Theater Arts. Upon graduating, McKee directed the Toledo Repertory Company, acted with the American Drama Festival, and became artistic director of the Aaron Deroy Theater. From there he traveled to London to accept the position of artist-in-residence at the National Theatre Company where he studied Shakespearean production at the Old Vic theatre. He then returned to New York City and spent the next seven years as an actor/director. Mid-life in the film industry After deciding to move his career to film, McKee attended Cinema School at the University of Michigan. While there, he directed two short films: A Day Off, which he also wrote, and Talk To Me Like The Rain, adapted from a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. These two films won the Cine Eagle Award, awards at the Brussels and Grenoble Film Festivals, and prizes at the Delta, Rochester, Chicago and Baltimore Film Festivals. In 1979, McKee moved to Los Angeles, where he began to write screenplays and work as a story analyst for United Artists and NBC. He sold his first screenplay Dead Files to AVCO/Embassy Films, after which he joined the WGA (Writers Guild of America). His next screenplay, Hard Knocks, won the National Screenwriting Contest, and since then McKee has had eight feature film screenplays purchased or optioned, including the feature film script Trophy for Warner Bros. (Only one of these films, however, was produced). In addition to his screenplays, McKee has had a number of scripts produced for television series such as Quincy, M.E. (starring Jack Klugman), Mrs. Columbo (starring Kate Mulgrew), Spenser: for Hire and Kojak (starring Telly Savalas). McKee was also an early instructor at the pioneering Los Angeles film school the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College. Starting the STORY seminar In 1983, as Fulbright Scholar, McKee joined the faculty of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California (USC), where he began offering his STORY Seminar class. A year later, McKee opened the course to the public, giving a three-day, 30-hour intensive class to sold-out audiences around the world. Since 1984, more than 50,000 students have taken McKee's course in cities around the world: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Tel Aviv, Auckland, Singapore, Barcelona, Stockholm, São Paulo and more. In March 2011 and again in 2012, he taught a four-day seminar in Bogotá, Colombia. In February 2012, he taught