Neil Drumming

Neil Drumming is a journalist, filmmaker and producer for the radio show This American Life. He wrote and directed the 2014 film Big Words.

Drumming attended the University of Southern California.

After graduating from college, Drumming went to work for the Washington City Paper in 1996. He was part of a group of hires by editor David Carr that included several young black writers who went on to become voices of their generation: hired alongside Drumming that year were eventual New Yorker magazine staffer and history professor Jelani Cobb, MacArthur Genius Ta-Nehisi Coates, and performance artist and playwright Holly Bass.

From 2002 to 2007, Drumming worked as an editor and music critic for Entertainment Weekly, later moving to Salon.

Drumming's first feature film, Big Words, premiered at Slamdance Film Festival in January 2013. Drumming wrote and directed.

Set on November 4, 2008, the night of Barack Obama's historic election as the first black President of the United States,Big Words revolves around three friends who 15 years earlier had had "a promising hip-hop group and are now dealing with the challenges of being in their late 30s." Selecting the film as a New York Times "Critics' Pick," Jeannette Catsoulis's review praised Drumming's "whip-smart screenplay" and "droll, insightful dialogue," describing the film as a "an engrossing, coming-of-middle-age drama." Writing in The Independent, Darren Richman compared Drumming's filmmaking to Noah Baumbach, both in the directors' relationship to the characters their films depict--like Baumbach, "Drumming seems to love his characters because of rather than in spite of their flaws"--and in the films' subject matter, noting that a "sense that things haven’t quite gone to plan, reminiscent of Baumbach’s Greenberg, hangs over Big Words from first frame to last."

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