American screenwriter and producer Barry Sandler was BOTD in 1947. Born in Buffalo, New York, he attended film school at the University of California Los Angeles. While a student, he wrote a screenplay for actress Raquel Welch, turning up at her home and pitching it to her. Welch agreed to participate and the film was released as Kansas City Bomber in 1972, launching his Hollywood career. After working on screenplays throughout the 70s, he had success in the 1980s with two pointedly camp adaptations of Agatha Christie murder mysteries, The Mirror Crack’d and Evil Under the Sun. He is best known as the writer and co-producer of the 1981 film Making Love, a melodrama about a married writer who comes out of the closet and has an affair with a male friend. Loathed by 20th Century Fox’s new owner Marvin Davis (who reportedly said “You made a goddamn faggot movie!” after viewing a rough cut), the film was considered so controversial that a content warning was included in the opening credits. A box office flop, the film was praised by gay critics including Vito Russo for sensitively depicting homosexuality, though others criticised it for dodging its controversial theme by focusing on its female lead. Sandler later wrote the screenplay for Ken Russell‘s erotic thriller Crimes of Passion, which received an X rating by American censors, effectively killing its box office prospects. His most recent screenplay, the comedy Knock ‘Em Dead, was produced in 2014 with an all-Black cast. Sandler is the recipient of a GLAAD Media Award and the 2002 Outfest Pioneer Award for Courage and Artistry and spoke about the making of Making Love in Rob Epstein‘s documentary The Celluloid Closet. Sandler teaches screenwriting at the University of Central Florida and is an artistic director for the Outfest film festival in Los Angeles.