Robert Greenwald


Robert Greenwald is the founder of Brave New Films, a nonprofit film and advocacy organization whose work is distributed for free in concert with nonprofit partners and movements in order to educate and mobilize for progressive causes. With Brave New Films, Greenwald has made investigative documentaries such as ', ', ', ', Rethink Afghanistan, Koch Brothers Exposed, and , as well as many short investigative films and internet videos.
Before launching Brave Films in 2000, Greenwald produced and/or directed more than 65 TV movies, miniseries and films as well as major theatrical releases. His early body of work includes Steal This Movie!, starring Vincent D'Onofrio as 60s radical Abbie Hoffman; Breaking Up, starring Russell Crowe and Salma Hayek; A Woman of Independent Means with Sally Field; The Burning Bed with Farrah Fawcett; and Xanadu, for which he won the inaugural Golden Raspberry award for worst director.

Early life

Greenwald was born and raised in New York City. He is son of the prominent psychotherapist Harold Greenwald, and the nephew of choreographer Michael Kidd. He attended the city's High School of Performing Arts. Greenwald started his directing career in the theater, with The People Vs. Ranchman, A Long Time Coming and A Long Time Gone, Me and Bessie and I Have a Dream, a play based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., with Billy Dee Williams playing King.

Television and feature film career

Greenwald moved to Los Angeles in 1972, where he continued working as a theater director at the Mark Taper Forum. He later launched a career as a director for television, establishing first Moonlight Productions and then Robert Greenwald Productions, and began creating theatrical films, television movies, miniseries and documentaries with a distinct social and political sensibility. Moonlight Productions was responsible for 34 films, and RGP has brought more than 45 films to audiences worldwide. In 1977, Greenwald received his first of three Emmy Award nominations for producing the television movie 21 Hours at Munich about the massacre at the 1972 Olympics. His next Emmy nomination came in 1984 for directing The Burning Bed, one of the most-watched television movies of all time. Based on a true story, The Burning Bed has been credited as "a turning point in the fight against domestic violence." Greenwald also directed theatrical films such as Breaking Up, Steal This Movie! and Xanadu.
Xanadu received mostly negative reviews. The film barely broke even at the box office in its initial release. A double feature of Xanadu and another musical released at about the same time, Can't Stop the Music, inspired John J. B. Wilson to create the Golden Raspberry Awards, an annual event "dishonoring" what is considered the worst in cinema for a given year. Xanadu won the first Razzie for Worst Director and was nominated for six other awards.

Documentary work

Greenwald turned to documentary filmmaking in 2002, executive-producing three political documentaries known as "The Un Trilogy": ' ; ', which Greenwald also directed; and '.
At Brave New Films, Greenwald has produced and directed numerous feature-length documentaries, along with many short films and videos. In 2013, Greenwald released ' and a documentary about the U.S. government's drone program, . His most recent full-length feature documentary, Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA, illustrates the connection between gun industry profits and gun deaths in America.
Following the release of 16 Women and Donald Trump, which featured women who publicly accused President Trump of sexual misconduct, Greenwald hosted three of the accusers at a December, 2017 press conference in New York.

Distribution and impact

Typically Greenwald's approach has been to adapt the principles of guerrilla filmmaking to political documentaries, using small budgets and short shooting schedules to produce films and then distributing them on DVDs or the Internet in affiliation with politically sympathetic groups such as MoveOn.org. BNF's methods are "rewriting the book on how movies are made and distributed." Greenwald's innovative model is said to be "working magnificently": "Millions of viewers have seen BNF films via grassroots 'house parties' and independent online DVD sales", as well as in more traditional theater screenings and online.
As a pioneer in alternative methods for effective progressive political campaigns, Greenwald has eschewed traditional distribution models of studio and network releases. He was among the first to post political online shorts and viral videos on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet, as well as releasing full-length documentaries online in a series of “real time” chapters. Greenwald's group takes full advantage of a variety of media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, and harnesses new distribution channels as soon as they emerge.
This approach has "inspired hundreds of thousands of people to take action and forced pressing issues into the mainstream media." He has been called "one of the most prominent and influential voices in new media." According to a Brave New Films website, as of 2013 its documentaries "have been streamed across all 7 continents and have been viewed over 70 million times."

Politics

Various sources have described Greenwald's political activism as left-wing.
Greenwald has lectured at Harvard University for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and speaks frequently across the country about his work. He addressed the United States House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense regarding war profiteering on May 10, 2007. In 2013, Greenwald went to Capitol Hill once again, to discuss weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles with lawmakers. At a Congressional briefing, Greenwald testified with the Rafiq Rehman family, the first Pakistani drone strike survivors to appear before Congress. Since May 2005, Greenwald has been a contributing blogger to The Huffington Post.

Selected filmography

Feature-length documentaries

Greenwald's work has earned 25 Emmy Award nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, the Peabody Award and the Robert Wood Johnson Award. He was awarded the 2002 Producer of the Year Award by the American Film Institute. He has been honored for his investigative film work by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the Liberty Hill Foundation; the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; Physicians for Social Responsibility; Consumer Attorney's Association of Los Angeles; Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and the Office of the Americas.
Greenwald's films have garnered the following nominations and awards:
Robert Greenwald has been the recipient of the following awards for his activism: