James L. Brooks

James Lawrence Brooks is an American director producer and screenwriter Growing up in North Bergen New Jersey Brooks endured a fractured family life and passed the time by reading and writing After dropping out of New York University he got a job as an usher at CBS going on to write for the CBS News broadcasts He moved to Los Angeles in 1965 to work on David L Wolpers documentaries After being laid off he met producer Allan Burns who secured him a job as a writer on the series My Mother the Car Brooks wrote for several shows before being hired as a story editor on My Friend Tony and later creating the series Room 222 Grant Tinker hired Brooks and Burns at MTM Productions to create The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970 The show one of the first to feature an independent working woman as its lead character was critically acclaimed and won Brooks several Primetime Emmy Awards Brooks and Burns then created two successful spinoffs from Mary Tyler Moore in the shape of Rhoda a comedy and Lou Grant a drama Brooks left MTM Productions in 1978 to cocreate the sitcom Taxi which despite winning multiple Emmys suffered from low ratings and was canceled twice He moved into feature film work when he wrote and coproduced the 1979 film Starting Over His next project was the critically acclaimed film Terms of Endearment which he produced directed and wrote winning an Academy Award for all three positions Basing his next film Broadcast News on his journalistic experiences the film earned him a further two Academy Award nominations Although his 1994 work Ill Do Anything was hampered by negative press attention due to the cutting of all of its recorded musical numbers As Good as It Gets cowritten with Mark Andrus earned further praise It was seven years until his next film which came in the shape of 2004s Spanglish His sixth film How Do You Know was released in 2010 Brooks also produced and mentored Cameron Crowe on Say Anything 1989 and Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson on Bottle Rocket 1996 Although he did not intend to do so Brooks returned to television in 1987 as the producer of The Tracey Ullman Show He hired cartoonist Matt Groening to create a series of shorts for the show which eventually led to The Simpsons in 1989 The Simpsons won numerous awards and is still running after 20 years Brooks also coproduced and cowrote the 2007 film adaptation of the show The Simpsons Movie In total Brooks has received 47 Emmy nominations winning 20 of them