Niederhoffer, Galt

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Niederhoffer, Galt

PERSONAL: Daughter of Victor (a national hardball-squash champion) and Gail (Herman) Niederhoffer; partner of Jim Strouse (a writer); children. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 2003.

ADDRESSES: Office—Plum Pictures, 141 5th Ave., Ste. 8N, New York, NY 10010; fax: 212-529-5824.

CAREER: Screenwriter and producer. Giv'en Films, cofounder, 1996–; Plum Pictures, cofounder; producer of films, including Hurricane Streets, 1997, Myth America (also director), 1998, Restaurant, 1998, Jump, 1999, Blue Ridge Fall, 1999, Six Chicks in a Kitchen (also director), 2000, The Intern, 2000, Prozac Nation, 2001, Get Well Soon, 2001, Return to Rajapur, 2005, Lonesome Jim, 2005, and The Baxter, 2005.

WRITINGS:

(Adaptor of film version) Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, Miramax (New York, NY), 2001.

A Taxonomy of Barnacles (novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Also writer for screenplay Myth America, 1998.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel.

SIDELIGHTS: Galt Niederhoffer is a film producer who started her own company in her early twenties. Plum Pictures, which she founded with Celine Rattray and Daniela Taplin, produces two to three films each year. Before founding Plum Pictures, Niederhoffer produced numerous films, including Six Chicks in a Kitchen, Prozac Nation, and Hurricane Streets, the last of which was written and directed by Morgan Freeman. Although having written screenplays and adapting novels for film, Niederhoffer only published her first novel in 2006, a romantic comedy called A Taxonomy of Barnacles. The book, paying homage to Charles Darwin with references to his earlier studies, features the Barnacle family: six daughters aged between ten and twenty-six under the care of their father, the "Pantyhose Prince" of New York. On Passover, he announces a weeklong challenge to his daughters, saying that the one who succeeds in immortalizing the Barnacle name will be the sole inheritor of the family fortune. This sets off a fierce competition among the girls, resulting in an upper-class Darwinian survival of the fittest.

Maria Speidel, reviewing the book in People, found the story to be an "engrossing tale of family drama and true love." A Kirkus Reviews critic was not as convinced, however. While conceding that it was a "confident and witty debut," the critic felt Niederhof-fer's "prose sometimes seems a bit too enamored of its own cleverness." Karen Valby's review in Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, concluded that Niederhoffer's "winning screwball comedy" was "droll and sophisticated."