His father was a playwright, his mother was a homemaker. He has 3 siblings. He graduated from Harvard and spent one year there in graduate school. He then took after his father and began writing screenplays such as Mississippi Burning (1988), which was nominated for 7 Academy Awards. He married his wife, Joan, in 1999 and now lives a happy life with his 3 children with her and his stepson from his wife's previous marriage Spouse Joan Gerolmo (1999 - 27 December 2007) (her death) (3 children) ttended St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island and graduated in the same class as Hunt Block. He had a very bad relationship with director Alan Parker on "Mississippi Burning", claiming that Parker had been both arrogant and ignorant of American life. Parker, for his part, claimed he had rewritten Gerolmo's script extensively.