Bill Guttentag
Lecturer in Organizational Behavior
Bill Guttentag is a two-time Oscar-winning documentary and feature film writer-producer-director. Live!, a dramatic feature he wrote and directed starring Eva Mendes, Andre Braugher, and David Krumholtz, was produced by Chuck Roven/Mosaic Media Group. The film is being distributed domestically this year by The Weinstein Company, and its international distribution includes Lionsgate. Bill Guttentag also wrote and directed Nanking, a documentary which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The film includes a stage reading he wrote that features Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, and Jürgen Prochnow. Nanking was released theatrically last winter by THINKFilm.
In 2003 Bill Guttentag won an Oscar for the documentary Twin Towers (Universal). It was his second Academy Award; the first was for You Don't Have to Die, a film he made for HBO.
He has also received three additional Oscar nominations, two Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and a Robert Kennedy Journalism Award. His films have been selected for the Sundance Film Festival three times and have played and won awards at numerous American and international film festivals. His films have received a number of special screenings internationally and in the US, including at the White House.
He recently completed Soundtrack for a Revolution (Wild Bunch) which had its international premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and its US premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film is about music and the civil rights movement and features updated renditions of classic civil rights songs. Musicians performing in the film include John Legend, Joss Stone, The Roots, and Wyclef Jean. The film’s executive producer is Danny Glover.
Bill Guttentag created and executive produced the NBC series Crime & Punishment, which ran for three seasons (2002-2004). The series was part of the Law & Order family of shows, and was created with Dick Wolf, who was also an executive producer. Over the series’ run, nearly every show was in the Nielsen top 20.
His first novel, Boulevard, will be published by Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton in February 2010.
His recent film Nanking won awards at a number of US and international film festivals (including Sundance). Guttentag was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award for Nanking, the film was short-listed for an Academy Award, and won a Peabody Award. Nanking was also released in China and became the highest grossing theatrical documentary in Chinese history.
Guttentag has directed films for HBO, ABC, CBS and others. His films include Assassinated: The Last Days of Kennedy and King (TNT/CNN) on the final year in the lives of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and The Cocaine War, an ABC News/Peter Jennings Reporting special on the drug war in South America.
Since 2001 he has been teaching a class on the film and television business at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
