John Steppling at Galicia Museum   

Throughout November American playwright and film-maker John Steppling will continue his Saturday lecture and film series at Galicia Museum.

Featuring post-World War II noir films, the series examines German Jewish emigre directors and the influence they had on the "golden age" of Hollywood.

Steppling is particularly interested in the way these directors brought Europe's harsh political realities to bear on American film in the 1940. By infusing low-budget genre projects with a certain cynicism, subversiveness, and earnest social realism, emigre directors transformed would be B movies into calssics of American film noir, thereby leaving an indelible stamp on the art and the industry.  

It was a lack of this subversiveness, in concert with an overbearing consumerism, that ultimately drove Steppling away from Hollywood and to Poland, where his lives with his wife in Krakówand teaches at the National Film School in Łódź. Steppling began his career as a playwright in New York and moved to LA when his play "52 Cars" was picked up by a Hollywood agent. For the next twelve years he earned a "surreal" salary working on what he says were depressingly conformist movies.   

While Steppling says he has found a healthier sensibility surrounding art and film in Poland, he still maintains relationshipswith theaters in California, and he is currently working on forthcoming plays for those venues. As a playwright he has been a Rockefeller Fellow, an NEA recipient, and a Pen-West winner. His most recent screenplay was "Animal Factory", directed by Steve Buscemi.