Schiller was born in 1936 in Brooklyn to Jewish[1] parents and grew up outside of San Diego, California. After attending Pepperdine College in Los Angeles, he worked for Life magazine, Paris Match, The Sunday Times, Time, Newsweek, Stern, and The Saturday Evening Post as a freelance photojournalist. He published his first book, LSD, in 1966. Since then Schiller has published 17 books, including W. Eugene Smith's book Minamata and Norman Mailer's Marilyn. Having produced and directed the 1967 Capitol Records audio documentary album Why Did Lenny Bruce Die?,[2] he collaborated with Albert Goldman on the bestseller in 1974 Ladies and Gentleman--Lenny Bruce!!, and also with Norman Mailer on the 1980 New York Times bestseller and the made-for-television motion picture of The Executioner's Song as well as in 1995 Oswald's Tale. His own books that became national bestsellers and made the New York Times Bestseller list include American Tragedy, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, Cape May Court House, and Into the Mirror.
He has directed seven motion pictures and miniseries for television; The Executioner's Song and Peter the Great won five Emmys. American Tragedy, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town and Into the Mirror were made into television mini-series for CBS, all of which Schiller produced and directed. In 2008, after the death of the writer Norman Mailer, he was named Senior Advisor to the Norman Mailer Estate. Schiller was a close friend of Mailer and collaborator on five of his works. Schiller also serves on the executive board of the Norman Mailer Society.[3]
Following the June 12, 1994 stabbing deaths of O.J Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, Schiller collaborated with Simpson, who was in jail awaiting his famous murder trial at the time, on a book called I Want to Tell You, which was billed as the former football star answering questions from fans about his life and the incident.[4] Following Simpson's acquittal on murder charges, Schiller and former Time magazine journalist Jim Willwerth co-wrote American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense,[5] considered one of the best books about the case. Dan Whitcomb, who covered the sensational trial for Reuters, worked for Schiller as a researcher on the book.
In 1999 Schiller published a book on the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: The Uncensored Story of the JonBenet Murder and the Grand Jury's Search for the Final Truth, based on an article he had published in The New Yorker on the same subject.[6]
Schiller served as a consultant to political campaigns and major corporations on such issues as crisis management, branding, public imaging and the use of social networking. Schiller has been an on-air analyst to NBC news, a consultant to Taschen Publishing, The John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation, The Ray Bradbury Estate, Mitsubishi Power Systems Americas, Photographers Annie Leibovitz Studio and Steven Klein and has written for The New Yorker, The Daily Beast and other publications.
In 2005, Schiller traveled to China and over two years built a collection of Chinese contemporary art, which numbers over 80 paintings and photographs. In 2007, he showed his own photographs for the first time in the US at the exhibition Marilyn Monroe and America in the 1960s.[7] It is for these photographs of Marilyn that Schiller is perhaps best known as a photographer. Schiller first photographed Monroe in May 1960 on the set of Let’s Make Love, and then again in 1962 when he was hired to photograph the star on the set of what would become the last film she would ever work on, the unfinished Something’s Got To Give.[8]Marilyn &Me,[9] Schiller's 11th book, commemorates his experience photographing the Hollywood legend, complete with 131 color and black-and-white photographs. In 2017 Schiller curated the John F. Kennedy Centennial for the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the New York Historical Society in New York City.[10] He also now represents the Jacques Lowe Estate of historical photographs of the Kennedy family and the Lisl Steiner photographic archives. In 2018 he curated the Robert Kennedy - Martin Luther King, Jr. exhibition for the New York Historical Society. He also managed the 2020 Centennial of Ray Bradbury.
Schiller resides in Sherman Oaks, California with his wife Nina Wiener, the Editor in Chief of The Mayo Clinic Press.
All of Me Is Illustrated (RosettaBooks/Inked 2020) With stories by Ray Bradbury, tattoos by today's artists. Conceived and directed by Lawrence Schiller
The Fire Next Time (Taschen Books 2018) By James Baldwin with photos by Steve Schapiro and conceived by Lawrence Schiller
^results, search (October 1999). Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: The Uncensored Story of the JonBenet Murder and the Grand Jury's Search for the Final Truth (Reprint ed.). Pymble, NSW; New York, NY: HarperTorch. ISBN9780061096969.
