Howard Jefferson Lewis (born 1951) is a Canadian screenwriter and film producer from Montreal, Quebec.[1] He is most noted as the writer of the film Ordinary Magic, for which he was a Genie Award nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 15th Genie Awards in 1994.[2]
Born and raised in Montreal, he is the grandson of Wilder Penfield.[3] After graduating from Queen's University with a degree in film studies, he worked as a journalist for the Ottawa Citizen, CBC Radio and Southam News before publishing Something Hidden, a biography of his grandfather, in 1981.[3]
His book was also adapted into a National Film Board of Canada documentary by filmmaker Bob Lower,[4] which drew Lewis more directly into filmmaking. He wrote a number of documentary shorts for the NFB in the 1980s, and was a writer for the short-lived television soap opera Mount Royal, before making his feature film debut with the screenplay for The Paper Wedding (Les noces de papier) in 1989.[1]
His second screenplay, Ordinary Magic, was directed by Giles Walker and released in 1993.[5] The following year, Michel Brault released My Friend Max (Mon amie Max), from a script cowritten by Lewis and Guy Fournier.[6] For that film, he won the award for Best Screenplay at the 1994 Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois.[7]
In 2002 he wrote Paule Baillargeon's NFB documentary Claude Jutra: An Unfinished Story (Claude Jutra, portrait sur film), for which he won both the Gemini Award for Best Writing in a Documentary Program or Series at the 18th Gemini Awards,[8] and the Writers Guild of Canada award for best writing in a documentary.[9]
His later screenplays included the feature films Emotional Arithmetic[10] and French Immersion,[11] and the documentary film Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague.
He was married in the 1970s to Catherine Keachie, a marketer in the publishing industry.[12] After that marriage ended in the mid-1980s, he remarried to actress Andrée Pelletier.[7]