American author and screenwriter (born 1965)
Scott Bechtel Smith (born July 13, 1965) is an American author and screenwriter. He has written two novels, A Simple Plan (1993) and The Ruins (2006). Both were adapted into films - A Simple Plan (1998) and The Ruins (2008), respectively - based on Smith's own screenplays. He also wrote the screenplays for the films Siberia (2018) and The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019). His screenplay for A Simple Plan earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Early life and education
Smith was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1965 and moved to Toledo, Ohio as a child.[1] He is the son of Linda and Doug Smith. He told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reviewer Regis Behe that, as a child, he read his father's "castoffs," the novels of Clive Cussler and Jack Higgins. "Growing up, I also read Ray Bradbury and Stephen King," he said. "I just had a sense of how to create these places that aren't real world places, but just with this provisional attachment to the real world. It is very much of your imagination, and I felt very much I could do that."[2] After graduating from Dartmouth College and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing, he took up writing full-time.
Career
He has published two novels, A Simple Plan and The Ruins. His screen adaptation of A Simple Plan earned him an Academy Award nomination. The screenplay won a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award and a National Board of Review Award.
His second novel, The Ruins, was also adapted into a film, released on April 4, 2008. Stephen King called it "the best horror novel of the new century." King had also called A Simple Plan "simply the best suspense novel of the year."
In 2016 it was announced that TNT had greenlit a pilot for Civil, a new TV series created by Smith about a second American Civil War following a hotly contested presidential election.[3] A TV series adaptation of William Gibson's The Peripheral was commissioned in 2018 by Amazon,[4] with Smith as writer.[5] Smith created the series, and served as executive producer and showrunner. Vincenzo Natali directed the show's pilot.[6]
