Kevin Williamson

Kevin Meade Williamson (born March 14, 1965) is an American screenwriter, director, and producer.

Though he landed a part on the soap opera Another World in 1990, he moved to Los Angeles the following year, where he had small parts on the TV series In Living Color, in the films Dirty Money and Hot Ticket, and in music videos.

Inspired by the March 9, 1994, episode of the news magazine Turning Point on Danny Rolling, a serial killer in Gainesville, Florida, who preyed on college students, Williamson wrote a horror movie script, originally titled Scary Movie.

Its characters had seen many classic horror movies (e.g. Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street) and knew all the clichés.

While taking classes on screenwriting at UCLA he wrote his first script, Killing Mrs. Tingle (later retitled Teaching Mrs. Tingle) which was bought by a production company in 1995 and put on the shelf.

Miramax bought the script for $400,000 for their new Dimension Films label in the spring of 1995.

In December 1995, the show was pitched to the Fox Network, where Stupin had been an executive, but it was rejected.

He is known for developing and writing the screenplay for the slasher film Scream (1996)—which launched the Scream franchise—along with those for Scream 2 (1997) and Scream 4 (2011).

Directed by Wes Craven, the film was renamed Scream, and released in The United States on December 20, 1996.

It became a commercial blockbuster and critical success—ultimately drawing $173 million in ticket sales worldwide.

Kevin Williamson earned the Saturn Award for Best Writing in 1996 for his work on Scream.

Then in 1996, Stupin and Williamson went to, and struck a deal with, The WB.

Williamson said, "I pitched it as Some Kind of Wonderful, meets Pump Up the Volume, meets James at 15, meets My So-Called Life, meets Little House on the Prairie."

Williamson also wrote the screenplays for the films I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), The Faculty (1998), Cursed (2005), and Sick (2022).

In 1997, Dimension Films released Scream 2, also written by Williamson.

In 1997, Williamson penned his next film, I Know What You Did Last Summer, based on a 1973 novel of the same name by Lois Duncan.

Centered on four high school friends who accidentally run over a man and dump his body in an attempt to go on with their lives, the plot focuses on the four friends a year after the accident when they become the victims of a serial stalker.

Despite receiving negative reviews from critics, the film helped launch the careers of actors Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe, going on to spawn two sequels, neither of which Williamson was involved with.

Williamson gave up the job of writing the full script for Scream 3 in order to direct his first penned script, originally titled Killing Mrs. Tingle, a comedy thriller, inspired by an event he experienced in high school.

Teaching Mrs. Tingle (as it was renamed after the Columbine High School massacre) followed a group of students getting even with their vindictive teacher.

He is also known for creating the WB teen drama series Dawson's Creek (1998–2003), the CW supernatural drama series The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017), the Fox crime thriller series The Following (2013–2015) and the CBS All Access thriller series Tell Me a Story (2018–2020).

Dawson's Creek premiered on The WB on January 20, 1998, and was an immediate hit that helped launch the newly created television network.

He made his directorial debut with the black comedy film Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), which remains his only directorial work to date.

Williamson was born in New Bern, North Carolina, the younger son of Faye and Wade Williamson, a fisherman.

He spent his early years in Aransas Pass, Texas, near Corpus Christi, Texas.

Williamson's family returned to North Carolina for his high school years.

He then attended East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where he received a BFA in Theatre Arts.

He told Entertainment Weekly interviewer Melissa Maerz, "When I was growing up, my mom and dad took me to the Poe museum in Richmond, Virginia. It was a little house downtown, and The Raven was written on the walls. You had to move from room to room to read the whole story. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world."

After graduation, he moved to New York City to pursue an acting career.

In 1999, Williamson left the show to focus on other endeavors, among them ABC's Wasteland, which failed to attract a sizable audience and was canceled after its thirteen-episode first season.

In 1999, Williamson created Wasteland, a late-night, sexualized version of his earlier show, Dawson's Creek.

It aired for just 3 episodes in October 1999 before being canceled.

It, too, was a critical and box office hit and paved the way for two more installments, Scream 3 (2000) and Scream 4 (2011).

The latter was written by Williamson.

Paul Stupin, an executive at Columbia TriStar Television, read Scream after the bidding war for the script and was convinced Williamson was just the man to create a television series for his company.

The result was Dawson's Creek, a semi-autobiographical tale set in a small coastal community not unlike Oriental.

Williamson was the model for the title character, Dawson Leery, a hopeless romantic who is obsessed with movies—especially those of Steven Spielberg.

Joey Potter, the platonic girl-next-door, was based on a real life friend of Williamson's when he was young.

The remaining 10 episodes were aired on Showtime's ShowNext channel in 2001.

He later returned to Dawson's Creek to pen the two-part series finale in 2003.