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Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo's Fire), TV writer/producer (Saved By The Bell), and producer of award-winning independent films, documentaries and docuseries.
Carl's career in the film industry began when he received the Duke/MCA-Universal Studios Scholar Award based in part on a short story he wrote in college about his infatuation with a waitress he met working as a bellhop in the St. Elmo Hotel. During his ten-week internship, Carl adapted that short story "St. Elmo's Fire" into his first screenplay. A year later, Carl became the assistant to director Joel Schumacher on D.C. Cab with whom he would collaborate with on a new version of St. Elmo's Fire about a group of friends just out of college navigating "the real world," and first jobs, first apartments, first loves. The film launched the careers of Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Andrew McCarthy, but a New York Magazine profile on Emilio Estevez who played Carl's alter-ego Kirbo Kager in the movie, turned into an article on "The Brat Pack" that haunted the cast for decades. St. Elmo's Fire became a sleeper hit in the summer of 1985, produced a #1 single "St. Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion), and, in June 2024, reignited by Andrew McCarthy's Brats documentary, soared to 9th on the streaming charts just behind Dune Two.
Carl went on to write screenplays for Universal, Columbia/Sony, Disney, Fox, Paramount, and Orion as well as television pilots for NBC, Twentieth Century Fox, and Tribune Media. He has written and produced over 150 episodes of television including for NBC's Saved by the Bell/T-NBC franchise and co-created and served as showrunner for 52-episodes of Malibu, CA a co-production between NBC and Tribune Media which was broadcast globally and which has a modest cult following on YouTube.
Feeling uneasy raising their young daughter above the Sunset Strip, Carl and his wife moved to his hometown to teach at the University of Pittsburgh for what he thought would be a one-year Hollywood sabbatical. Instead, Carl's story was featured in Po Bronson's bestseller, What Should I Do With My Life? that led to an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Shortly after Carl told Oprah how happy he was living in the real-life Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Fred Rogers passed away. Carl's dermatologist offered to finance a movie about Pittsburgh and Carl's comeback stories. For My Tale of Two Cities, Carl played football with Steeler great Franco Harris, went cheese shopping with philanthropist Teresa Heinz Kerry, ate breakfast in a diner with Treasury Secretary Paul O' Neill, and sat at the piano with Joanne Rogers in the studio where Fred produced his iconic TV program.
For the film's grand finale, Carl and Mr. McFeely (actor David Newell) sang "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" with hundreds of Pittsburgh expatriates on Broadway and across from the Beverly Hills Hotel. My Tale of Two Cities played 26 cities across North America including being the first shown at The Capitol Hill Visitor's Center. NBC/Newsweek political reporter Howard Fineman, who moderated a panel afterwards, called My Tale of Two Cities "a wry and funny tale about the fulfillment found in coming home... A cross between Woody Allen and Fred Rogers, (Kurlander) reminds us that our cities are the real America in which we can best renew ourselves, our country, and our hope for all humanity."
Carl also produced The Shot Felt Round The World,about the Salk polio vaccine that aired on the BBC as The Polio Story: The Vaccine That Changed The World and on The Smithsonian Channel as A Shot To Save The World winning the CINE Golden Eagle Award for best science program. The film found new relevance during the pandemic and, after an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning with Jonas Salk Chair Dr. Paul Duprex, Carl directed Chasing COVID about Pitt's efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Carl met transplant pioneer Dr. Tom Starzl during the making of My Tale of Two Cities and produced the documentary Burden of Genius about how Dr. Starzl overcome seemingly impossible obstacles, to turn once experimental liver transplants into routine operations that has saved countless lives. Burden of Genius has won two "Best Documentary" prizes at film festivals, continues to screen globally at the leading medical centers, and has inspired audience members to become organ donors. Partnering with Project Greenlight producer Chris Moore and actor Zachary Quinto, Carl served as co-executive producer of the 10-part Starz docuseries The Chair which following two directors different movies with the same script. The series won the TV Critics Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming.
Kurlander appeared in one of the first reality television shows, 3000 Miles, 21 Days, and 10 Cents, a Fox program where three teams worked their way across the country starting with only a dime. The show was hosted by Bruce Jenner and Carl was paired with his mother actress Jeanne Wechsler where after cleaning toilets in Utah and painting a white picket fence in Hannibal, Missouri, they made it to New York without the dollar to pay the bridge toll into Manhattan. Elsewhere on screen, Carl had a cameo in the bar during St. Elmo's Fire, played a bellhop on NBC's Hang Time, and co-starred in the independent comedy Youngstown Shakedown as a hapless filmmaker trying to help his hometown.
Carl has a produced numerous independent films, some involving past students including Jon Hill's feature, Above The Clouds, in which Carl played the protagonist's dying father, Thanks To Her, written in Carl's screenwriting class about a young woman's struggle with being Bi-Ace, had over 1.5 million views on YouTube as a short which led to it being produced as a feature. Carl produced The Rehabilitation of the Hill set in Pittsburgh's historic Hill District, the setting of August Wilson's plays, as a community teaching film. That was a co-venture between the University of Pittsburgh and the Steeltown Entertainment Project, a non-profit that Carl co-founded with Ellen Weiss Kander. In the fifteen years of its existence, Steeltown helped Pittsburgh become a player in the entertainment industry and pioneered innovative "youth and media" programs including the Steeltown Film Academy which continues at WQED, the world's first community -supported television station. Having met George Romero as part of the Steeltown, Carl presented George with the Elly Pioneer Award shortly before he passed away, and is on the advisory board of The George A. Romero Foundation.
Carl co-authored The F Word: How To Survive Your Family with his friend comedian Louie Anderson and has written numerous pieces published in The L.A Times, Time Magazine, Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Scientific American, and Deadline. He has appeared as a guest on CBS' Sunday Morning, NPR, PBS, and numerous other TV and radio shows and podcasts.
Carl continues to teach at the University of Pittsburgh where he is the director of the Pitt in LA program. He is working on several new documentaries and writing a pilot loosely-inspired by his grandfather Jack Cohen, a pioneer in the jukebox industry. Today he lives several blocks from that waitress who inspired his first short story "St. Elmo's Fire" who remains one of his closest friends.
