Alexander Hilary Kurtzman
,
Los Angeles, California, USA
Birthday
1973-09-07
Occupation
Director, Screenplay
Spouse(s)
Samantha Counter (2002 - present)
Years Active
Biography
Alex Kurtzman is an American film and television writer, producer and director.
Kurtzman was born and raised to a secular Jewish family in Los Angeles, California, where he met his high school friend and longtime collaborator Roberto Orci. He attended Wesleyan University.
Kurtzman first teamed with Orci on television on the syndicated series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, for the television unit of Pacific Renaissance Pictures, then operating out of Universal International. After they produced several storylines to cope with the absence of lead actor Kevin Sorbo following a stroke that Sorbo had suffered during the fourth season, Kurtzman and Orci were placed in charge of the show. They were both aged 24. They moved into films after they were asked to rewrite Michael Bay's The Island. The film earned $162 million at the worldwide box office, on a budget of $126 million, which was a sufficient enough success that they were brought to write Bay's Transformers, which earned $710 million. Though The Island, Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen were not particularly well received by critics, the three films earned a combined $1.7 billion. They wrote the 2009 film Star Trek alongside J. J. Abrams, with whom they had co-created the Fox science-fiction series Fringe. After the pilot, Kurtzman served as consulting producer on the show for the remainder of its run.
In 2011, Forbes magazine described Orci and Kurtzman as "Hollywood's Secret Weapons" as, over the course of the previous six years, their films had grossed a combined total of over $3 billion at the box office. The partnership also wrote People like Us, originally known as Welcome to People, which was Kurtzman's directorial debut.
In April 2014, both Orci and Kurtzman confirmed to Variety that they would no longer work together on film projects; they added that they would still work together—but only on television projects.
By Posted on