Candidate for
Member, Democratic Party County Central Committee; County of San Diego; Assembly District 75

JOHN LEONE is an Honors graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover , and Harvard, where he was on the Editorial Boards of The Crimson and the The Lampoon, and wrote for both Time and Newsweek. He won the Book-of-the-Month Club Award as the best first novelist in America through a national competition in 1970, judged by William Styron, James Baldwin, and Truman Capote. He studied prosody and versification with the Greek scholar and translator Robert FitzGerald (The Odyssey, The Oedipus Cycle).

He was a Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford, where he lived and wrote for a year.

He was a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute . He worked as a studio musician and producer at Clover Recorders in a partnership with Charles Plotkin, currently Bruce Springsteen's producer, in Hollywood , then wrote and directed The Last of the Cowboys, starring Henry Fonda, Eileen Brennan, and Susan Sarandon . He was a production consultant or executive on sixteen films for a family-owned enterprise, American Cinema, which produced eighteen films in a period of five years .

He lived in England, France, and Italy for three years, traveling extensively in Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia. When he returned he directed his musical verse-play The Unified Field, ) produced by Charles Plotkin, at the Los Angeles Theater Center.

He has since written four novels-- Imaginary Numbers, World of Souls, and The Theatricals, a comic novel set in Chipping Campden, which was optioned by Paramount Pictures; andThe Investment Club.

In 1991 he joined The Center For Advanced Policy Studies, a distributed consulting group with contributing members at the University of California at San Diego, California Institute of Technology, Harvard, and MIT. The group was founded to provide expert information on complex and unfamiliar issues and places to the media.
His article on the domestic marijuana industry is featured in the September 1994 issue of California Lawyer.

His 1995 policy pieces Lessons of Mexico and Letter from Mexico include interviews with the Zapatista military commanders Tacho and Moises, as well as Subcommandante Marcos. He went to the Lacandon Jungle on assignment from James Fallows, then Washington Editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

He has finished an original screenplay called Mexico for Oliver Stone. His comedy Jedgar & Clyde was optioned by Sean Penn and Michael Fitzgerald, as well as an adaptation of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King. The Theatricals has been optioned by Paramount Pictures. He has recently finished a new script, THE DOUBLE , an adaptation of Doestoevski's novel. He wrote Father Urban from the JF Powers National Book Award-winning novel Morte D'Urban for Ithaca Films.

In 2004 he wrote a script for Intermedia and Oliver Stone from his novel Jihad.

He is currently finishing a new novel, The Crowd Dreams of Love.

Leone is a member of the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild, and Musicians Local 47 in LA. He is represented by Stephen Breimer at Bloom Hergott Diemer & Klein in Beverly Hills and Ronald Mardigian Management in Los Angeles.