Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes (born January 2, 1961) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.

His films span four decades with themes examining the personalities of well-known musicians, dysfunctional and dystopian societies, and blurred gender roles.

Haynes was born January 2, 1961, in Los Angeles, and grew up in the city's Encino neighborhood.

His father, Allen E. Haynes, was a cosmetics importer, and his mother, Sherry Lynne (née Semler), studied acting.

Haynes is Jewish on his mother's side.

His younger sister is Gwynneth Haynes of the band Sophe Lux.

Haynes developed an interest in film at an early age, and produced a short film, The Suicide (1978), while still in high school.

He studied art and semiotics at Brown University, where he directed his first short film Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (1985), inspired by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (a personality Haynes would later reference in his film I'm Not There).

At Brown, he met Christine Vachon, who would go on to produce all of his feature films.

After graduating from Brown, Haynes moved to New York City and became involved in the independent film scene, launching Apparatus Productions, a non-profit organization for the support of independent film.

According to Cinematic/Sexual: An Interview with Todd Haynes, in response to whether his academic background affected his film-making practice, Haynes stated that his high school teacher taught him a valuable lesson: "Reality can't be a criterion for judging the success or failure of a film, or its effect on you. It was a simple, but eye-opening, way of approaching film."

Haynes first gained public attention with his controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), which chronicles singer Karen Carpenter's life and death using Barbie dolls as actors.

Superstar became a cult classic.

In 1987, while an MFA student at Bard College, Haynes made a short, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which chronicles the life of American pop singer Karen Carpenter, using Barbie dolls as actors.

The film presents Carpenter's struggle with anorexia and bulimia, featuring several close-ups of Ipecac (the nonprescription drug Carpenter was reputed to have used to make herself vomit during her illness).

Carpenter's chronic weight loss was portrayed by using a "Karen" Barbie doll with the face and body whittled away with a knife, leaving the doll looking skeletonized.

Superstar featured extensive use of Carpenter songs, showcasing Haynes's love of popular music (which would be a recurring feature of later films).

Haynes failed to obtain proper licensing to use the music, prompting a lawsuit from Karen's brother Richard for copyright infringement.

Carpenter was reportedly also offended by Haynes's unflattering portrayal of him as a narcissistic bully, along with several broadly dropped suggestions that he was gay and in the closet.

Carpenter won his lawsuit, and Superstar was removed from public distribution; to date, it may not be viewed publicly.

Bootlegged versions of the film are still circulated, and the film is sporadically made available on YouTube.

Safe was later voted the best film of the 1990s by The Village Voice Film Poll.

His feature directorial debut, Poison (1991), a provocative exploration of AIDS-era queer perceptions and subversions, established him as a figure of a new transgressive cinema.

Poison won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize and is regarded as a seminal work of New Queer Cinema.

Haynes's 1991 feature film debut, Poison, garnered him further acclaim and controversy.

Drawing on the writings of gay writer Jean Genet, the film is a triptych of queer-themed narratives, each adopting a different cinematic genre: vox-pop documentary ("Hero"), 50s sci-fi horror ("Horror") and gay prisoner romantic drama ("Homo").

The film explores traditional perceptions of homosexuality as an unnatural and deviant force, and presents Genet's vision of sado-masochistic gay relations as a subversion of heterosexual norms, culminating with a marriage ceremony between two gay male convicts.

Poison marked Haynes's first collaboration with his longtime producer Christine Vachon.

Poison was partially funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), "at a time when the agency was under attack from conservative groups for using public funds to support sexually explicit works".

This, along with the film's sexual themes, was a source of controversy.

The film subsequently became the center of a public attack by Reverend Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, who criticized the NEA for funding Poison and other works by gay and lesbian artists and filmmakers.

Wildmon, who had not viewed the film before making his comments publicly, condemned the film's "explicit porno scenes of homosexuals involved in anal sex", despite no such scenes appearing in the film.

Poison went on to win the 1991 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize, establishing Haynes as an emerging talent and the voice of a new transgressive generation.

The film writer B. Ruby Rich cited Poison as one of the defining films of the emerging New Queer Cinema movement, with its focus on maverick sexuality as an anti-establishment social force.

Haynes received further acclaim for his second feature film, Safe (1995), a symbolic portrait of a housewife who develops multiple chemical sensitivity.

His next feature, Velvet Goldmine (1998), is a tribute to the 1970s glam rock era.

The film received the Special Jury Prize for Best Artistic Contribution at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

Haynes gained acclaim and a measure of mainstream success with Far from Heaven (2002), receiving his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

He continued to direct critically lauded films such as I'm Not There (2007), Carol (2015), Wonderstruck (2017), Dark Waters (2019), and May December (2023), as well as the documentary film The Velvet Underground (2021).

Haynes also directed and co-wrote the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011), for which he received three Primetime Emmy Award nominations.