Sherman Alexie

Award-winning American Indian poet, short story writer and novelist Sherman Alexie is an enrolled member of the Spokane tribe who grew up on the reservation about 50 miles from Spokane, Washington. Though he first attracted attention for his poetry, he earned increasing praise and interest from the film industry for his prose, but he rejected offers from producers who wanted to cast dark-skinned whites, choosing to wait for an Indian to come forward who would share his vision for a film. NYU-trained director Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne-Arapaho, contacted Alexie through a mutual friend after discovering his work, and together they developed material from his 1993 short story collection "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" at the 1995 Sundance Filmmakers and Screenwriters Lab. The result was the short "Somebody Kept Saying Powwow," culled from the second act of what would become the feature "Smoke Signals."