Erik Jendresen


Erik Jendresen is an author as well as a writer and producer for plays, television, and film.
As co-creator, lead writer and a supervising producer of the critically acclaimed mini-series Band of Brothers for HBO in 2001, Jendresen was one of the recipients of that year's Emmy Award for "Outstanding Miniseries", which he shared with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, among others. Jendresen also shared an Emmy nomination for that show in the category of "Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special". The show also resulted in a Golden Globe Award for "Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television", and 20 other awards, including the Peabody Award.
As a writer/ producer for film, his current projects include The Mariner ; Mission: Blacklist ; Saint-Ex ; Aloft ; Solo ; and an adaptation of Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth. Earlier film projects include Star Trek: The Beginning, Sublime, starring Tom Cavanagh and Kathleen York, Otis and The Big Bang, and Ithaca - an adaptation of William Saroyan's The Human Comedy.
As a writer, producer, and showrunner for television, his current projects include Special, a series based on the documentary filmmakers of the 1960s ; a series based on the stories of the French Foreign Legion ; The War, a five-season series about the unending interconnected conflicts of the 20th century ; The 43, a six-hour mini-series about WWII British ex-servicemen fighting fascism on their home soil ; A Coloured Man's Reminiscences, an eight-hour miniseries chronicling the story of James Madison’s slave, Paul Jennings ; Castner's Cutthroats, a six-hour miniseries about the Battle of the Aleutians ; Rocket Men, a ten-hour miniseries about Wernher von Braun and the men who took us to the moon and beyond; Climb to Conquer, a ten-hour miniseries about the 10th Mountain Division in World War II ; and Shot All to Hell, a four-hour miniseries about the James-Younger Gang and the Northfield, Minnesota, raid.
Previous projects include Killing Lincoln, co-produced with Tony and Ridley Scott for the National Geographic Channel; a series based on the Francis Ford Coppola film, The Conversation ; The Pony Express ; an eight-hour adaptation of Gregory Maguire's novel, ; an eight-hour miniseries Majestic-12; and The Command - a series set in the world of the Joint Special Operations Command.
Jendresen also has to his credit several books, most of which deal with the socio-anthropology of Peru and the Amazon Basin, including Dance of the Four Winds and its sequel, Island of the Sun, and the children's book, The First Story Ever Told. Hanuman is a re-telling for children of a portion of the Ramayana.
He is also a playwright.
Jendresen lives in Sausalito, California, aboard the M.V. Hindeloopen, 112-year-old riveted wrought iron vessel which saw service during the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. He is married to Venus Madora Aslee Bobis, Program Director of the Partial Hospitalization Program at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California, San Francisco, and his partner in Pilothouse Pictures.
He is an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.