go to the head of the class." Stern was followed shortly by A Mother's Kisses (1964) and his first play, Scuba Duba (1967). The success of these three works led to his being named "The Hottest Writer of the Year" by The New York Times Magazine in 1968. He switched his focus to writing screenplays after the 1970s. He wrote the script for Stir Crazy in 1980, which wound up being the third-highest-grossing film in the U.S. that year. Four years later, he composed the first draft of Splash. It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, which Friedman shared with Brian Grazer, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel. Friedman wrote several novels throughout the 1980s and 1990s that garnered "respectful reviews". However, critics were of the opinion that they lacked the same level of inventiveness as his previous works. In 1988, he appeared in Woody Allen's film Another Woman. He would go on to feature in two other films directed by Allen during the following decade: Husbands and Wives (1992) and Celebrity (1998). Friedman's collection of short fiction, Three Balconies, appeared in September 2008, from Biblioasis, who also published his 2011 memoir Lucky Bruce. A collection of four plays (Scuba Duba, Steambath, Sardines and The Trial, titled 3.1 Plays, was published in January 2012. Style Friedman was an early writer of modern American black humor, together with his peers Joseph Heller (also a close friend of his), Stanley Elkin, and Thomas Pynchon. The style was given this name in part because of the 1965 anthology by the same name that he edited. When asked about the origin of the term by Newsday in 1995, he revealed, "I don't really know if I invented [it]". He was described by The New York Times as a "deadpan prose stylist" who was a "savage social satirist". The themes of his writings reflected the social cataclysm that took place during the 1960s and 1970s. He utilized his experiences from that time to touch upon race and gender relations. He also made use of other experiences from his personal life to base his writings on. For instance, the crowded Brooklyn apartment setting in A Mother's Kisses was similar to the three-room apartment in the Bronx where he was raised, while the main character's rejection by Columbia University mirrored his own failed attempt at applying to that institution. The plot of his short story