Breaking Up

Robert Greenwald (born August 28, 1945) is an American film director, film producer, and political activist, noted in the 2000s for his documentaries critical of Fox News and of the George W. Bush administration, as well as numerous award-winning television movies from the 1980s and 1990s.

Greenwald was born and raised in New York City, the son of Ruth and Harold Greenwald. He attended the city’s High School of Performing Arts. He was active in New York theater, directing the plays Me and Bessie (1975) and I Have a Dream (1976), a play based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., with Billy Dee Williams playing King. Greenwald then moved to Los Angeles, where he launched a successful career as a director for television.

In 1977, he 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, the critically-acclaimed television movie starring Farrah Fawcett about domestic abuse. During this period he produced or directed many television movies; The New York Times would later characterize this work as “commercially respectable B-list movies”.

Greenwald’s first foray into feature films, directing Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu (1980), was not as successful – the film was a critical and commercial failure, but later became a cult classic and the basis for a Broadway musical. Years later, he returned to making features, producing and directing Breaking Up (1997), starring Salma Hayek and Russell Crowe, as well as Steal This Movie! (2000), the well-received biopic of 1960s and 1970s activist Abbie Hoffman.

After Steal This Movie!, Greenwald turned toward making issues-oriented documentary films, most notably Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004). His 2006 full-length documentary, Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers, examines corporate business and profits behind the War in Iraq. Greenwald was also the director and producer of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), about the impact the retail chain has had on American communities. Greenwald’s approach has been to adapt the principles of guerrilla filmmaking to political documentaries, using small budgets and short shooting schedules to produce timely films and then distributing them on DVDs or the Internet in affiliation with politically sympathetic groups such as Moveon.org.

Greenwald is the founder of Brave New Films, a media company that has published additional documentary films such as Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, The Big Buy: Tom Delay’s Stolen Congress, and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Brave New Films has also released a pair of television series entitled ACLU Freedom Files and The Sierra Club Chronicles. Brave New Films has recently formed a partnership with The Young Turks to provide live coverage of political events via streaming video.

Greenwald’s films have garnered 25 Emmy Award nominations, four CableACE Award nominations, two Golden Globe nominations, the Peabody Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Award, and eight Awards of Excellence from the Film Advisory Board. He was awarded the 2002 Producer of the Year Award by the American Film Institute.

For his activism, Greenwald has been honored by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the New Roads School, Consumer Attorney’s Association of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and the Office of the Americas. He is co-founder (with actor Mike Farrell) of Artists for Winning Without War, whose purpose is to advance progressive causes and voice opposition to the Iraq War.—wikipedia