Clay A. Griffith was born to former actors Peter Griffith and Nanita Greene. He has an older sister actress Tracy Griffith and an older half-sister actress Melanie Griffith. He grew up in New York and the Virgin Islands. When he was eighteen, his sister Melanie helped him gain entry into the film industry by being an assistant art director in a film that she starred in Something Wild (1986). They worked together again on Pacific Heights (1990), in which Clay was one of the set decorators. That was the last time they worked together, since Clay forged his own path in the film industry. He has enjoyed a long-standing association with filmmaker Cameron Crowe, which began almost three decades ago on the romantic comedy "Say Anything" (as Crowe's assistant on the filmmaker's directorial debut), and continued on to Crowe's new romantic comedy, "Aloha," on which he served as production designer.
These titles have bookended Griffith's work with Crowe, first as a set decorator ("Singles," "Jerry McGuire"), then as production designer on Crowe's Oscar®-winning, semi-autobiographical music extravaganza, "Almost Famous," for which Griffith himself earned an Art Directors Guild nomination (Contemporary Film category). Since that 2000 project, Griffith has designed Crowe's "We Bought A Zoo" and "Elizabethtown" and the TV pilot/series "Roadies."
He has been a set decorator on such memorable and influential films as "Dirty Dancing," "Mystic Pizza," David Fincher's "Se7en," " Nora Ephron's "Sleepless in Seattle" and James L. Brooks' 1997 Oscar®-nominated Best Picture, "As Good As It Gets" Coincidentally, he had once been a script reader at Brooks' Gracie Films.
Following his debut as production designer on "Almost Famous," Griffith has gone on to design such motion pictures as "Radio," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Domestic Disturbance," "Lucky You," "Meet Dave," "A Thousand Words," and Ed Zwick's latest films "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" and biopic "Trial By Fire. " Griffith recently finished the much- anticipated Craig Brewer period biopic "Dolemite is my Name" premiering at TIFF." In addition, he worked on cataclysmic thriller "Greenland".
He is married to Heather Griffith, with whom he has a child
