Talk:Rupert Wainwright

Untitled

This page is a mess. Will re-visit and edit to make more neutral. GG The Fly (talk) 19:05, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Re-wrote and removed extraneous and non-neutral POV material -- flag removed GG The Fly (talk) 23:10, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Eleven years on and it's a CV, not a wikipedia page 69.113.166.178 (talk) 06:24, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

Edit request from a connected contributor (July 2026)

Disclosure: I work with the subject of this article, Rupert Wainwright. Per WP:COI I am requesting these changes for independent review rather than editing the article directly. My conflict of interest is also disclosed on my user page.

The article is out of date and thinly sourced. I am proposing a replacement for the prose sections (lead through "Music videos"), keeping the existing Filmography, References and External links sections as they are. Every statement in the proposed text below is cited to an independent source (Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, Grammy.com, Playback, TheWrap, the Los Angeles Times, etc.). I have deliberately left out a number of claims from the subject's own materials that I could not verify in independent sources — a list of those omissions follows the draft, for transparency.

Summary of requested changes:

1. Expand the lead to reflect his best-known work (Stigmata and The Fog both opened at No. 1 in the US; Grammy win for the MC Hammer long-form video).
2. Add an "Early life and education" section (Oxford upbringing and university, acting roles, UCLA film scholarship), sourced to a 1999 Playback trade profile.
3. Add sourced box-office facts for Stigmata and The Fog.
4. Add sections on Adore Creative's sports-bid films and Special Olympics 2015 closing-ceremony film (TheWrap, insidethegames.biz, U.S. Ski & Snowboard), his move into AI-assisted filmmaking (Los Angeles Times, July 2026), and the Heroes Ukraine charity video (2025).
5. Remove the sentence about The Millionaire Matchmaker appearance as undue weight in a career biography (WP:DUE).
6. Correct the awards claims: the currently uncited "five MTV Video Music Awards" is not supported by any independent source I could find and is not in the proposed text.

Proposed replacement text (from the top of the article through the end of the current "Music videos" section):

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Not to be confused with singer Rufus Wainwright.

Rupert Wainwright is an English film and television director, writer, and producer. He is known for the feature films Stigmata (1999) and The Fog (2005), both of which opened at number one at the United States box office, and for his music videos for MC Hammer, including the long-form video Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em: The Movie, which won a Grammy Award in 1991. He is the founder of the Los Angeles-based advertising and production company Adore Creative.

Early life and education

Wainwright grew up in Oxford, England, where he began writing and directing for the stage at sixteen, and attended the University of Oxford. Originally an actor, he appeared in Another Country (1984) and Dreamchild (1985). He later earned a scholarship to study film at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Career

Music videos and advertising

Wainwright produced and directed multiple music videos for MC Hammer, including "U Can't Touch This", and has also worked with artists such as N.W.A and Michael Jackson. He directed the long-form video Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em: The Movie, which won the Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form at the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards in 1991, and received a second Grammy nomination in 1993 for Hammerin' Home.

In advertising, Wainwright established a reputation for award-winning television commercials; a Reebok campaign he directed, featuring comedian Sinbad, won a Grand Effie Award. In 1995 he directed the four-minute cinematic teaser for Michael Jackson's album HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I, reported to have cost US$8 million; the album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. In 2023, he appeared as a guest at Kingvention, the annual Michael Jackson fan convention in London, to discuss his work on the teaser.

Film

Wainwright directed the ABC television film Dillinger (1991), starring Mark Harmon, and made his theatrical feature debut with the Disney comedy Blank Check (1994). His independent feature The Sadness of Sex (1995) was based on the work of writer Barry Yourgrau.

Stigmata (1999), a supernatural thriller for MGM starring Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne and Jonathan Pryce, opened at number one at the US box office in September 1999 and grossed approximately $89 million worldwide. In 2005 he directed The Fog, a remake of John Carpenter's 1980 film for Revolution Studios, starring Tom Welling, Maggie Grace and Selma Blair; it also opened at number one at the US box office.

Adore Creative

Wainwright is the founder and creative director of Adore Creative, a Los Angeles-based advertising and production company. Through the company he made promotional films for international sporting-event bid campaigns, including Russia's successful bids for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the 2013 Summer Universiade and the 2015 FINA World Championships, as well as three films supporting Russia's successful bid for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. During the 2014 Winter Games, Adore Creative produced Olympic-related programming for Fox Sports outlets in the United States, Brazil and New Zealand from a studio in Sochi. The company also produced "Rise Up LA 2015", the closing-ceremony film of the Special Olympics World Games Los Angeles 2015.

AI filmmaking

In the 2020s Wainwright moved into AI-assisted filmmaking. In July 2026, the Los Angeles Times reported that he planned to make Sebastian, a feature film about Saint Sebastian set in third-century Rome, as a hybrid production shot partly on location in Europe and partly generated with artificial intelligence, using ByteDance's Seedance video tool.

Heroes Ukraine

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Wainwright directed Heroes Ukraine (2025), an adaptation of David Bowie's "Heroes" performed by Ukrainian artists including Mika Newton, Alyona Alyona, Jerry Heil, KOLA and DakhaBrakha, with Bowie's longtime pianist Mike Garson. The video was made in support of a Unite with Ukraine campaign funding medical supplies for Ukrainian combat medics.

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References

Claims deliberately omitted (present in the subject's own materials, but which I could not verify in independent reliable sources — listed so reviewers know they were considered and excluded rather than overlooked):

• A birth date (available sources conflict) and specific birthplace details.
• That the UCLA scholarship was specifically a Fulbright (only self-published and IMDb-derived sources found).
• "One of the youngest directors accepted into Columbia Pictures' Discovery Program" (currently in the article, uncited; I found no independent source — reviewers may wish to remove it too).
• "Five MTV Video Music Awards" (currently in the article, cited only to the subject's own website).
• Cannes honours (no independent record found).
• A Los Angeles Times quote calling The Sadness of Sex "an inspired tour de force" — a Kevin Thomas LA Times review from around April 1997 likely exists, but I could not retrieve it to confirm the quote; if an editor with LA Times archive access can verify it, it would be a worthwhile addition.
• Fundraising totals for the Heroes Ukraine campaign — no independent source states a figure, so none is included.

Thank you for reviewing. I'm happy to answer questions or provide further sources. MsBlueCoast (talk) 00:07, 22 July 2026 (UTC)