Bio
Bill Guttentag is a double Oscar-winning feature film and documentary writer-producer-director. He wrote and directed Knife Fight (IFC) starring Rob Lowe, Julie Bowen, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Jamie Chung, which premiered at the Tribeca Film festival, and was released in 2013. He wrote and directed LIVE!, starring Eva Mendes and Andre Braugher, which was produced by Chuck Roven/Mosaic Media Group and distributed domestically by The Weinstein Company, and its international distribution included Lionsgate (2008). His films include Nanking (THINKFilm/Fortissimo), a theatrical documentary which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival that featured Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, and Jürgen Prochnow, and was shortlisted for an Oscar. He directed Soundtrack for a Revolution (Wild Bunch) which had its international premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and was shortlisted for an Oscar.
In 2003 Bill Guttentag won an Academy Award for the documentary Twin Towers (Universal). He has also has received a second Oscar, three additional Oscar nominations, a Peabody Award, three Emmy Awards, two additional Emmy nominations, two Writers Guild Award nominations, a Producers Guild Award nomination, and a Robert Kennedy Journalism Award.
His films have been selected for the Sundance Film Festival three times, Tribeca four times, and have played at numerous American and international film festivals. They have also received a number of special screenings internationally and in the US, including at the Harvard Kennedy School and the White House.
He 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.
Nanking won awards at a number of US and international film festivals (including Sundance and Hong Kong), and after its theatrical release, played on Cinemax. Guttentag was nominated for a WGA award for the film, and won a Peabody Award and Emmy Award. Nanking’s international release included China, where it became the highest grossing theatrical documentary in Chinese history.
Soundtrack for a Revolution had its US premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and its international premiere at Cannes. The film was released theatrically by Area 23a, and later aired on PBS. Guttentag was nominated for WGA and Producer’s Guild awards, and a Humanitas Prize for the film, which also won awards at several US and international film festivals.
His novel, Boulevard was published by Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton in 2011, and the French edition was published by Éditions Gallimard in 2013, where it is a finalist for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (award for crime novels). He co-wrote the non-fiction book Masters of Disaster – The Ten Commandments of Damage Control (Palgrave/Macmillan), which was published in December 2012. He has also written a number of nonfiction pieces, including for The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.
Bill Guttentag has directed films for HBO, ABC, CBS, Turner, and others. His films include The Cocaine War, an ABC News/Peter Jennings Reporting special on the drug war in South America, and You Don’t Have to Die, a film he made for HBO, for which he also won an Oscar.
Since 2001 he has been teaching a course on the film and television business at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.