A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
After writing the 1996 film Sunchaser, the 1998 film The Mighty and the 2001 film K-PAX, Leavitt was hired by Warner Bros. in February 2004 to rewrite an early draft of the film Blood Diamond, then titled Okavango. The story had been stuck in "development hell" at the studio for years before producers Paula Weinstein and Gillian Gorfil finally decided on the story of an African farmer caught up in the conflict between an American smuggler and the local diamond mining organization. Leavitt researched the diamond industry to great lengths before he began writing the screenplay, explaining that he has "always been a stickler for immersing [himself] in research". He wrote the film with the assumption that it would offend the diamond industry, particularly De Beers, and so made sure to portray the industry truthfully, aware that he could potentially be sued by De Beers and other powerful mining corporations. Paula Weinstein was impressed by Leavitt's Blood Diamond draft, but hired writers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz to rewrite the script again; by the time he had completed the script, Zwick had become so interested in the story that he agreed to direct the film as well. Leavitt was signed by Warner Bros. in October 2006 to adapt Vanity Fair editor Doug Stumpf's novel Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy, which the studio had acquired the rights to in mid-2005. He has also since rewritten Scott Williams' original draft of The Express, a biographical film about American football player Ernie Davis. He wrote the screenplay for In the Heart of the Sea, for Intermedia and Spring Creek, and has written Animal Kingdom on spec. He re-wrote the 2014 film Seventh Son and the 2016 film Warcraft.
Screenplay:
1998 The Mighty
2001 K-PAX
2006 Blood Diamond
2014 Seventh Son
2015 In the Heart of the Sea
2016 Warcraft
2021 Those Who Wish Me Dead
Story:
1998 The Mighty
2001 K-PAX
2006 Blood Diamond
2014 Seventh Son
2015 In the Heart of the Sea
2016 Warcraft
2021 Those Who Wish Me Dead
Writer:
1996 The Sunchaser
1998 The Mighty
2001 K-PAX
2001 The Jennie Project
2006 Blood Diamond
2008 The Express
2014 Seventh Son
2015 In the Heart of the Sea
2016 Warcraft
2021 Those Who Wish Me Dead
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.