Steve Jankowski

Steve Jankowski was born and raised in The Bronx, NY and attended the same high school as actress Anne Bancroft and famed mass murderer Son of Sam. Steve spent most of his adult life hustling a living in the entertainment business, starting out in high school as a ticket taker and usher in a local movie theatre. Right after high school Steve got a job as a painter in NY's famed Beacon Theatre while it was undergoing renovation. It was there he gravitated toward the stage, learning stagecraft and started working Rock concerts. This grew into networking in the New York City music scene of the 1970's where Steve spent the next ten years in the Rock & Roll business. He free-lanced for NY's premier concert promoter Ron Delsener as an assistant stage manager, stagehand, and backstage security person working at all of NYC's major Rock & Roll venues, most notably The Beacon, The Palladium, and the Central Park Summer Concert Series as well as shows at such venues as Carnegie hall, Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, City Center, and the Copa Cabana. During this time Steve also delivered music instruments to all the major New York recording studios and clubs for Studio Instrument Rentals, a NYC rental company, and performed roadie duties at CBGBs, Max's Kansas City, The Roxy, and The Bottom Line to name a few. As a roadie, road manager, and lighting designer Steve traveled all over the US numerous times, by truck, tour bus, and plane, and made 2 tours of Japan with a variety of artists that include Rupert Holmes, Marshall Crenshaw, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In his late twenties Steve decided it might be wise to give up his life of sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll when he started noticing many of his peers over thirty losing their teeth, hair, and some, their life. It was then Steve returned to school and attended Hunter College in NYC to study film production. While there he was introduced to Robert Redford's Sundance Institute by one of his professors and worked as a crew member, and later production manager, for the famed Sundance June Filmmakers' Lab. Here Steve met his screenwriting guru Frank Daniel and eventually moved to Los Angeles to attended graduate school and earn his MFA at USC, where Daniel was his mentor as well as the Dean of the Cinema School. It was at Sundance where Steve also met his filmmaking partner, co-writer, director, and long time inspiration, John Shepphird who has since become an award winning mystery author in his own right. Steve has written (and/or co-written with John Shepphird) over thirty screenplays. Nine of these screenplays were produced as low-budget feature/TV films. Steve acted as Producer on four of them, and Second Unit Director on another four. Steve also worked as a production sound mixer for TV and film and was actually co-nominated for a British Academy Award for a television documentary on Andre Previn, which he has still never seen. At the age of 40, Steve renewed another life-long passion he had for sailing. He joined a sailing club in Marina del Rey, and two years later took a sabbatical from the film business to sail to Tahiti via the Marquesas Islands on a fellow club member's 42 foot sailboat. Steve continues to write and has just completed his first foray into fiction prose, "Below The Line," a pulp/noir murder mystery which combines his exposure to the film and music industries, as well as his love of sailing.