WHIT STILLMAN (b. John Whitney Stillman, 1952) Well-bred independent filmmaker and former journalist whose low-budget debut, Metropolitan (1990), chronicled the coming-of-age rituals of Manhattan debutantes and their tuxedoed escorts. The droll, talky movie showed the flip side of America's social mobility--what cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich called The Fear of Falling (1989). The movie (sold under the tag line "Doomed. Bourgeois. In Love.") restored some Salingeresque literary cachet to preppydom (then under the shadow of the syntax-challenged George Bush and '80s excess)--and also proposed a new acronym UHB (urban haute bourgeoisie, pronounced "ub") to replace WASP, a term that was actually coined by Stillman's godfather, historian Digby Balzell. Married to a Spanish reporter, Stillman mined more autobiographical material for his second, similarly toned movie, Barcelona (1994). His latest movie is an elegy to New York's Studio 54, titled The Last Days of Disco (1998)

Ann de Ameller Stillman
Born: 24 Mar 1986
Place: New York, NY
Lived: 1999
Place: New York, NY