James L. Brooks

James Lawrence Jim Brooks is an American director, producer and screenwriter. Growing up in North Bergen, New Jersey, Brooks endured a fractured family life and passed the time by reading and writing. After dropping out of New York University, he got a job as an usher at CBS, going on to write for the CBS News broadcasts. He moved to Los Angeles in 1965 to work on David L. Wolpers documentaries. After being laid off he met producer Allan Burns who secured him a job as a writer on the series My Mother the Car.

Brooks was born James Lawrence Brooks on May 9, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, and raised in North Bergen, New Jersey. His parents, Dorothy and Edward Brooks, were both salespeople . The Brooks family was Jewish Edward Brooks changed his surname from Bernstein and claimed to be Irish. Brooks father abandoned his mother when he found out she was pregnant with him, and lost contact with his son when Brooks was twelve. During the pregnancy, Brooks father sent his wife a postcard stating that If its a boy, name him Jim. His mother died when he was 22. He has described his early life as tough with a broken home, poor and sort of lonely, that sort of stuff, later adding My father was sort of inandout and my mother worked long hours, so there was no choice but for me to be alone in the apartment a lot. He has an older sister, Diane, who helped look after him as a child and to whom he dedicated As Good As It Gets.

Source: Wikipedia