Leslie Dixon is an American screenwriter and film producer. She began her career as an original screenwriter, writing films such as 1987's Outrageous Fortune and Overboard. She then moved into adaptations and re-writes, developing the screenplays for: Mrs. Doubtfire, The Thomas Crown Affair, Pay It Forward, and Hairspray. She has also produced a variety of films, and the television series Limitless. Leslie Dixon is the granddaughter of photographer Dorothea Lange and landscaper painter Maynard Dixon. Dixon grew up in the California Bay Area. At the age of 18, she was living alone in San Francisco without enough money to afford college. Once she realized that she wanted to pursue writing, she moved to Hollywood at the age of 26 with hopes of making her way into the film industry. Having no contacts within the industry, she began by working office jobs for several years and eventually landed a job as a script reader. During her time as a script reader, she studied the scripts she was reading. She learned the structure of scripts, their layout on the page, the elements that were needed in order to make a script appealing and successful, and she recognized the types of scripts that gained the most attention from producers. This gave her insight into "what was and wasn’t being bought". After a year of living in Hollywood, she wrote her first screenplay (written with an unknown co-writer). Her partner got an agent attached to the piece, and after receiving two offers, it was sold to Columbia Pictures for $30,000. However, the screenplay never made it to production.

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