Black Box Studios Presents Screenwriter and Director Paul Schrader at Debonair Music Hall in Teaneck

Tickets are now on sale for AN EVENING WITH PAUL SCHRADER, presented by Black Box PAC on Sunday, March 17th, 2024 at Debonair Music Hall, 1409 Queen Anne Road in Teaneck, NJ 07666.  General admission seats are $40, and $30 for students with valid college ID, at www.blackboxpac.com.  Doors open at 6:30 at Debonair, which offers a cash bar/restaurant and is adjacent to free street and municipal lot parking. The venue offers accessible ground floor entry, and any remaining seats are $50 on the day of the event.

Paul Schrader is an American screenwriter, film director, and film critic. He first became widely known for writing the screenplay of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). He later continued his collaboration with Scorsese, writing or co-writing Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader has also directed over 25 films, including Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), American Gigolo (1980), Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), and First Reformed (2017). Schrader’s work frequently depicts troubled men struggling through an existential crisis that is then punctuated by a violent, cathartic event.

Raised in a strict Calvinist family, Schrader attended Calvin College before electing to pursue film studies at UCLA on the encouragement of film critic Pauline Kael. He then worked as a film scholar and critic, publishing the book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972) before making the transition to screenwriting in 1974. The success of Taxi Driver in 1976 brought greater attention to his work, and Schrader began directing his own films beginning with Blue Collar (co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader). His three most recent films have been described by Schrader as a loose trilogy: First Reformed (2017), The Card Counter (2021), and Master Gardener (2022). His upcoming film Oh, Canada reunites him with American Gigolo star Richard Gere.