Doc Makers That Rock
List activity
48 views
• 0 this weekCreate a new list
List your movie, TV & celebrity picks.
16 people
- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Alex Gibney was born on 23 October 1953 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a producer and director, known for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015). He has been married to Anne Gibney since 14 August 1982. They have three children.- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Blair Foster is known for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011) and Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (2014).- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Jed Rothstein is known for Killing in the Name (2010), WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (2021) and Before the Spring: After the Fall (2013).- Director
- Producer
- Writer
John Maggio is a producer, director, and writer known for The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee (2017), Panic (2018) The Italian Americans (2015) American Experience (1988), Frontline (1983) and Virgil Bliss (2001). His work has been honored with the Emmy Award, Writers Guild Award, Producers Guild Award Nomination and multiple News and Documentary Emmy Award Nominations .- Writer
- Additional Crew
Carl Bernstein was born on 14 February 1944 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. He is a writer, known for All the President's Men (1976), Untitled David Simon/Capitol Hill Project and The Final Days (1989). He has been married to Christine Kuehbeck since July 2003. He was previously married to Nora Ephron and Carol Honsa.- Bob Woodward was born on 26 March 1943 in Geneva, Illinois, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for All the President's Men (1976), Wired (1989) and The Nightmare Years (1989). He has been married to Elsa Walsh since 25 November 1989. They have two children. He was previously married to Frances Roderick Barnard and Kathleen Middlekauff.
- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Sidney Lumet was a master of cinema, best known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors -- and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York. He made over 40 movies, often complex and emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. Although his politics were somewhat left-leaning and he often treated socially relevant themes in his films, Lumet didn't want to make political movies in the first place. Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s and also in the film ...One Third of a Nation... (1939). After starting an off-Broadway acting troupe in the late 1940s, he became the director of many television shows in the 1950s. Lumet made his feature film directing debut with 12 Angry Men (1957), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned three Academy Award nominations. The courtroom drama, which takes place almost entirely in a jury room, is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history. Lumet got the chance to direct Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind (1960), an imperfect, but powerful adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending". The first half of the 1960s was one of Lumet's most artistically successful periods. Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), a masterful, brilliantly photographed adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play, is one of several Lumet films about families. It earned Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Dean Stockwell and Jason Robards deserved acting awards in Cannes and Hepburn an Oscar nomination. The alarming Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964) unfairly suffered from comparison to Stanley Kubrick's equally great satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which was released shortly before. The Pawnbroker (1964), arguably the most outstanding of the great movies Lumet made in this phase, tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who lives in New York and can't overcome his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. Rod Steiger's unforgettable performance in the title role earned an Academy Award nomination. Lumet's intense character study The Hill (1965) about inhumanity in a military prison camp was the first of five films he did with Sean Connery. After the overly talky but rewarding drama The Group (1966) about young upper-class women in the 1930s, and the stylish spy thriller The Deadly Affair (1967), the late 1960s turned out to be a lesser phase in Lumet's career. He had a strong comeback with the box-office hit The Anderson Tapes (1971). The Offence (1973) was commercially less successful, but artistically brilliant - with Connery in one of his most impressive performances. The terrific cop thriller Serpico (1973), the first of his films about police corruption in New York City, became one of his biggest critical and financial successes. Al Pacino's fascinating portrayal of the real-life cop Frank Serpico earned a Golden Globe and the movie earned two Academy Award nominations (it is worth noting that Lumet's feature films of the 1970s alone earned 30 Oscar nominations, winning six times). The love triangle Lovin' Molly (1974) was not always convincing in its atmospheric details, but Lumet's fine sense of emotional truth and a good Blythe Danner keep it interesting. The adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), an exquisitely photographed murder mystery with an all-star cast, was a big success again. Lumet's complex crime thriller Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which Pauline Kael called "one of the best "New York" movies ever made", gave Al Pacino the opportunity for a breathtaking, three-dimensional portrayal of a bisexual man who tries to rob a bank to finance his lover's sex-change operation. Lumet's next masterpiece, Network (1976), was a prophetic satire on media and society. The film version of Peter Shaffer's stage play Equus (1977) about a doctor and his mentally confused patient was also powerful, not least because of the energetic acting by Richard Burton and Peter Firth. After the enjoyable musical The Wiz (1978) and the interesting but not easily accessible comedy Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), Sidney Lumet won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for his outstanding direction of Prince of the City (1981), one of his best and most typical films. It's about police corruption, but hardly a remake of Serpico (1973). Starring a powerful Treat Williams, it's an extraordinarily multi-layered film. In his highly informative book "Making Movies" (1995), Lumet describes the film in the following way: "When we try to control everything, everything winds up controlling us. Nothing is what it seems." It's also a movie about values, friendship and drug addiction and, like "Serpico", is based on a true story. In Deathtrap (1982), Lumet successfully blended suspense and black humor. The Verdict (1982) was voted the fourth greatest courtroom drama of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008. A few minor inaccuracies in legal details do not mar this study of an alcoholic lawyer (superbly embodied by Paul Newman) aiming to regain his self-respect through a malpractice case. The expertly directed movie received five Academy Award nominations. Lumet's controversial drama Daniel (1983) with Timothy Hutton, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel" about two young people whose parents were executed during the McCarthy Red Scare hysteria in the 1950s for alleged espionage, is one of his underrated achievements. His later masterpiece Running on Empty (1988) has a similar theme, portraying a family which has been on the run from the FBI since the parents (played by Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch) committed a bomb attack on a napalm laboratory in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam. The son (played by River Phoenix in an extraordinarily moving, Oscar-nominated performance) falls in love with a girl and wishes to stay with her and study music. Naomi Foner's screenplay won the Golden Globe. Other Lumet movies of the 1980s are the melancholic comedy drama Garbo Talks (1984); the occasionally clichéd Power (1986) about election campaigns; the all too slow thriller The Morning After (1986) and the amusing gangster comedy Family Business (1989). With Q&A (1990) Lumet returned to the genre of the New York cop thriller. Nick Nolte shines in the role of a corrupt and racist detective in this multi-layered, strangely underrated film. Sadly, with the exception of Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), an imperfect but fascinating crime drama in the tradition of his own previous genre works, almost none of Lumet's works of the 1990s did quite get the attention they deserved. The crime drama A Stranger Among Us (1992) blended genres in a way that did not seem to match most viewers' expectations, but its contemplations about life arouse interest. The intelligent hospital satire Critical Care (1997) was unfairly neglected as well. The courtroom thriller Guilty as Sin (1993) was cold but intriguing. Lumet's Gloria (1999) remake seemed unnecessary, but he returned impressively with the underestimated courtroom comedy Find Me Guilty (2006) and the justly acclaimed crime thriller Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007). In 2005, Sidney Lumet received a well-deserved honorary Academy Award for his outstanding contribution to filmmaking. Sidney Lumet tragically died of cancer in 2011.- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Alan J. Pakula was an American film director, writer and producer. He was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Best Director for All the President's Men (1976) and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sophie's Choice (1982).
He also directed Presumed Innocent (1990), The Pelican Brief (1993) and The Devil's Own (1997), his last film.
From October 19, 1963, until 1971, Pakula was married to actress Hope Lange. He was married to his second wife, Hannah Pakula from 1973 until his death in 1998.
Pakula died on November 19, 1998, in a car accident, he was 70 years old.- Isidor Feinstein Stone, the progressive investigative journalist who was a successor to such socialist muckrakers as Jack London and George Seldes (and a precursor to such modern newspaper crusaders as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein), was born Isidor Feinstein on December 24, 1907 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to ethnic Russian Jewish parents, who were shop-owners. His interest in journalism started in high school, and he began publishing his own newspaper as a sophomore. Later, he got experience as a cub reporter for The "Philadelphia Inquirer" while a philosophy student at the University of Pennsylvania, and he went to work for the paper full-time after dropping out of Penn.
A radical leftist in terms of politics, he moved to the "New York Post" in 1933, where he was a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Around the time of the publication of his first book in 1937, he took the by-line "I.F. Stone". He had adopted the surname "Stone" as a pen-name in order to avoid the then-rampant anti-Semitism which blocked Jews' entry into schools and jobs. Subsequently, he joined the liberal-leftist weekly newspaper "The Nation" as associate editor in 1939, later becoming its Washington editor, and also wrote for the left-wing New York afternoon newspaper "PM" from 1940 to 1948, when it ceased publication. As an unapologetic leftist who was many considered a "fellow traveler" of American and Soviet communists by the federal government, he was investigated thoroughly; nothing was ever proved against him during that "Scoundrel Time", as Lillian Hellman called it, when an association with the Communist Party, one of its alleged "Fronts" or a liberal organization in which communists were involved could mean blacklisting, expulsion from employment, and the denial of civil rights such as that of travel.
In the early 1950s, Stone became an unspoken critic of the Cold War and of McCarthyism, publishing his seminal book "The Hidden History of the Korean War" in 1952. It was unique for the times in that it alleged that the government and the big media had lied about the origins of the war. Stone is best remembered for his political newsletter "I.F. Stone's Weekly," which he started in 1953, during the high-water mark of McCarthyism period of the Second Red Scare. The newsletter had enormous influence well out of proportion to its small circulation: Not only did it challenge the status quo, but it gave courage to other journalists who otherwise were intimidated by the vast array of forces aligned against progressives in the 1950s.
Stone also was an early critic of the Vietnam War: he was the only American journalist to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that precipitated wide-scale US involvement in Southeast Asia. The incident is now known to be largely fabricated, with such witnesses as Senator John McCain -- who was flying over the Gulf of Tonkin in support of the American destroyers allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese warships -- maintaining that an attack by the North Vietnamese never happened.
As America grew more liberal during the 1960s, the circulation of his newsletter increased, reaching a height of 70,000. However, Stone ceased publication in 1971 Dru to failing health and poor eyesight. The ever-remarkable Stone then learned Ancient Greek to research the "The Trial of Socrates", the book her published in 1988.
The following year, I.F. Stone died on June 18, 1989 at the age of 81. He is remembered as avatar of that particularly American prototype of the crusader for free speech and intrepid investigative journalism. - Director
- Producer
- Writer
His documentaries helped spur a rebirth of non-fiction film in the 80s & garnered wide critical success. But until 2003's "The Fog of War," Morris was shunned by the Academy Awards.
Morris' first two films won much acclaim (Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981)). In the second movie, Morris intended to explore "Nub City," the town known for residents trading limbs for insurance settlements, but death threats (and some other equally fascinating locals) morphed Morris' focus into profiling other citizens instead.
After his first two films, Morris found financing for new projects scarce, so he turned to a unusual source of income - working as a New York private detective. Finally, after 6 years, he moved into feature-length, (and more serious projects) with The Thin Blue Line (1988).
Errol Morris cites his detective experience as providing new skills for his investigative filmmaking, most notably in "The Thin Blue Line", which resulted in a wrongfully convicted man being freed from a lifetime sentence in Texas after serving 13 years for a policeman's murder. Morris persuaded the real murderer to help free the innocent man. The real killer was subsequently executed for a unrelated murder.
Morris uses techniques not traditionally seen in documentaries, to make his films more dramatic and diverse, such as the Thin Blue Line's incredibly eerie Philip Glass score, and the haunting reenactments of the policeman's murder. Thin Blue Line's multiple points of view have drawn favorable comparisons to Kurosawa's ground-breaking cinema classic, Rashomon (1950). His own striking, innovative film style is very influential. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Morris knows how to create careful doses of emotional reality, which can have much more impact on a viewer than a literal reality can be on film.
Technical problems forced Morris to insert his voice as an interviewer for the first time, at the end of The Thin Blue Line, and he's experimented with using himself in his documentaries since. Morris incorporated his reaction to his parents' recent deaths in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997).
Morris feels his interviewing of subjects, has been greatly enhanced in his later work, by devising the Interrotron (terror and interview). It's two cameras, one on Morris and one on the interviewee. Each sees the other's images staring directly into the lens, to give the audience the appearance the subject is talking directly to them.
While his work explores a wide range of subjects, Morris has stated his films break down into "Completely Whacked Out" and "Politically Concerned." Many focus on people with strong, unusual obsessions. His cable documentary series First Person, was especially effective presenting with great sympathy, power and humor, compelling individuals such as Temple Grandin, an animal scientist who has autism. Grandin designs animal slaughterhouses to be humane.
Fred Leuchter, the subject of Morris' film, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) was slated to be one of the people profiled in Morris' "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control", but Morris decided putting Leuchter in the same film would overpower the other portraits. Leuchter'd been dubbed "The Florence Nightingale of Death Row" for his career of making prisoner execution methods more humane, was invited by a Holocaust denier who was on trial, to examine the site of the Auschwitz death camp. Way out of his league, Leuchter's faulty, amateurish research led him to claim that Auschwitz could not have been used for executions. "Accidental Nazi" was considered as a title for the film. Morris prefers characters who are puzzling.
The film brought Morris (who's Jewish) much criticism and attention. One of Morris' recurring themes is the powerful contrasts between how his subjects view themselves, and how audiences view them. The witty Morris revels in his own off kilter humor, iconoclasm, and extreme skepticism when he's being interviewed.
Morris had problems when he ventured into directing a Hollywood fiction film as did his contemporaries Michael Moore, Joe Berlinger, and Bruce Sinofsky. The Dark Wind (1991) was held up by the studio for 2 years, then released on video. It was an adaptation of a Tony Hillerman mystery novel, executive produced by Robert Redford. Morris has continued entirely with non-fiction, though many of his subjects are much stranger than fiction anyway.
He has taken on difficult subjects, such as A Brief History of Time (1991), about the paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking, illustrating Hawking's revolutionary theories, and comparing the paralyzed scientist's own rich interior world periled by ALS, with the complex, dying universe Hawking limns.
Morris' film The Fog of War (2003), examines the architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Morris' academic training in philosophy and history shows in his documentaries' vast depth. While getting a history degree at University of Wisconsin, Morris explored doing a film on notorious local murderer Ed Gein (Gein was the basis for Psycho (1960)). Morris also studied at Princeton and University of California - Berkeley.
Morris' directing career started while he programmed shows at the California's Pacific Film Archive. A newspaper headline spurred his first film "Gates of Heaven," revealing with bizarre developments in 2 widely contrasting pet cemeteries. The uncut film confounded editors, such as Academy Award nominee David Webb Peoples (Unforgiven (1992)). German film director Werner Herzog bet Morris that the film would never get made. At Berkeley, Herzog settled the bet on stage in an incredible display, as documented by director Les Blank (whose son 'Harrod Blank'_ is also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker) in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
Morris, who received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, says none of his films have made him money, so he directs commercials, and won an Emmy in 2001. A series of campaign ads he did for John Kerry was little shown. Morris' much-criticized approach was to Interrotron actual Republicans and conservatives who had switched to support Kerry, versus George W. Bush. Morris has an occasional feature in the New York Times ruminating on the power and meaning of photos.
Opening April 2008 is his new feature, Standard Operating Procedure (2008), which explores abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The film is accompanied by a book of on-set photos of Morris' productions.- Producer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
Ryan White is known for Good Night Oppy (2022), The Case Against 8 (2014) and Good Ol' Freda (2013).- Producer
- Director
- Cinematographer
Laura Poitras was born on 2 February 1964 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She is a producer and director, known for Citizenfour (2014), The Oath (2010) and My Country, My Country (2006).- Producer
- Director
- Camera and Electrical Department
Julia Reichert has been called a godmother of the US independent film movement and is a three time Oscar-nominee. Her film Growing Up Female was the first feature documentary of the modern Women's Movement. It was recently chosen for inclusion on the National Film Registry.
Her films Union Maids and Seeing Red (with Jim Klein) were both nominated for Academy Awards for Best Feature Documentary, as was The Last Truck, as a short. Her film A Lion in the House (with Steven Bognar) premiered at Sundance, screened nationally on PBS, was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award, and won the Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking. She co-wrote and directed the feature film Emma and Elvis, produced the feature The Dream Catcher directed by Ed Radtke.
Her film Sparkle (with Steven Bognar) won the Audience Award for Best Short at Silverdocs 2012, and was broadcast nationally on PBS.
She delved into the world of web-based interactive projects, co-creating an interactive non-fiction site, Reinvention Stories, about how citizens of Dayton, Ohio, are recovering from the economic downturn.
Raises Not Roses: The Story of the 9to5 Movement is a film about 9to5, an organization that brought rights, respect and raises to white collar workers. 9to5 is a little known intersection of the women's movement and the labor movement. It brought awareness of ideas such as the glass ceiling, sexual harassment, equal pay for equal work and the Family Medical Leave Act.
Julia is co-founder of New Day Films, the social issue film distribution co-op, which is now 42 years old. She is author of "Doing It Yourself," the first book on self-distribution in independent film, and articles for The Independent, a publication of AIVF. Reichert is Professor Emeritus of Motion Pictures at Wright State University in Ohio, a graduate of Antioch College, a mother, and a grandma.
She is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and a member of the advisory board of the Independent Feature Project.
Julia is the 2018 recipient of International Documentary Associations Career Achievement Award.- Writer
- Producer
Judith Erlich is known for Rivages and L'Île aux femmes (2016).- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Francine Zuckerman is known for The Atwood Stories (2003), After Munich (2019) and We Are Here (2013).- Director
- Producer
- Actress
Nancy Schwartzman is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. She is the Director and Executive Producer of the forthcoming 5-part original series Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order for Freeform/Disney+ with XTR Studios. The show features a diverse cast of young women pooling their talents to fight violence against women and bring justice to victims. The series is slated for release in the Spring 2024.
Nominated for the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2023 and the F:ACT Award at CPH: Dox, her recent film, Victim/Suspect follows Investigative journalist Rae de Leon as she travels nationwide to uncover and examine a shocking pattern: Young women tell the police they've been sexually assaulted, but instead of finding justice, they're charged with the crime of making a false report, arrested, and even imprisoned by the system they believed would protect them. It is a Netflix Original documentary with the Center for Investigative Reporting and Motto Pictures. The film premiered on Netflix to 190 countries on May 23, 2023 and trended #6 in the United States, and in the top #10 globally in 28 countries. It is currently the #7 Documentary viewed on Netflix.
Her debut feature documentary Roll Red Roll (PBS/BBC/Netflix) was nominated for a Peabody award, and exposed the notorious Steubenville, Ohio high school sexual assault case and uncovered the social-media fueled "boys will be boys" culture that let it happen. Roll Red Roll garnered 7 best documentary awards, premiered in 2018 at the Tribeca Film Festival and Hot Docs, and has screened at over 40 film festivals worldwide. The film opened theatrically with 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a Critic's Pick in The New York Times and reviewed in The New Yorker, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times amongst others.
As a follow up to the documentary, she is the author of the non-fiction book Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power and Football in the American Heartland released in July 2022 with Hachette and received stellar reviews from the New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal. This is a deep dive into the Steubenville, Ohio case and a follow-up from the award-winning film. Her short films including One Shot One Kill, for Mother Jones (2020) and Anonymous Comes To Town (2019), co-produced with the Tribeca Film Institute and Gucci's Chime for Change, xoxosms and The Line. Together, they have garnered over 5 million views.
For her human rights filmmaking and technology development to prevent sexual violence, she is the winner of awards from the Obama/Biden White House, the United Nations and the Avon Foundation.
She is a tech founder and created the Circle of 6 safety app. She is represented by UTA, a graduate of Columbia University and not so newly based in Los Angeles. Despite some practice, she remains terrible at parallel parking.