“one of the finest hollywood historians of our time.”
-Leonard maltin, maltin on movies
“One of the great chroniclers of Hollywood lore” (Janet Maslin, New York Times), Sam Wasson was born in Los Angeles.
He studied Film at Wesleyan University and at the USC School of Cinematic Arts before publishing his first book, A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards, “the critical resurrection of Blake Edwards" (Andrew Sarris). The subsequent publication of Paul on Mazursky, Wasson’s book of conversations with the legendary writer-director of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, occasioned Quentin Tarantino to declare Mazursky "one of the great writer-directors of cinema.”
Published in 2010, Wasson's Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman became a New York and Los Angeles Times Best Seller and a New York Times and Publishers' Weekly best book of the year. Winner of the Cinémathèque française’s Meilleur livre étranger sur le cinéma, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. has been translated into over a dozen languages and was named by Entertainment Weekly one of the best pop-culture books of all time.
Wasson’s award-winning biography Fosse, “one of the most eloquent showbiz accounts in years” (Chicago Tribune) appeared on over a half-dozen best books of the year lists, was a finalist for the Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing, and the basis for the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning series, Fosse/Verdon, directed by Thomas Kail and produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
In 2017, Wasson published Improv Nation: How We Made A Great American Art. Called "one of the most important stories in American popular culture" (New York Times), the book was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s George Freedley Memorial Award. The internationally acclaimed New York Times Best Seller, Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood won him a second Meilleur livre étranger sur le cinéma from the Cinémathèque française and would appear on both Esquire’s and the Hollywood Reporter’s lists of the best film books of all time. “Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film,” Janet Maslin wrote, “is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie. It’s about the glorious lost Hollywood in which that 1974 movie was born.”
In 2020, Wasson and producer Brandon Millan founded Felix Farmer Press to publish necessary books on the art, business, culture and history of the Hollywood film. “Wasson and Millan,” wrote the Los Angeles Review of Books, “are taking upon themselves the responsibility of keeping great books about Hollywood in circulation.” Their first book, Bruce Wagner’s The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories Bret Easton Ellis hailed one of the best novels of the year. Felix’s Farmer’s second book, Richard Schickel’s landmark The Famous Mr. Fairbanks: A Story of Celebrity, was published in 2022. “Schickel’s hypothesis still holds true today,” Leonard Maltin wrote, “more than one hundred years after Fairbanks burst onto movie screens around the world.”
Co-authored with renowned film scholar and educator Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History was called “Hollywood’s ultimate oral history” (The New Yorker), “unparalleled in its scope and vision” (Entertainment Weekly), “a gold mine” (Kirkus), “majestic” (Los Angeles Review of Books), “monumental” (Le Figaro), “genuinely unputdownable” (The Spectator), “as close to a comprehensive Who’s Who of American film as we’re likely to see, and as close to a definitive history of American cinema as we’ve seen so far” (Booklist), “arguably the most comprehensive, gossipy and insightful oral history of Tinseltown ever made” (Globe and Mail) and in 2023 was named one of the hundred best film books of all time (The Hollywood Reporter).
In addition to his work as an author and publisher, Wasson is a writer at large for Air Mail. He has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker, and has won three Los Angeles Press Club Journalism Awards. He’s served as a consultant for The National Comedy Center in New York and The Film Society of Lincoln Center and was a Visiting Professor of Film at Wesleyan University and Emerson College. In 2013, In conjunction with the Paley Center for Media, Wasson discovered "Seasons of Youth," a lost 1961 Fosse television special, now publicly available at the Paley Center's museums in New York and Los Angeles.
The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, Wasson’s biography of Coppola’s real-life dream studio, American Zoetrope, was published in 2023.
Wasson lives in Los Angeles.