Bill Guttentag
Lecturer in Organizational Behavior
Bill Guttentag is a two-time 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 January 2013; and LIVE!, starring Eva Mendes and Andre Braugher, which was produced by Chuck Roven/Mosaic Media Group. LIVE! was distributed domestically by The Weinstein Company and its international distribution included Lionsgate (2008). He also wrote and directed Nanking, a theatrical documentary which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and features Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, and Jürgen Prochnow. Nanking was distributed domestically by THINKFilm and internationally by Fortissimo Films, 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, and have played and won awards at numerous American and international film festivals. They have also received a number of special screenings internationally and in the US, including at the White House.
Nanking won awards at a number of US and international film festivals (including Sundance and Hong Kong), and after its theatrical release, aired 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 (Wild Bunch) had its international premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The film was released theatrically by Area 23a, and later aired on PBS. Guttentag was nominated for WGA and Producer’s Guild awards for the film, which also won awards at several international film festivals, and was short-listed for an Academy Award.
Bill Guttentag 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.
His novel Boulevard was published by Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton in 2010. The paperback edition came out in 2011, and the French edition will be published by Éditions Gallimard in May 2013. 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.
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 Graduated School of Business at Stanford University.
