Biography

After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin's prestigious Plan II Honors program, with emphases in both English Literature and Film, Tom moved to Los Angeles where he has worked steadily writing, directing, editing and acting. (And, for quite a while, waiting tables.) He was hired to adapt a script for Academy Award Winner Morgan Freeman's production company, Revelations, a screenplay made into the film "Under Suspicion" starring Freeman and Academy Award Winner Gene Hackman. The screenplay was nominated for an Edgar Award.

Co-writer of the summer 2026 release "Young Washington", Provost was the writer / director of "The Presence". The genre-twisting ghost story stars Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino, Shane West, Golden Globe Nominee Justin Kirk, and Tony Curran. After winning numerous awards on the festival circuit including Best Picture and Best Director, Lionsgate picked up the movie which was released in Fall 2011.

A professor of both film directing and screen acting at Chapman University, Provost works steadily as a script doctor and consultant.

He also teaches the popular series of classes on filmmaking called "Cinema Language: The Art Of Storytelling", both in Los Angeles and around the country, often in conjunction with Mark Stolaroff's "No Budget Film School".

You can find some of his writing at onfoodandfilm.com and his website is cinema language.org.

He also founded and runs the charity bagsandgrace.com, an outreach that provides bags of food, clothing and sundries to the unhoused of Los Angeles County.
- IMDb mini biography by: The Lionshare Group

Anyone working in movies has influences. I certainly have quite a few. Spielberg and DePalma, for instance, both had an enormous effect on me when I was younger. While I'd loved movies all my life, it was after seeing Jaws, Close Encounters and, particularly, Dressed to Kill that I started to become aware of the camera, of film grammar (English was already my favorite subject so this was not a huge leap) and the other ways these storytellers went about their craft. Spielberg continues to be an influence, of course, the guy continually blows my mind. And there are many other directors who have had an effect, from Hitchcock to Nolan, Wyler to Nichols, Hawkes to Polanski, David Lean. My biggest influence, though, is Alan J. Pakula.

My favorite movie is The Godfather so I named my production company after that movie. 'Khartoum' is the name of the horse. Yes, I named my company after a headless horse. Make of it what you will.

There is something that happens on a movie set, an intangible magic, that helps create a great work of art, whether the most talented people in the world are working on it, or people who don't know what they are doing. It just happens.