Jeff Feuerzeig (born 1964) is an American film director and screenwriter best known for The Devil and Daniel Johnston, his profile of cult musician and outsider artist Daniel Johnston, for which he was awarded the Directing prize for Documentary at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and which was released theatrically in March 2006 by Sony Pictures Classics.
History
Feuerzeig grew up in Hazlet, New Jersey and the Morganville section of Marlboro Township.
[Falkenstein, Michelle. "From Maplewood To Sundance", The New York Times, January 30, 2005. Accessed August 10, 2012. "In 1988, Daniel Johnston, a songwriter, gave a legendary concert in Pier Platters, an independent Hoboken record store. He had a mental breakdown during the concert and ran amok for two weeks, said Jeff Feuerzeig, who grew up in Hazlet and Morganville and attended Trenton State College."] He came of age just in time to receive the full impact of the punk rock wave and its attendant do-it-yourself aesthetic, an influence that dominates his approach and subject matter to the present. He graduated with honors from Trenton State College in 1986 and immediately enrolled in New York University's six-month Intensive Filmmaking Program, where he studied under Thierry Pathé.
He has spent 25 years directing commercials for a wide assortment of corporate clients, including
IBM, Delta Air Lines and Budweiser.
In 1990, he directed
Jon Hendricks: The Freddie Sessions, a profile of
Jon Hendricks and member of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. The half-hour film featured appearances by
George Benson,
Al Jarreau and
Bobby McFerrin and was broadcast nationally on PBS.
Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King (1994)
In 1993, marshaling his continuing interest in the outer limits of alternative music, Feuerzeig directed a 16mm feature documentary on brothers
Jad Fair and their seminal proto-punk band
Half Japanese, a passion project that was booked for an independent two-week run at
Film Forum in New York and subsequently distributed by Tara Releasing in art-houses nationwide – often in conjunction with the band playing full concerts after the screening.
" Half Japanese has the feel of a complete put-on," wrote Stephen Holden in The New York Times.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)
Over a five-year period beginning in 2000, Feuerzeig created an innovative and sympathetic portrait of West Virginia-born cult singer-songwriter and outsider artist Daniel Johnston, whose early-20s onset of manic-depression and schizophrenia enabled him to create a nakedly confessional body of work unfiltered by the limitations of his contemporaries. Working from the conceit of clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s
(1993), and utilizing techniques from the
New Journalism of the 1970s (the creation of first-person POV and internal monologue through audio cassette letters, journal entries, home movies, etc.), Feuerzeig documented the musician-artist’s struggles with his private demons – many of them quite literal in his own mind – elevating what might have been a footnote in rock history to world acclaim.
New York Press film critic Matt Zoller Seitz said of Devil: “A true nonfiction film, a movie that tries to do with sound and image what journalists like Nick Tosches ( Dino) and Norman Mailer ( Armies of the Night) tried to do with prose, bending prose into poetry to find a more subjective route to truth.”
The film appeared on many best of the decade lists.
The Real Rocky (2011)
On October 25, 2011, the
ESPN network broadcast
The Real Rocky, an original one-hour documentary directed by Feuerzeig as part of its ongoing documentary showcase series, original titled
30 for 30, and more recently re-branded as "ESPN Films." The film chronicles the ongoing controversy surrounding the true identity of the eponymous title character from the Sylvester Stallone
Rocky franchise, which public opinion and folk wisdom has long held was based on New Jersey heavyweight boxer
Chuck Wepner, “The Bayonne Bleeder,” whose chief claim was that he once went 15 rounds with
Muhammad Ali, even knocking him down in the ninth round (by, as it was later revealed, stepping on his foot).
Using collage graphics somewhere between Roy Lichtenstein's Pop Art confections and the ransom note typography of Jamie Reid's Sex Pistols album cover, the film spells out Rocky's influence on Wepner's personal life – much of it catastrophic, such as his descent into cocaine and a brief stint in federal prison. To provide both insider insight and period detail, Feuerzeig assembles a round table of sportswriters and Jersey stalwarts reminiscent of the Carnegie Deli regulars in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose.
According to Variety’s Brian Lowry, "For anyone familiar with boxing or even just the "Rocky" franchise, "The Real Rocky" – shot partly in black and white to heighten its cinematic feel, and featuring boxing reporters as a sort of Greek chorus – is the genuine article."
Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016)
A journalist friend alerted Feuerzeig to the story of writer
Laura Albert, who had used an avatar,
JT LeRoy, as the credited author of her fiction
Sarah and
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. “I devoured all the pieces about it and after reading them I just had this feeling there was much more to the story than we were being told. What was glaringly missing was the voice of the author of the fiction both on and off the page. I wanted to hear that voice.”
Feuerzeig contacted Albert, who for years had turned down the other documentary filmmakers that approached her. He persuaded her of his seriousness about telling her story, and after showing her his film The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Retrieved 22 December 2022. Working from Albert’s archives, Feuerzeig spent eight days filming an in-depth interview with her, which he used as the spine of his feature-length documentary. “She shared everything one hundred percent honestly,” Feuerzeig insisted.
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2016, and then made the rounds of international film festivals; it was released nationwide to American theaters on September 9, 2016.
Other projects
In 2009, Feuerzeig began production on a proposed feature documentary about artist
Shepard Fairey, the lawsuit brought against him by the
Associated Press and his
Fair Use defense in creating the iconic Barack Obama "Hope" poster during the 2008 presidential election. To be called
The Boy Who Cried Hope, the film was postponed indefinitely following revelations that Fairey had lied about the photographic source material for the poster.
In April 2011, Feuerzeig directed The Dude, an 18-minute documentary profile of Jeff Dowd, a long-time producer's rep for independent films and putative inspiration for the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski.
On 9 April 2013, called into The Best Show to discuss his "Piano Van"
Upcoming Projects
Feuerzeig has completed the screenplay for
God Bless Tiny Tim with filmmaker/playwright
Julien Nitzberg. This portrait of the latterday crooner and accidental cultural icon is currently in development.
He is also slated to direct
The Bleeder, a biopic of boxer
Chuck Wepner, whose life story inspired (and was in turn affected by) the Sylvester Stallone film
Rocky. Feuerzeig co-wrote the script with
Jerry Stahl, and the film is set to star
Liev Schreiber as Wepner.
[Rosenberg, Adam; "EXCLUSIVE: Liev Schreiber Wants to Tell Real-Life 'Rocky' Story Next, Director Named" [2], Mtv.com, February 10, 2006]
Filmography
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Jon Hendricks: The Freddie Sessions (1990)
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Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King (1994)
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The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)
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The Dude (2011)
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The Real Rocky (2011)
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(2016)
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Chuck (2016) - Writer
External links
