Max Adams
Director

Born in California to a crazy Marine and a Brooklyn beauty queen, I grew up in New York City, but moved to Florida in time for high school. As a child, I spent most of my time reading comic books and watching films. In junior high school, movies quickly evolved from my babysitters to my instructors. I learned self-sacrifice from watching Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties. Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, and John Wayne taught me to be tough. Paul Newman taught me that it's okay to have nothing, because "sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand." And so my education continued until I graduated from high school.

I needed to live a little before I attempted to make my films. So I enlisted in the Army to gain some life experience and to save up money for college. After a few years as an Army Ranger, the United States Military Academy at West Point offered me admission. And although I knew it would delay my original goal of becoming a filmmaker, I also realized that this was an opportunity I could not pass up. As a student at West Point, I wrote short films, theatrical plays, and satires for journals. Although many thought I was funny--the administration did not--and I spent months in confinement and on punishment tours, giving me ample time to contemplate my distant future. Eventually, I graduated and found myself on the fast train to the Middle East.

Upon returning from Iraq, I managed to get some articles, short stories, interviews, and photographs published (mostly in motorcycle magazines). I also finished a few feature-length screenplays. One script, "Shroud in Darkness," placed as a Finalist in both the 7th Annual Scriptapalooza Screenwriting Competition and the 5th Annual Filmmakers International Screenwriting Awards Contest, and as a Semifinalist in the 1st Annual Writers on the Storm Screenplay Competition