Errol Morris | |
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Born | Hewlett, New York, United States |
February 5, 1948
Occupation | Film director |
Years active | 1978–present |
Website | |
www.errolmorris.com |
Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director. In 2003, The Guardian put him seventh in its list of the world's 40 best directors.[1] In 2003, his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
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Biography
Early life and education
Morris was born in Hewlett, New York on February 5, 1948. When he was two years old, his father died of a heart attack. His mother, a Juilliard graduate, supported Morris and his brother as a music teacher. Morris attended Hewlett Elementary School in a class with Brent Glass, Tony Kornheiser and former Village Voice editor David Schneiderman.[citation needed]
After being treated for strabismus in childhood, he refused to wear an eye patch. As a consequence, he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision.[2]
In the 10th grade, Morris attended the Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont. He began playing the cello, spending a summer in France studying music under the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Morris' future collaborator Philip Glass. Describing Morris as a teenager, Mark Singer wrote that he "read with a passion the forty-odd Oz books, watched a lot of television, and on a regular basis went with a doting but not quite right maiden aunt ("I guess you'd have to say that Aunt Roz was somewhat demented") to Saturday matinées, where he saw such films as This Island Earth and Creature from the Black Lagoon — horror movies that, viewed again 30 years later, still seem scary to him."[3]
Morris attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating in 1969 with a B.A. in history. For a brief time Morris held small jobs, first as a cable television salesman and then as a term-paper writer. His unorthodox approach to applying for grad school included "trying to get accepted at different graduate schools just by showing up on their doorstep." Having unsuccessfully approached both the University of Oxford and Harvard University, Morris was able to talk his way into Princeton University, where he began studying the history of science, a topic in which he had "absolutely no background." His concentration was in the history of physics, and he was bored and unsuccessful in the prerequisite physics classes he had to take. This, together with his antagonistic relationship with his advisor Thomas Kuhn ("'You won't even look through my telescope.' And his response was 'Errol, it's not a telescope, it's a kaleidoscope.'"[3]) ensured that his stay at Princeton would be short. He left Princeton in 1972, enrolling at Berkeley as a Ph.D. student in philosophy. At Berkeley, Morris once again found that he was not well-suited to his subject. "Berkeley was just a world of pedants. It was truly shocking. I spent two or three years in the philosophy program. I have very bad feelings about it," he later said.[3] He became a regular at the Pacific Film Archive, as Tom Luddy, the director of the archive at the time, later remembered: "He was a film noir nut. He claimed we weren't showing the real film noir. So I challenged him to write the program notes. Then, there was his habit of sneaking into the films and denying that he was sneaking in. I told him if he was sneaking in he should at least admit he was doing it."[3]
Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, Morris visited Plainfield, Wisconsin in 1975. While in Wisconsin, he conducted multiple interviews with Ed Gein, the infamous serial killer who was a resident at Mendota State Hospital in Madison. He later made plans with German film director Werner Herzog, whom Tom Luddy had introduced to Morris, to return in the summer of 1975 to secretly open the grave of Gein's mother to test their theory that Gein himself had already dug her up. Herzog arrived on schedule, but Morris had second thoughts and was not there. Herzog did not open the grave. Morris later returned to Plainfield, this time staying for almost a year, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews. Although he had plans to either write a book or make a film (which he would call Digging up the Past), Morris never completed his Ed Gein project. In the fall of 1976, Herzog visited Plainfield again, this time to shoot part of his film Stroszek. After the shooting finished, Herzog handed Morris an envelope with cash in it. Morris walked over to the motel window and tossed the envelope out the window into a parking lot. Herzog went out to the parking lot and brought the money back, again offering it to Morris, saying, "Please don't do that again."[3] Morris accepted the $2,000 and used it to take a trip to Vernon, Florida. Vernon was nicknamed Nub City because its residents participated in a particularly gruesome form of insurance fraud in which they deliberately amputated a limb in order to collect the insurance money. "In the hierarchy of nubbiedom, the supremely rewarding self-sacrifice was the loss of a right leg and a left arm, because, so the theory went, 'afterward, you could still write your name and still have a foot to press the gas pedal of your Cadillac.'"[3] Morris's second documentary would be about the town and bear its name, although it makes no mention of Vernon as Nub City, but instead explores other idiosyncrasies of the town's residents. Morris made this omission because he received death threats while doing research; the town's residents were afraid that Morris would reveal their secret.
After spending two weeks in Vernon, Morris returned to Berkeley and began working on a script for a work of fiction that he called Nub City. After a few unproductive months, he happened to read a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that read, "450 DEAD PETS GOING TO NAPA VALLEY". Morris left for Napa Valley and began working on the film that would become his first feature, Gates of Heaven. In 1978 when the film premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary by Les Blank. Herzog had promised to eat his shoe if Morris completed the project, to challenge and encourage Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. At the public shoe-eating, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.
Early career
Gates of Heaven was given a limited release in the spring of 1981. Critic Roger Ebert was and remains today a champion of the film, including it on his all-time top ten best films list. Morris returned to Vernon in 1979 and again in 1980, renting a house in town and conducting interviews with the town's citizens. Vernon, FL premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival. Newsweek called it, "a film as odd and mysterious as its subjects, and quite unforgettable." The film, like Gates of Heaven, suffered from poor distribution. It was released on video in 1987, and DVD in 2005.
After finishing Vernon, FL, Morris tried unsuccessfully to get funding for a variety of projects. There was Road, a story about an interstate highway in Minnesota; a project about Robert Golka, the creator of laser-induced fireballs in Utah; and the story of Centralia, Pennsylvania, the coal town in which an "inextinguishable subterranean fire" ignited in 1962. He eventually got funding in 1983 to write a script about John and Jim Pardue, a pair of Missouri bank robbers who had killed their father and grandmother and robbed five banks. Morris's pitch went, "The great bank-robbery sprees always take place at a time when something is going wrong in the country. Bonnie and Clyde were apolitical, but it's impossible to imagine them without the Depression as a back-drop. The Pardue brothers were apolitical, but it's impossible to imagine them without Vietnam." Morris wanted Tom Waits and Mickey Rourke to play the brothers, and he wrote the script, but the project eventually failed. Morris worked on writing scripts for various other projects, including a pair of ill-fated Stephen King adaptations.
In 1984 he married Julia Sheehan, whom he had met in Wisconsin while researching Ed Gein and other serial killers. Morris would later recall an early conversation with Julia: "I was talking to a mass murderer but I was thinking of you," he said, and instantly regretted it, afraid that it might not have sounded as affectionate as he had wished. But Julia was actually flattered: "I thought, really, that was one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me. It was hard to go out with other guys after that."
In 1985, Morris became interested in Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist in Dallas. Under Texas law, the death penalty can only be issued if the jury is convinced that the defendant is not only guilty, but will commit further violent crimes in the future if he is not put to death. Grigson had spent 15 years testifying for such cases, and he almost invariably gave the same damning testimony, often saying that it is "one hundred per cent certain" that the defendant would kill again.[4] This led to Grigson being nicknamed "Dr. Death".[5] Through Grigson, Morris would meet the subject of his next film, 36 year-old Randall Dale Adams.[6]
Adams was serving a life sentence that had been commuted from a death sentence on a legal technicality for the 1976 murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer. Adams told Morris that he had been framed, and that David Harris, who was present at the time of the murder and was the principal witness for the prosecution, had in fact killed Wood. Morris began researching the case because it related to Dr. Grigson; he was at first unconvinced of Adams's innocence. After reading the transcripts of the trial and meeting David Harris at a bar, however, Morris was no longer so sure.
At the time, Morris had been making a living as a private investigator for a well-known private detective agency that specialized in Wall Street cases. Bringing together his talents as an investigator and his obsessions with murder, narration and epistemology, Morris went to work on the case in earnest. Unedited interviews in which the prosecution's witnesses systematically contradicted themselves were used as testimony in Adams's 1986 habeas corpus hearing to determine if he would receive a new trial. David Harris famously confessed, in a roundabout manner, to killing Wood. Although Adams was finally found innocent after years of being processed by the legal system, the judge in the habeas corpus hearing officially stated that, "much could be said about those videotape interviews, but nothing that would have any bearing on the matter before this court." Regardless, The Thin Blue Line, as Morris's film would be called, was popularly accepted as the main force behind getting its subject, Randall Adams, out of prison. As Morris said of the film, "The Thin Blue Line is two movies grafted together. On one simple level is the question, Did he do it, or didn’t he? And on another level, The Thin Blue Line, properly considered, is an essay on false history. A whole group of people, literally everyone, believed a version of the world that was entirely wrong, and my accidental investigation of the story provided a different version of what happened."[7]
Three years after the release of Adams, he sued Morris demanding a fair share of box office revenue. Morris stands by the belief that a subject should not be paid for being themselves, even in front of the camera. Aside from the fact that Adams was suing the very man who got him off of death row and out of prison all together, was the fact that Morris himself made absolutely no money on the movie.[citation needed] The man supplements his income working on paid commercials for companies like Levi, Miller Beer, and Honda.
According to a survey by The Washington Post, The Thin Blue Line made dozens of critics' top ten lists for 1988, more than any other film that year. It won the documentary of the year award from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. Despite its widespread acclaim, it was not nominated for an Oscar, which created a small scandal regarding the nomination practices of the Academy. The Academy cited the film's genre of "non-fiction", arguing that it was not actually a documentary. To this day, The Thin Blue Line is one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries ever made.
2000s
Although Morris has achieved fame as a documentary filmmaker, he is also an accomplished director of television commercials. In 2002, Morris directed a series of television ads for Apple Computer as part of a popular "Switch" campaign. The commercials featured ex-Windows users discussing their various bad experiences that motivated their own personal switches to Macintosh. One commercial in the series, starring a high-school friend of his son Hamilton Morris, named Ellen Feiss, became an Internet fad. Morris has directed hundreds of commercials for various companies and products, including Adidas, AIG, Cisco Systems, Citibank, Kimberly-Clark's Depend brand, Levi's, Miller High Life, Nike, PBS, The Quaker Oats Company, Southern Comfort, EA Sports, Toyota and Volkswagen. Many of these commercials are available on his website.
In 2002, Morris was commissioned to make a short film for the 75th Academy Awards. He was hired based on his advertising resume, not his career as a director of feature-length documentaries. Those interviewed ranged from Laura Bush to Iggy Pop to Kenneth Arrow to Morris's 15 year old son Hamilton Morris . Morris was nominated for an Emmy for this short film. He considered editing this footage into a feature length film, focusing specifically on Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane (This segment was later released on the second issue of Wholphin). Morris went on to make a second short for the 79th Academy Awards in 2007, this time interviewing the various nominees and asking them about their Oscar experiences.
In July 2004, Morris directed another series of commercials in the style of the "Switch" ads. This campaign featured Republicans who voted for Bush in the 2000 election giving their personal reasons for voting for Kerry in 2004. Upon completing more than 50 commercials, Morris had difficulty getting them on the air. Eventually the liberal advocacy group MoveOn PAC paid to air a few of the commercials. Morris eventually wrote an editorial for the New York Times discussing the commercials and Kerry's losing campaign.
In the fall of 2004, Morris also directed a series of noteworthy commercials for Sharp Electronics. The commercials enigmatically depicted various scenes from what appeared to be a short narrative that climaxed with a car crashing into a swimming pool. Each commercial showed a slightly different perspective on the events, and each ended with a cryptic weblink. The weblink was to a fake webpage advertising a prize offered to anyone who could discover the secret location of some valuable urns. It was in fact an alternate reality game. The original commercials can be found on Morris's website.
Morris also directed a series of spots for Reebok that featured rapper 50 Cent. The spots featured a title design by The Wilderness.
In 2003, Morris won the Best Documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards, for his film The Fog of War, about the career of Robert S. McNamara, who was famous for having been the Secretary of Defense who had led the nation into the Vietnam War under Presidents John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and who was also crucially involved in having helped President Kennedy avoid a Third World War over the issue of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the hauntingly re-enacted opening portion of the film concerning the background that McNamara and his pro-nuclear-war adversary U.S. General Curtis LeMay had shared together during World War II, director Morris brought out complexities in the character of McNamara, which the public had not previously recognized, but which largely shaped McNamara's positions regarding both the missiles-in-Cuba issue and the Vietnam War issue, and which therefore created the historical figure that McNamara turned out to be as the U.S. Secretary of Defense. In this documentary, Morris brought to a pinnacle the revolutionary technique that he had first introduced to the world in his 1988 The Thin Blue Line: the use of re-enactments in a documentary film—a technique (re-enactments) which had previously been thought to be inappropriate for use in a "documentary" film. However, by now, in 2004, the use of re-enactments in a documentary had become accepted by critics, and therefore this time around, Morris finally won the Academy Award that he should earlier have won also for his The Thin Blue Line, which had actually revolutionized documentary filmmaking.
In early 2010, a new Morris documentary had been submitted to several film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, and Telluride Film Festival.[8] The film, titled Tabloid,[9] features interviews with Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, who was convicted in absentia for the kidnap and indecent assault of a Mormon missionary in England during 1977.
Additionally Morris has been writing long-form journalism exploring different areas of his interest, published on the New York Times website. A collection of these essays, entitled Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, was published by Penguin Press on September 1, 2011. In November 2011, Morris premiered a documentary short, "The Umbrella Man," featuring Josiah "Tink" Thompson on the Kennedy assassination, on the opinion page of The New York Times online.
The Interrotron
The Interrotron is a device similar to a teleprompter: Errol and his subject each sit facing a camera. The image of each person's face is then projected onto a two-way mirror positioned in front of the lens of the other's camera. Instead of looking at a blank lens, then, both Morris and his subject are looking directly at a human face. (Diagram) Morris believes that the machine helps to explore the relationship between "monologue and language, and how people present themselves to camera, and express themselves to camera."[10]
The name "Interrotron" was coined by Morris's wife, who, according to Morris, "liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview."[11]
Filmography
- Gates of Heaven (1978)
- Vernon, Florida (1981)
- The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- The Dark Wind (1991)
- A Brief History of Time (1991)
- Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997)
- Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
- First Person (2000)
- The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
- Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
- Tabloid (2010)
- The Unknown Known (forthcoming)
Writing
Books
- Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (Penguin Press, 1 September 2011)
- A Wilderness Of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald (Penguin Press, 4 September 2012)
Essays
- "Will The Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up" (2007)
- "Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?" (2007)
- "Cartesian Blogging, Part One" (2007)
- "Play It Again, Sam (Re-Enactments, Part One)" (2008)
- "Play It Again, Sam (Re-Enactments, Part Two)" (2008)
- "The Most Curious Thing" (2008)
- "Cartesian Blogging, Part Two" (2008)
- "People in the Middle" (2008)
- "Photography as a Weapon" (2008)
- "Cartesian Blogging, Part Three" (2008)
- "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" (2009)
- "Whose Father Was He?" (2009)
- "Bamboozling Ourselves" (2009)
- "Seven Lies About Lying" (2009)
- "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock" (2009)
- "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is" (2010)
- "The Ashtray" (2011)
- "Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?" (2011)
- "What's In A Name?" (2012)
- "Are You An Optimist or a Pessimist?" (2012)
Awards and honors
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007)[12]
- Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival for Standard Operating Procedure
- Academy Award for Documentary Feature The Fog of War (2004)
- Best Documentary of the Year awards for The Fog of War (2003): the National Board of Review, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics, and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics.
- 2002 International Documentary Association list of the 20 all-time best documentaries: The Thin Blue Line (#2), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (#14)[13]
- Emmy for Best Commercial for PBS commercial "Photobooth" (2001)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1989)
- In December 2001, the United States' National Film Preservation Foundation announced that Morris's The Thin Blue Line would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, bringing the total at the time to 325.
- MacArthur Fellowship (1989)
- Washington Post Best Film of the Year for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- KFC "Breakout Bucket" Award (2009)
- New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics Best Documentary for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- Golden Horse for Best Foreign Film at the Taiwan International Film Festival for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture, from the Mystery Writers of America, for The Thin Blue Line (1989)
- Gates of Heaven (1978) has long been on Roger Ebert's list of the ten greatest films ever made.
References
- ^ "40 Best Directors". The Guardian (London). http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/page/0,11456,1082823,00.html. Retrieved May 2, 2010.
- ^ Schulz, Kathryn. "Errol Morris Looks for the Truth in Photography," New York Times Book Review, September 4, 2011; retrieved 2011-11-2-11
- ^ a b c d e f Singer, Mark (February 2, 1989). "Predilections". The New Yorker. http://www.errolmorris.com/content/profile/singer_predilections.html.
- ^ Gillespie, Pat (June 14, 2004). "Expert psychiatric witness was nicknamed Dr. Death". The Dallas Morning News. http://docs.newsbank.com/g/GooglePM/DM/lib00375,103386EA575FCA6A.html. Retrieved 2009-03-21.
- ^ "Groups Expel Psychiatrist Known for Murder Cases; Witness nicknamed 'Dr. Death' says license won't be affected by allegations". The Dallas Morning News. July 26, 1995. http://www.ccadp.org/DrDeath.htm. Retrieved 2009-03-21.
- ^ "Study: State relies too much on 'killer shrinks'". Fort Worth Star-Telegram. March 31, 2004. http://docs.newsbank.com/g/GooglePM/ST/lib00154,101B1DBE87233DDC.html. Retrieved 2008-03-11.
- ^ Livesey, Margot. "Errol Morris", BOMB Magazine, Fall, 1999. Retrieved July 29, 2011.
- ^ "TIFF unveils 2010 docs: Bruce Springsteen, Errol Morris and Werner Herzog in 3D", [1], National Post, August 4, 2010
- ^ "New Details on Errol Morris’ Next Documentary, TABLOID" [2], Collider, March 30th, 2010
- ^ "Interviews: Errol Morris" "[3]"
- ^ "THE FOG OF WAR: 13 Questions and Answers on the Filmmaking of Errol Morris by Errol Morris", FLM Magazine Winter 2004 "[4]"
- ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf. Retrieved June 3, 2011.
- ^ "International Documentary Association Top Twenty Documentaries of All-Time". Central Washington University -- Brooks Library (at Archive.org). Archived from the original on 13 February 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080213002531/http://www.lib.cwu.edu/media/intnationaldoc20.htm. Retrieved 2 September 2011.
External links
- Errol Morris's website
- Errol Morris on Twitter
- Errol Morris at the Internet Movie Database
- Errol Morris on Charlie Rose
- Errol Morris discusses his career on the 7th Avenue Project radio show
- Works by or about Errol Morris in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Errol Morris collected news and commentary at The New York Times
- Errol Morris at Rotten Tomatoes)
- Errol Morris (Jonathan Crow, Allmovie)
- Errol Morris (Nina Rehfeld, GreenCine)
- Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Errol Morris from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Werner Herzog in coversation with Errol Morris (The Believer)
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