Festival Keynote: Filmmaker Michael Epstein

Transformation in Art, Music, and Film

The LaSells Stewart Center, Oregon State University

Friday: 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM

This year's keynote speaker, Michael Epstein, is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning director, writer and producer.

Michael Epstein is an Academy Award-nominated documentary producer, director and writer whose work has been awarded two George Foster Peabody Awards, an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, as well as numerous other distinctions.  His films have screened in dozens of international film festivals, and been broadcast throughout the world.  He is also a successful commercial director.

Epstein's latest effort was LENNONYC, which had its world premier at the 2010 New York Film Festival, and was awarded the George Foster Peabody Award.  The film traces the last decade of John Lennon's life in his adopted city, New York. In October 2010, on what would have been John Lennon's 70^th birthday, twenty thousand people showed up for a free screening of Epstein's film in New York's Central Park.  LENNONYC was also broadcast nationally on the PBS series American Master in November, 2010, and has played in dozens of international film festivals and been broadcast all around the world.

In 1996 Epstein's The Battle Over Citizen Kane, produced and directed along with Thomas Lennon, was also awarded the George Foster Peabody Award.  The Battle Over Citizen Kane was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, as well as an Emmy for Outstanding Informational Special.  The film documented the lives of director Orson Welles and publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and told the story of their fight over the distribution of Citizen Kane.  The Battle Over Citizen Kane was an official selection at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, and 1996 the Berlin International Film Festival.

In January 2008, Epstein's Grand Central was broadcast on the PBS series The American Experience.  The one-hour film tells the story of one of America's most significant landmarks.  The New York Times in its praise for Grand Central, called the film "brilliantly entertaining," and The Boston Globe noted that "Epstein captures the magic of the building and its wild history."

Epstein's Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company (2006) was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Non-Fiction Filmmaking.  Combat Diary, the story of the hardest-hit combat unit in the Iraq War, has been hailed by Newsweek as "the best in a newly crowded field of documentaries on Iraq."  The Los Angeles Times called Combat Diary "a masterful documentary…pitch perfect."  The Marine Corps Times praised the film as "a stark, honest and gripping portrait of idealism tempered by the pain of brothers lost in war."

In April of 2006 Epstein premiered Antietam on The History Channel.  Produced in association with Radical Media, Antietam was the premier episode for 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America, which won the Emmy for Best Non-Fiction Series (2006).  Antietam set a new visual standard for historic filmmaking. Writing in Variety, Brian Lowry noted Antietam's "sense of movement and pace while capturing the horror of the battle as much through the sharp observations of its academic witnesses as its arresting visual imagery."

In 2004 Epstein released Final Cut: The Making and Un-Making of Heaven's Gate.  It is the story of one of the greatest flops in Hollywood history, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, and the demise of the studio that finance it, United Artists.  Final Cut was selected to be part of the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, and had it's theatrical premier at New York's Film Forum in October 2004. It was hailed by the New York Times as "a documentary ten times as engrossing as the film that is its subject."  The film has played at dozens of festivals world-wide.

In 2003 Epstein released None Without Sin, an examination of the Hollywood blacklist as seen through the friendship of playwright Arthur Miller and director Elia Kazan.  The two-hour documentary was broadcast on the PBS series American Masters in September, 2003 to critical acclaim and has been rebroadcast a dozen times since.  It was also award the prestigious Banff Television Award for best International Arts Program for 2003.

In 2000 Epstein's Hitchcock, Selznick & The End of Hollywood was awarded the Primetime Emmy for Best Non-Fiction Series (representative program), and the Best Arts Documentary at the Banff International Television Festival.  The film, which explored the seven-year relationship between director Alfred Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick, was also nominated for a Writer's Guild Award.  Hitchcock, Selznick & The End of Hollywood was selected to compete in the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, and played in over two-dozen international film festivals.

Along with Thomas Lennon, Epstein also produced and wrote The Hurricane of '38, for which he and Lennon were nominated for a Writers Guild award, and The Choice '92, which Lennon and Epstein, along with Richard Ben Cramer were awarded a Writers Guild award.

Epstein's commercial work includes a numerous short internet-only documentaries for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and "Carbon Caps=Hard Hats" campaign for the Environmental Defense Fund. Epstein also directed fourteen short films for Lincoln Motors' Dream campaign.