David S. Ward

Ward was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Miriam (née Schad) and Robert McCollum Ward. Ward has degrees from Pomona College (BA), as well as both USC and the UCLA Film School (MFA).
He was employed at an educational film production company when he sold his screenplay for The Sting (1973), which led to an Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay. After this initial success, his follow-up projects were less critically and commercially well received, including Ward's first directorial effort, Cannery Row (1982), and a sequel The Sting II (1983). Ward's efforts to sell a script based on the frontier days of California were undone by an industry-wide "ban" on Westerns after the spectacular failure of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). He then wrote the comedy Saving Grace (1986) under a pseudonym.
Sting star Robert Redford contracted Ward in 1986 to work on the Redford-directed…