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Robert Maier (born December 26, 1950, in Salisbury, Maryland) is an American writer, director, producer and production manager, best known for his long collaboration with filmmaker John Waters.
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Robert Maier (born December 26, 1950, in Salisbury, Maryland) is an American writer, director, producer and production manager, best known for his long collaboration with filmmaker John Waters.
Maier moved to the Baltimore suburb of Towson, Maryland in 1954. In 1973, after graduating from The American University in Washington, D.C. he moved to Baltimore's Fells Point neighborhood, where he first connected with John Waters' Dreamland studios group.
Maier worked with filmmaker John Waters for fifteen years as a production executive on Waters' films Polyester , Hairspray , Desperate Living , Female Trouble , and Cry-Baby . Maiers first film was the 30-minute underground film Love Letter to Edie (1974), a documentary on the life and career of Edith Massey, a regular actress in the John Waters films. It has played around the world for thirty years, been excerpted for programs on Channel 4, the Discovery Channel, the Criterion Collection, and New Line Cinema's John Waters boxed set. A remastered DVD version includes his "expanded director's cut".
Maier is a multimedia producer, writer, and director with a wide range of documentary, corporate and instructional TV experience. Other than Waters, he also worked with a dozen other low-budget movie-makers in Baltimore and New York City. Maier has numerous feature film credits. For New Line Cinema in New York, he was line producer of the award-winning Alone in the Dark , and the original Hairspray. Other New York independent feature credits include The House on Sorority Row , Fastlane, The Fox Affair, and Downtown 81 . He was also line producer of four feature-length world music documentaries for by documentarian Robert Mugge.
He lived for seven years in the 1970s and 1980s in the New York City area, then returned to Baltimore for several years. In 1989, he moved to Davidson, North Carolina where he worked in Charlotte as a public TV production executive and independent producer. During that time, he traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including a stint Ariana Television in Afghanistan helping to launch an educational TV network in Kabul.
His broadcast credits include the one-hour documentary Trappist which appeared on PBS, ABC and NBC networks, and a six-hour series for PBS, Seapower: A Global Journey. His half-hour documentary Nativity airs regularly as a Christmas special on PBS and the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
In non-broadcast production, Maier was the co-writer/producer of a 15-hour teacher development series, Creating the Learning Centered School, and 8 hours of productions for the Skylink Family and School Network. He has produced dozens of instructional videos, TV spots, marketing films, and two PBS how-to series, The Spirit of Cross Stitch and Homestretch.
Beginning in 2012 his interest in independent and art films led him to create several indie film series. They included The Davidson Film Club, Studio C Cinema at the Cornelius (NC) Art Center, and The Warehouse Cinema at The Warehouse Performing Art Center. They specialized in independent, documentary, foreign and classic films. He has lectured on the art of film in Celo, NC, Charlotte, NC, The Palace Theater in Chattanooga, TN. [1] [2]
Maier is the author of two textbooks: Handbook of Location Scouting and Management (Focal Press) and Guide to Essential Audio and Video Production (Full Page Publishing). He has taught graduate-level production courses at The American University's Summer Film and Video Institute and presented production workshops at the University of Maryland, Florida State University, Johns Hopkins University, Towson State University, and Davidson College.
Maier also wrote a 348-page memoir, Low Budget Hell: Making Underground Movies with John Waters that describes his experiences on Waters' and other low-budget films in the 1970s and 80s, ISBN 0983770808]. He has been a regular contributor to The Wrap and Indiewire . [3]
Maier earned a BA (Literature) from The American University and an MA in English (Professional Communications) from East Carolina University.
Maier was the Department Head in the Broadcasting Production program at Gaston College for nine years. He taught basic and advanced level courses in broadcasting over a ten year period in digital audio and video production. Additionally, he designed and supervised installation of new audio and video production facilities for the program in the late 1990s and into the 2020s. They included a multi-track digital recording studio and a high definition multi-camera digital video studio, including several video and audio editing rooms, and an Internet Radio production facility with tie-lines to the college broadcast radio station, WSGE-91.7 FM. This included five field portable digital recording packages.
National Educational Television (NET) was an American educational broadcast television network owned by the Ford Foundation and later co-owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It operated from May 16, 1954, to October 4, 1970, and was succeeded by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has memberships with many television stations that were formerly part of NET.
Harris Glenn Milstead, better known by the stage name Divine, was an American actor, singer and drag queen. Closely associated with independent filmmaker John Waters, Divine was a character actor, usually performing female roles in cinematic and theatrical productions and adopted a female drag persona for his music career.
Frontline is an investigative documentary program distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Episodes are produced at WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts. The series has covered a variety of domestic and international issues, including terrorism, elections, environmental disasters, and other sociopolitical issues. Since its debut in 1983, Frontline has aired in the U.S. for 42 seasons, and has won critical acclaim and awards in broadcast journalism. In 2024, Frontline won its first Oscar at the 96th Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature, 20 Days in Mariupol, made by a team of AP Ukrainian journalists. Frontline has produced over 800 documentaries from both in-house and independent filmmakers, 200 of which are available online.
Pink Flamingos is a 1972 American black comedy film by John Waters. It is part of what Waters has labelled the "Trash Trilogy", which also includes Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). The film stars the countercultural drag queen Divine as a criminal living under the name of Babs Johnson, who is proud to be "the filthiest person alive". While living in a trailer with her mother Edie, son Crackers, and companion Cotton, Divine is confronted by the Marbles, a pair of criminals envious of her reputation who try to outdo her in filth. The characters engage in several grotesque, bizarre, and explicitly crude situations, and upon the film's re-release in 1997 it was rated NC-17 by the MPAA "for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail". It was filmed in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland, where Waters and most of the cast and crew grew up.
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John Samuel Waters Jr. is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and artist. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films, including Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). Waters wrote and directed the comedy film Hairspray (1988), which was later adapted into a hit Broadway musical and a 2007 musical film. Other films he has written and directed include Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), and Cecil B. Demented (2000). His films contain elements of post-modern comedy and surrealism.
Filmmaking or film production is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, beginning with an initial story, idea, or commission. Production then continues through screenwriting, casting, pre-production, shooting, sound recording, post-production, and screening the finished product before an audience, which may result in a film release and exhibition. The process is nonlinear, as the director typically shoots the script out of sequence, repeats shots as needed, and puts them together through editing later. Filmmaking occurs in a variety of economic, social, and political contexts around the world, and uses a variety of technologies and cinematic techniques to make theatrical films, episodic films for television and streaming platforms, music videos, and promotional and educational films.
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Hairspray is a 1988 American comedy film written and directed by John Waters, starring Sonny Bono, Ruth Brown, Divine, Debbie Harry, Ricki Lake in her film debut, and Jerry Stiller, with special appearances by Ric Ocasek in his final film and Pia Zadora. Hairspray was a dramatic departure from Waters's earlier works, with a much broader intended audience. Hairspray's PG is the least restrictive rating a Waters film has received; most of his previous films were rated X by the MPAA. Set in 1962 Baltimore, Maryland, the film revolves around self-proclaimed "pleasantly plump" teenager Tracy Turnblad as she pursues stardom as a dancer on a local TV show and rallies against racial segregation.
Dreamlanders are the cast and crew of regulars whom John Waters has used in his films. The term comes from the name of Waters' production company, Dreamland Productions.
KUHT is a PBS member television station in Houston, Texas, United States. Owned by the University of Houston System, it is sister to NPR member station KUHF. The two stations share studios and offices in the Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting on the campus of the University of Houston. KUHT's transmitter is located near Missouri City, in unincorporated northeastern Fort Bend County. In addition, the station leased some of its studio operations to Tegna-owned CBS affiliate KHOU from August 2017 to February 2019 when the latter's original studios were inundated by Hurricane Harvey.
Towson High School is a high school in Baltimore County, Maryland, United States, founded in 1873. The school's current stone structure was built in 1949. Located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson and serving the surrounding communities of Towson, Lutherville, and Ruxton, it is part of the Baltimore County Public Schools system, the 25th largest school system in the nation as of 2005. Area middle schools that feed into Towson High are Dumbarton Middle School, Ridgely Middle School, and Loch Raven Technical Academy, although students from other areas attend the Law and Public Policy magnet school.
Hairspray is a 2007 musical romantic comedy film based on the 2002 Broadway musical of the same name, which in turn was based on John Waters's 1988 comedy film of the same name. Produced by Ingenious Media and Zadan/Meron Productions, and adapted from both Waters's 1988 script and Thomas Meehan and Mark O'Donnell's book for the stage musical by screenwriter Leslie Dixon, the film was directed and choreographed by Adam Shankman and has an ensemble cast including John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Amanda Bynes, James Marsden, Queen Latifah, Brittany Snow, Zac Efron, Elijah Kelley, Allison Janney, and Nikki Blonsky in her feature film debut. Set in 1962 Baltimore, Maryland, the film follows the "pleasantly plump" teenager Tracy Turnblad (Blonsky) as she pursues stardom as a dancer on a local television dance show and rallies against racial segregation.
R. J. Cutler is an American filmmaker, documentarian, television producer and theater director.
Lynn Tomlinson is an animator and artist. She is a professor at Towson University. She lives in Baltimore, MD, with her husband, Craig J Saper, and her family. She has taught at Cornell University, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Delaware College of Art and Design, Richard Stockton College, and Tufts University. Her films have been screened at film festivals around the world over the past two decades. She has received awards and grants including several Mid-Atlantic Emmys, an ITVS production grant, and Individual Artist Fellowships from the State Arts Councils of Pennsylvania, Florida, and Maryland.
King Gimp is a 1999 documentary that was awarded the 2000 Oscar for Best Short Subject Documentary and 2000 Peabody Award. King Gimp follows the life of artist Dan Keplinger of Towson, Maryland, who has cerebral palsy. Filmmakers Susan Hannah Hadary and William A. Whiteford, of the University of Maryland Video Press and Tapestry International Productions produced the film. Geof Bartz, A.C.E. edited the final version.
Craig B. Fisher was an American network and cable television producer. He spent more than 25 years with ABC, CBS, and NBC News Division in New York and Washington, D.C., and more than two decades as a freelance writer and producer. Fisher was responsible for over one thousand hours of live, film and videotape, studio and location television and corporate productions.
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