ALUMNI WEEKEND 2019
LIFETIME ALUMNI ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN FILMMAKING
J. Whitney Stillman ’69 Whit arrived at Millbrook in September of 1966 from the Potomac School in McLean, VA. His three busy and creative years here became the rock-solid foundation upon which to build his passion and his future professional career. Whit was a mainstay on the honor roll, and he rose to become editor of The Silo. He joined the Millbrook Players, which was the school’s theatrical group at that time. He also honed his leadership skills, serving as a prefect and a member of the Dean’s Committee. His love of movies may well have begun in The Barn, where he and his schoolmates gathered for the Saturday night movie on a weekly basis. Whit went on to Harvard University, where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1973 and then began work as an editorial assistant at Doubleday before moving to the conservative magazine The American Spectator as a junior editor. While on assignment in Spain in 1980, Whit was introduced to some film producers from Madrid, and he worked for the next few years as a sales agent. Passionately pursuing his dream of becoming a screenwriter-director, Whit had to become a fundraiser in order to finance his movies. From 1984 to 1988, Whit wrote the screenplay for Metropolitan, and he is probably best known for this film, which debuted in 1990. He financed Metropolitan by selling
insider rights to his New York City apartment and collecting contributions from friends and relatives. The film earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He went on to direct five other films including Barcelona in 1994 and The Last Days of Disco in 1998, and he published a novel, Damsels in Distress, in 2011 that was based on this film. The Cosmopolitans came out in 2014, and Love and Friendship in 2016. Whit once commented, “Filmmaking is a series of mistakes and disasters and trying to recover from them.” He orchestrated those recoveries beautifully, and we are very proud and honored to present him with an Alumni Achievement Award in Filmmaking.
ALUMNI ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN BROADCAST JOURNALISM
Serena Altschul ’89 Serena is a native New Yorker and arrived at Millbrook in September of 1986. Following her Millbrook graduation, Serena attended Scripps College in Claremont, CA, where she studied English literature and acted as associate producer of The Last Party, a political documentary. So began her interest in television and broadcast news. Serena began her professional career first as an anchor/reporter at Channel One News and then as a New York-based correspondent for CNN. While at CNN, Serena also served as a reporter and producer for MTV News, which she joined in 1996 as a contributor to the cable network’s “Choose or Lose” political awareness campaign. She covered a wide variety of hard news and popular culture stories for MTV, including profiles of political leaders and music legends. She also created, produced, and hosted an MTV documentary series, Breaking it Down, with hour-long special segments on single topics such as gang violence, homeless teenagers, and the effects of the drug trade. That series ran for four years (1999-2002). She hosted two acclaimed editions of MTV’s True Life series, one on heroin abuse among affluent Dallas teenagers and another on the murder of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay student at the University of Wyoming. In 2001 she contributed to an edition of the CBS News Magazine 48 Hours on the increasing use and abuse of oxycontin, and two years later she was named a CBS News contributing correspondent. Since 2013, she has appeared regularly on CBS Sunday Morning. We are exceptionally proud of all that she has achieved in her career and very pleased to award her with an Alumni Achievement Award for Broadcast Journalism.
ANNUAL REPORT 2018-2019
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