Michael Ventura


Michael Ventura is an American novelist, screenwriter, film director, essayist and cultural critic.

History

Michael Ventura commenced his career as a journalist at the Austin Sun, a counter-culture bi-weekly newspaper that published in the 1970s. Ventura is best known for his long-running column, "Letters at 3 A.M.", which first appeared in LA Weekly in the early 1980s and continued in the Austin Chronicle until 2015. He has published three novels: Night Time Losing Time, The Zoo Where You're Fed to God, and The Death of Frank Sinatra.
An excerpt from his novel about Miriam of Magdala was published in the third issue of the CalArts literary journal Black Clock in 2005. He is the author of two essay collections, Shadow-Dancing in the U.S.A. and . With psychologist James Hillman, Ventura co-authored the 1992 bestseller We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World's Getting Worse.
He appears as a fictional character in Steve Erickson's 1996 novel, Amnesiascope.
He wrote the screenplay for Echo Park, among other films, including Roadie.
He curated the Sundance Festival's 1989 retrospective on John Cassavetes.

Novels