Kevin DiNovis studied dramatic craft with Pulitzer Prize winning
Absurdist playwright Edward Albee. His first feature film, Surrender
Dorothy (1998), won multiple awards, including the Grand Jury prize for
Best Feature at the Slamdance, Chicago Underground, and New York
Underground Film Festivals. Hand-picked by critic Roger Ebert as one of
only ten films to inaugurate his Overlooked Film Festival, Surrender
Dorothy is distributed by TLA releasing; the DVD version was praised as
one of the "best releases of 2000" by the Internet Movie Data Base.
Since then, DiNovis has worked as a writer (adapting Mary Higgins
Clark's bestselling thriller Loves Music, Loves to Dance for USA
Networks) while making his second feature, Death & Texas (2004), a
satire about the execution of a beloved American football hero; the
film was produced by Stephen Israel (Swimming With Sharks) and stars
Academy-Award Nominee Charles Durning, Steve Harris, Mary Kay Place and
Billy Ray Cyrus.
Recently DiNovis has teamed with veteran producer and former Paramount
President Frank Yablans on an adaptation of the bestselling non-fiction
book Soul Surfer, the inspiring true story of 13-year-old professional
surfer Bethany Hamilton's struggle to return to the sport after losing
her arm to a shark. Other scripts DiNovis has written for Yablans
include: The Bellringer, an epic biopic about William and Catherine
Booth, the nineteenth-century social reformers who founded the
Salvation Army; and The One-Minute Millionaire, a romantic comedy
loosely based on the eponymous book by self-help guru Mark Victor
Hansen.
In 2009, DiNovis was the first writer selected to inaugurate Marvel
Studio's Writers Program. In addition to adapting two features and one
short subject for the celebrated 'House of Ideas', DiNovis participated
in an uncredited dialogue polish of the script for Thor.
