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Steven Kloves (born March 18, 1960) is an American screenwriter mainly renowned for his adaptations of novels, especially for the Harry Potter film series and for Wonder Boys, whose screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. He has also directed two movies.

Kloves, born in Austin, Texas in 1960, grew up in Sunnyvale, California where he attended Fremont High School. He entered UCLA but dropped out after reducing his schedule to only a few courses in his second year. As an unpaid intern for a Hollywood agent, he gained attention for a screenplay he wrote called Swings. This led to a meeting where he successfully pitched Racing with the Moon (1984).

His first experience with professional screenwriting left him wanting more interaction with the actors so that the characters would stay true to his vision. Kloves wrote The Fabulous Baker Boys and also intended it to be his directorial debut. After years of trying to sell the project in Hollywood, the film finally got off the ground and was released in 1989. The Fabulous Baker Boys did reasonably well, but his next shot as writer/director for Flesh and Bone (1993) fared poorly at the box office. Kloves then stopped writing for three years.

Realizing that he had to return to writing to support his family, he began adapting Michael Chabon's novel Wonder Boys into a screenplay. Kloves was offered the chance to direct but he declined, preferring to direct only his own original screenplays. This was his first try at adapting another work to film. His screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award after the film's release in 2000.

Warner Bros. sent Kloves a list of novels that the company was considering to adapt as films. The listing included the first Harry Potter novel, which intrigued him despite his usual indifference to these catalogs. He went on to write the screenplays for the first four films in the blockbuster series. Harry Potter producer David Heyman revealed in an October 2005 press conference that Kloves would be returning to adapt Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — the sixth in the series.^[1] It is likely that the reason he could not write the script for the fifth book was because he was directing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

• Racing with the Moon (1984)
• The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)
• Flesh and Bone (1993)
• Wonder Boys (2000)
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2008)^[2]

• Sragow, Michael. "A wizard of Hollywood!" 24 February 2000. Salon.com [1] (interview with Steve Kloves)

1. ^ Heyman: Kloves to Return for Sixth Script. The Leaky Cauldron. Retrieved on 2006-11-26.
2. ^ Steve Kloves. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved on 2007-05-06.