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Jamie Ruddy |
Director · Writer · Producer |
| Jamie Ruddy moved from New York to Los Angeles to direct films shortly after her first script, Body Art, a dark New York thriller, caught the attention of Universal Studios. Instead of selling Body Art as a spec script, she attached Ken Kokin, producer of The Usual Suspects and Sundance-winners Captain Abu Raed and Public Access, to produce. Almost immediately thereafter, she sold a pitch based on the story of the infamous Hungarian countess Erzebet Bathory to Casey Silver and Universal Studios. The Countess, a period drama with horror elements, landed her in the WGA and gave her immense experience in the world of "for hire". |
| After pitching for countless horror movie remakes, Jamie chose instead to scribe an original and attach herself to direct. The Quarry has attracted multiple companies and investors. Jamie learned a lot about film financing and what types of projects were easiest for a young director - lower budget projects than she usually penned. She asked her longtime friend, Laura Valdivia, a talented stand up comic, to collaborate on Is It Just Me?. The slice of life dramedy is both a character piece and a visual film that will bring Jamie back to her roots in directing the actor. |
| In high school, Jamie was accepted into the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York for acting. A few years later she was the sole recipient of The Outstanding Achievement in Screenwriting at NYU's film program where she also wrote and directed two award-winning shorts, Bored to Pieces and The Grave Keeper, and penned a third award winner, Genesis and Catastrophe. |
| Jamie recently completed a new screenplay, China: Kingdom at the Center of the World, an action adventure martial arts piece set in Shanghai in 1857 that places the audience in a fantasy world built from the ground up a la Lord of the Rings. She also just finished a second screenplay with Laura Valdivia, The Deserted, a low budget horror film that she is also tied to direct. Jamie is currently working on a feature script; a period piece based on the true story of her great uncle, David "Quincy" Liberman (1901-1952), a Jewish gangster who gave away his illicit earnings to the African American community of Newark. It is set in the same world as her new short film, Weequahic. |
Awards include:
Bored to Pieces won NYU's Color Sync Film Festival and The Shots in the Dark Thriller Festival in Nottingham, England. It earned critical acclaim at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of the best international independent horror shorts. |
| The Grave Keeper won acting and producing awards at NYU and received grants from the Warner Brothers Film Production Award and the Thomas William Gidro-Frank Production Award. |
| Genesis and Catastrophe won the Austin Film Festival. |
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