Ronald Thomas Rollet

Author

RONALD THOMAS ROLLET

ACADEMIC AND ARTISTIC BACKGROUND

Rollet holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an M.A. in Philosophy from Columbia University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. He taught film at NYU, Columbia University, University of Michigan, and Pratt Institute. As a Bodleian Library Visiting Fellow at Oxford, Rollet researched 19th century American popular singers for a screenplay for Joan Micklin Silver that also became the opera A Hundred Years Hence with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom. Rollet’s plays and musicals have been staged in a number of New York theaters. As a filmmaker and screenwriter, Rollet’s career involved productions in the US and abroad, his films have been shown theatrically and broadcast nationally, and he directed Danny DeVito in one of his earliest films. Rollet has published novels, poetry, and short stories. For the Village Voice he reviewed and also was active in the burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway theatre. Rollet edited the Museum of Modern Art’s circulating film catalog and served as editor of Film Library Quarterly, which published his monograph on French filmmaker Louis Malle.

AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

Rollet has received awards and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York Foundation, Columbia University, the National Science Foundation, New Jersey State Council On the Arts, and others. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cape May New Jersey State Film Festival, which he founded.

LITERARY REPRESENTATION

Until her retirement, Rollet was represented by Phyllis Westberg, President of Harold Ober Associates, one of America’s oldest and well-respected literary agencies. Westberg represented a number of literary authors and managed the portfolios of J.D. Salinger, Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, and Langston Hughes.

COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

As CEO of SciSoft Software, Rollet created scientific simulation software based on his NSF-funded research in teaching problem-solving at the university level. The first program, T-Rex, received critical acclaim. Agent John Brockman—founder of Brockman Inc. and pioneer in representing software authors and scientific thinkers—orchestrated the auction that sold this scientific simulation software to HRW (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) and CBS Software for what was then the largest advance paid to a software author.

NEWEST LITERARY PROJECT

Rollet is currently seeking representation for his newest project, THE THIRD ORDER UNDEAD, a five-book vampire noir series set in 1952 Los Angeles, New York City, Cold War Europe, and the ancient realm of Sheba. The series merges Anne Rice’s vampire mythology with Raymond Chandler’s noir voice, following Soldier—a WWII veteran who discovers a 1945 encounter in France’s Vosges Mountains during Hitler’s last counteroffensive, Operation Northwind, left him partially transformed into what vampires call the “Third Order Undead.” The series’ historical references have been reviewed by a noted historian. Rollet’s family is from Lorraine, France—where the vampire mythology originates—and where Rollet has spent time researching its history, culture and battlegrounds.

Book 2 places Soldier together with Charlie Chaplin during his Red Scare harassment, traveling on the same 1952 cross-country trains, in the same New York hotel, and on the historic Queen Elizabeth ocean voyage from America on Chaplin’s way to premiere his last Hollywood film, Limelight, in London—all travel and historical events researched in detail.

THE THIRD ORDER UNDEAD represents the synthesis of Rollet’s several careers: the literary craft learned from Phyllis Westberg, the commercial instincts developed with John Brockman, the historical rigor from academic research, the visual storytelling from film work, and the narrative craft from plays and opera. All five books in the series are complete. Rollet lives in Cape May, New Jersey.