Daniel Petrie Jr.

Daniel Mannix Petrie Jr. (born November 30, 1951) is a Canadian-American producer, writer, and director of film and television. He is best known for pioneering the sub-genres of action comedy and buddy cop films through movies like Beverly Hills Cop and Turner & Hooch. He served as President of the Writers Guild of America, West between 1997 and 1999, and then again between 2004 and 2005. 2Life and career Petrie was born in Canada to Daniel Petrie Sr., a film director, and Dorothea, a producer, novelist, and actress. He attended Northfield Mount Hermon School and the University of Redlands, earning degrees in psychology and creative writing. Originally a literary agent, he followed in his father's footsteps and joined the film industry as a screenwriter. His debut screenplay, Beverly Hills Cop, was the result of numerous rewrites and several radically different iterations over the course of a decade. At one point, the film was a serious action film starring Sylvester Stallone, a project that Stallone later took with him and developed into Cobra. Despite the troubled production history, the film was a massive critical and financial success, grossing over $300 million worldwide from a $15 million budget and earning rave reviews from critics like Janet Maslin and Richard Schicke