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Martyn Burke | |
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 Martyn Burke in 2013 | |
| Born | 1952 Hamilton, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation(s) | Director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, documentary films |
Martyn Burke (born 1952) is a Canadian director, novelist and screenwriter from Toronto, Ontario. [1]
Born in Hamilton, Ontario, to Freda and Les Burke who immigrated from England to Canada during World War II as part of the British Civilian Military Authority, Martyn Burke graduated from Royal York High School in Toronto, Ontario. He attended McMaster University, where he played on the football team, the McMaster Marauders, and graduated with a degree in economics. After a brief stint working in television programming for a major advertiser, Burke paid his own way over to Viet Nam to work as a freelance journalist and photographer covering the war. His experience reporting on the Viet Nam War was the beginning of his writing and filmmaking career and served as the background for his first novel, Laughing War which was short-listed for a Books in Canada First Novel Award.
In 2018, the BBC listed the Paramount Pictures film Top Secret! , which Burke co-wrote, as one of the top one hundred film comedies of all time.
In 2012 he won the Peabody Award and was short-listed for an Academy Award for the film Under Fire: Journalists In Combat; in 2015 he was named winner of the Auteur Award by the International Press Association in Los Angeles; and in 2018 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. [2]
Burke lives in Santa Monica, California with his wife, Laura Morton.
After Viet Nam, Burke started writing, directing and producing documentaries for CBC Television winning a number of awards in Canada for his work. Among them are a Gemini Award for Best Documentary for Connections , a multi-part undercover report on the Mafia in Canada and America, and a Genie Award for his documentary, Witnesses, filmed inside the conflict zones of Afghanistan. Other conflict zone documentaries include The Week That Paddy Died, about the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
Often Burke's work as a documentary filmmaker inspired his novels or films. His documentary The KGB Connections, resulted in his later novel, The Commissar's Report, a satirical story about Soviet and United States relations during the Cold War. Producing and directing a segment for CBS's West 57th about early black R and B legends Ruth Brown and Bo Diddley being cheated out of record royalties, led to his novel Ivory Joe, the story of a 1950s family being caught up in the turmoil of the music industry at the dawn of Rock and Roll.
While still living in Canada, Burke began writing and directing theatrical films, such as John Candy's first film, The Clown Murders , and Power Play a.k.a. Coup d'Etat which starred Peter O'Toole and David Hemmings. He emigrated to California when Columbia Pictures optioned his book The Commissar's Report and brought him to Los Angeles to write the screenplay.
Continuing to produce and direct documentaries - his 2012 documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat was short-listed for an Academy Award and won a Peabody Award in 2012 - his theatrical and cable television film career expanded in Los Angeles and includes the Emmy Award nominated film for TNT, Pirates of Silicon Valley for which he was also nominated for a DGA Award as director. In 2015 he was awarded the International Press Academy's Auteur award. He wrote a number of HBO and TNT films including The Second Civil War starring Beau Bridges (for which Bridges won an Emmy) and James Earl Jones and Denis Leary, Sugartime starring John Turturro about Chicago mafia don Sam Giancana, and an adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm . His feature film credits include co-writing the Paramount Pictures cult classic comedy, Top Secret! and directing Avenging Angelo starring Sylvester Stallone, Anthony Quinn and Madeline Stowe.
Feature or Miniseries
Pirates of Silicon Valley is a 1999 American biographical drama television film directed by Martyn Burke and starring Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. Spanning the years 1971–1997 and based on Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's 1984 book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, it explores the impact that the rivalry between Jobs and Gates (Microsoft) had on the development of the personal computer. The film premiered on TNT on June 20, 1999.
John Marcum Wells is an American producer, writer, and director. He is best known for his role as showrunner and executive producer of the television series ER, Third Watch, The West Wing, Southland, Shameless, Animal Kingdom, and American Woman, as well as the miniseries Maid and the upcoming series Rescue: HI-Surf. His company, John Wells Productions, is currently based at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California. Wells is also a labor leader, having served as president of the Writers Guild of America, West from 1999 to 2001 and from 2009 to 2011. Wells serves on the Motion Picture & Television Fund (MPTF) Board of Governors. In 2011, he developed the series Shameless on Showtime, which ran for eleven seasons ending in 2021.
The Gathering Storm is a BBC–HBO co-produced television biographical film about Winston Churchill in the years just prior to World War II. The title of the film is that of the first volume of Churchill's largely autobiographical six-volume history of the war, which covered the period from 1919 to 3 September 1939, the day he became First Lord of the Admiralty.
Martha Coolidge is an American film director and former President of the Directors Guild of America. She has directed such films as Valley Girl, Real Genius and Rambling Rose.
George Wallace is a 1997 biographical two-part mini-series produced and directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Gary Sinise as George Wallace, the 45th governor of Alabama. The mini-series's teleplay, written by Marshall Frady and Paul Monash, is based on the 1996 biography Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace by Frady. Mare Winningham, Clarence Williams III, Joe Don Baker, Angelina Jolie, Terry Kinney, William Sanderson, Mark Rolston, Tracy Fraim, Skipp Sudduth, Ron Perkins, and Mark Valley also star.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968.
Jon Alpert is an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, known for his use of a cinéma vérité approach in his films.
Blake Neely is an Emmy Award-winning American composer, conductor, and orchestrator. He has been nominated for seven Emmy Awards for his work on Everwood, The Pacific, Pan Am, Pamela, a Love Story, Good Night Oppy, and won the Emmy (2021) for The Flight Attendant.
Bill Guttentag is an American dramatic and documentary film writer-producer-director. His films have premiered at the Sundance, Cannes, Telluride and Tribeca film festivals, and he has won two Academy Awards.
Connections: An Investigation into Organized Crime in Canada consisting of two television documentary programs broadcast as a CBC/Norfolk Communications Ltd coproduction transmitted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in two 90-minute segments on successive nights: Sunday, June 12 and Monday, June 13, 1977.
George Cooper Stevens Jr. is an American writer, playwright, director, and producer. He is the founder of the American Film Institute, creator of the AFI Life Achievement Award, and co-creator of the Kennedy Center Honors. He has also served as Co-Chairman of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
Charles Olivier is an American film and television writer, producer, playwright, journalist and editor. His work has won several Emmys, a G. Foster Peabody award, a Thurgood Marshall Humanitarian Award for Excellence in Journalism, as well as many other accolades. He and his films have taken top awards or been nominated at the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, and many more.
Shawn Efran is an American filmmaker, journalist, television producer, and media entrepreneur. His work, including as producer for 60 Minutes on CBS, and as founder and executive producer of Efran Films, has garnered critical acclaim, including seven Emmy awards, a Peabody, a Polk, and four Society of Professional Journalists National Distinguished Public Service Award.
Amy Schatz is an American director and producer of documentaries and children's shows and series. In March 2021, Schatz won the Directors Guild of America Award for Children's Programs for "We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest".
Jason Rosenfield is an American film editor, writer, director, producer and educator known mostly for his work in story-driven feature-length documentaries. Elected to membership in American Cinema Editors., an honorary society of distinguished editors, he has earned multiple Emmy Awards for his work and contributed to numerous additional awards, including an Emmy Award and three nominations, an Academy Award nomination, a Peabody and R.F. Kennedy Award.
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