990s Manhattan." Rudnick won an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and the John Gassner Playwrighting Award. In September 2017, Rudnick's play Big Night opened at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, where it played through October. Wendie Malick starred in this Oscar themed tragicomedy, described by The Hollywood Reporter as "an often amusing but mostly muddled ensemble piece."

Rudnick has worked as an uncredited script doctor on films including The Addams Family and The First Wives Club. He was credited as the pseudonym "Joseph Howard" for his work on Sister Act, which was originally intended as a vehicle for Bette Midler; the screenplay went through many changes, and by the time it became re fashioned for Whoopi Goldberg he refused to have his real name associated with it. He received sole writing credit for Addams Family Values, In & Out, and the screen version of his play Jeffrey. Rudnick's later screenwriting forays included Isn't She Great and the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives. His script Coastal Elites––a socially distanced film about the COVID 19 pandemic––was directed by Jay Roach and stars Bette Midler, Dan Levy, Issa Rae, Sarah Paulson, and Kaitlyn Dever. It began airing on HBO on September 12, 2020.

In 2011, HarperCollins published I Shudder, a collection of Rudnick's autobiographical essays, some covering his work on stage and screen, interspersed with fictional pieces depicting Elyot Vionnet, a fictional alter ego. Since 1998, Rudnick has been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, mostly of over 50 short humor pieces. His work appears in the collections Fierce Pajamas and Disquiet, Please. In 1988, Rudnick began producing satiric film criticism for Premiere Magazine under the name Libby Gelman Waxner, a deranged Manhattan wife, mother and "Assistant Buyer of Juniors Activewear." A collection of Libby's columns was published in 1994 under the title If You Ask Me, and Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, wrote that, "Mr. Rudnick weaves many a trenchant thought into Libby's comic screeds." Premiere folded in 2007, but Libby resumed writing a monthly column for Entertainment Weekly in 2011 and occasionally contributes reviews to The New Yorker. Rudnick's first young adult novel, Gorgeous was published in 2013. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, said that the book included "writing that's hilarious, profane and profound (often within a single sentence.)" Scholastic also published his second Young Adult novel, It's All Your Fault, which Booklist called "A laugh out loud, irreverent tale built on as much snarkiness as sweetness. A riotously good read." His latest novel, Playing the Palace, was published by Berkley on May 25, 2021. In 2023, Simon & Schuster published Rudnick's novel Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style. In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly called the book "dazzling and funny."

Rudnick is openly gay.