As reported by Deadline, filmmaker Stacy Title—who earned an Oscar nomination for directing the 1993 short film Down On The Waterfront—has died. Title was diagnosed with ALS three years ago, shortly after being involved in a car accident that doctors suggested had somehow triggered the neurodegenerative disease. Title was 56.
Title’s first break into the movie industry was her Oscar-nominated short Down On The Waterfront, which starred Jason Alexander, Ed Asner, and Title’s husband Jonathan Penner—a Survivor contestant and actor who collaborated with Title on a number of her films. She also directed the black comedy The Last Supper in 1995 (a movie about liberal grad students plotting to murder far-right extremists with a cast that include Cameron Diaz, Courtney B. Vance, Bill Paxton, and Ron Perlman) and 1999's Let The Devil Wear Black, a modern-retelling of Hamlet. Title and Penner also developed an attempted Long Ranger reboot for The WB with Chad Michael Murray that wasn’t picked up as a full series.
Title also directed the 2006's horror anthology Snoop Dogg’s Hood Of Horror and 2017's The Bye Bye Man—a film that dramatically over-performed at the box office, despite receiving largely negative reviews. That same year, Title directed her first TV episode (on Hulu’s Freakish), but her accident occurred shortly after that and the disease progressed very rapidly. Within months, she couldn’t talk or swallow, but Deadline says she remained determined to make one final film. That project, titled Walking Time Bomb and starring Jason Alexander, Cary Elwes, and Bob Odenkirk, didn’t end up happening, but Deadline notes that Title still spend her last few years directing ALS PSAs and working as an advocate for people in Hollywood with disabilities.