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Mr. Michael S. Phillips
Adjunct Faculty
- Education
- New York University, Juris Doctor in Law
- Biography
- Michael Phillips grew up in Brooklyn, where, “they had double
features with about ten cartoons for 25 cents. I used to go every week…
When I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still, I stayed in the theater all day and watched it three times in a row.”
Phillips’ insatiable appetite for film drove him to become a producer. For the last 40 years, he has produced over 18 films, which collectively have garnered twenty-three Academy Award nominations and one Best Picture win for his second produced film, The Sting. With his late ex-wife, Phillips went on to produce Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and Steven Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a happy return to the genre that first inspired him as a child).
“It’s an odd thing to win a [Best Picture] Oscar at 30… It was great in that it liberated me from the illusion that an Oscar would change my life. But it also taught me some wrong lessons. This business is not easy and you're lucky every time you get to make a film…. I feel like I've gotten everything I've ever wished for.”