Our Mentors

JAMES V. HART (J.V.) was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and grew up in Ft. Worth Texas on Drive-In Movies and Saturday Matinees. 

 

Over his multi-decade career, Hart has accumulated an impressive list of writing/producing credits including; Hook, directed by Steven Spielberg based on an idea by Hart’s then 6 year old son, Jake, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Muppet Treasure Island, directed by Brian Henson, and Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis.

 

Other writing/producing credits include: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Tuck Everlasting, Jack And The Beanstalk: The Real Story. Sahara, Lara Croft: Tombraider – The Cradle Of Life, August Rush, Epic, and the TV series, Crossbones, which he created with Tom Fontana and Neil Cross.

 

The Hot Zone, the acclaimed series based on Richard Preston’s New Yorker article and his bestselling non-fiction book, was also created by Hart, who also shared writing and story credits on each episode and served as an Executive Producer. The limited series broke ratings records for Nat Geo. Hart collaborated with Preston when writing the original feature screenplay in 1993 while Preston was still writing book published in 1994.

 

Over the years Hart has collaborated with some of the most successful directors, producers, and writers in the media, including bestselling authors -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Carl Sagan, Stan Lee, Dean Koontz, William Joyce, Richard Preston, Natalie Babbit, Clive Cussler,  and course, J.M Barrie, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley.

 

His films have grossed over a billion dollars worldwide and won many awards. He has been nominated for the Humanitas Prize for his work with Carl Sagan on Contact, and the Hugo award for the same, and received many other honors including the Saturn award for his work with the Henson Company and Coppola.

 

The HartChart toolkit, which Hart developed while working with Francis Ford Coppola on Dracula, has become a staple for professional and threshold writers around the world for over 20 years.

 

His renowned story mapping tool app, TheHartChart, and the HartChart toolkit, were launched online and in print at the 2015 Austin Film Festival. This innovative digital application charts characters’ emotional journeys and heartbeats through any narrative and is presented in a visual interactive format rather than words on a page.

 

Hart has conducted workshops and master classes around the world for Sundance, eQuinoxe Europe, New Zealand, Australia, as wall as NYU, Columbia, Pepperdine, SMU, The David Lynch school of Cinema Studies, the AFI, The Austin Film Festival, The Dallas International Film Festival, The Puglia Experience in Italy, and many others.

 

Hart is a co-founder of the Peter Pan Children’s Fund, a non-profit that fosters youth philanthropy supporting Children’s Hospitals, has served on the Meadows School of the Arts board at SMU, is a founding member of the Writer’s Guild Initiative board, and founder of Lionfish University, a non-profit .org dedicated to reef preservation and conservation.

 

As a founding member of the Writer’s Guild Initiative [WGA East] the WGI hosts workshops for Veterans, Care Givers, First Responders, COVID Long Haulers, LGBT groups, Disaster survivors and other groups who seek to find their voice as writers.

 

Hart’s son, Jake Hart, is a frequent collaborator and member of the WGA and daughter Julia Hart is a writer director with several notable credits and is also a member of the WGA and DGA.

 

Hart is currently co-writing “Young Hook” with his son Jake based on his novel, Capt. Hook – The Adventures of a Notorious Youth, for Village Roadshow.

 

“Nobody has a job in this business until a writer types ‘the end’ is Hart’s primary mantra and message to writers everywhere.