Tom Schatz
Mrs. Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair in Communication
E-mail: tschatz@mail.utexas.edu
Office: WWH 415
Phone: 512-232-5987
Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1976
Curriculum Vitae - PDF
Tom Schatz is the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair (and former Chair) of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 1976, and is currently the Executive Director of the UT Film Institute. He has written four books about Hollywood films and filmmaking. These include Hollywood Genres, widely considered the standard academic text on that subject; The Genius of the System, a highly acclaimed book about the “studio system” during Hollywood’s classical era; and most recently Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, which is volume six of Scribner’s ten-volume History of American Film series. His writing on film has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Premiere, The Nation, Film Comment, and Cineaste.
Besides his writing and teaching, Schatz also lectures widely both in the U.S. and abroad on American film and television, and he has conducted seminars for academics and industry professionals in Europe and Asia. He also has lectured for the Motion Picture Academy and the Directors Guild of America; he has taught for the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film School, where he serves on the Advisory Board. Schatz also is engaged in media production, providing his expertise (and on-screen interviews) for a number of film and television documentaries, and is co-producer of “The Territory,” a long-running regional PBS series that showcases independent film and video work. He also served as editor of the Film and Media Studies Series for the University of Texas Press for over a decade.
His current publishing projects include a history of MCA-Universal, co-authored with Thom Mount, former President of Universal Pictures, and an edited four-volume collection on Hollywood for Routledge, due to be published in 2004. Recent writing has appeared in Film Quarterly and The Nation, as well as the lead essay in an anthology, John Ford’s “Stagecoach,” published in 2003 by Cambridge University Press.
As Executive Director of the newly created Film Institute at the University of Texas, he oversees the development of a program devoted to training students in narrative and digital filmmaking, and the actual production of feature-length commercial films.
