Writer/Director ALAN SHAPIRO has been making movies since he was 12, influenced by the early films of Chaplin and classics such as The Bicycle Thief and The Red Balloon. At New York University Film School, his first student production, briefly...Brian won much acclaim, including Best Student Film at Cannes. It was shown at the Museum of Modern Art and on PBS, and helped him raise enough grant money to finance a second short, Meeting Halfway. Warner Brothers provided the balance of a college scholarship and summertime apprenticeship under Ken Russell on Altered States, and his career was off and running. In 1984, he wrote and directed the Cable Ace Award -winning telefilm Tiger Town for Disney starring Roy Scheider; produced the telefilm The Blue Yonder starring Peter Coyote and Art Carney; and penned the teleplay for NBC's Philly Boy, starring Jason Bateman. In 1986, Shapiro wrote, produced and directed the Disney Sunday Movie The Christmas Star with Edward Asner and Fred Gwynne, and soon thereafter caught the eye of Francis Coppola, who exec-produced his writing and directing efforts on Fox's two-hour pilot, The Outsiders. In 1993, Shapiro wrote & directed the Morgan Creek/Warner Bros. feature The Crush, which marked the feature film debut of his young discovery, Alicia Silverstone. In 1996, he wrote and directed the feature film Flipper for Universal Pictures with Paul Hogan and Elijah Wood.

Alan Shapiro, Morgan Creek Prods. and Warner Bros, were sued by a Los Angeles family alleging that the film The Crush (1993) libeled their daughter. Plaintiffs noted, among other things, that the film's central female character, a psychotic killer with an unrequited crush on the man who rents her parents' guest house, shared their daughter's first name Darian (which was changed to Adrian in later film releases). Shapiro, who promoted the film as inspired by a real-life experience, lived in the plaintiffs' guest house in 1982. The suit was eventually settled.