New Hampshire native Robert Rodat moved to Los Angeles thinking he might produce films but began writing scripts during the ten years spent working on his MFA at USC's film school. He received his first screenwriting credit for "Comrades of Summer", a 1992 HBO movie about an American baseball manager (Joe Mantegna) hired to train a Russian team for Olympic competition. Exploring one of the more recent hypotheses about the identity of the notorious British criminal Jack the Ripper, he penned "The Ripper" (Starz!, 1997), which posited the notion that the murderer was a member of the English
