Richard Brick
Adjunct Professor
On theatrical features films, Richard Brick was the co-producer of three Woody Allen pictures: Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity and Sweet and Lowdown and of Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream. He produced Robert M. Young’s Caught and Joe Vasquez’ Hangin’ with the Homeboys. He was the unit production manager of Mike Nichol’s Silkwood and Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart and was the Location Manager of Milos Forman’s Ragtime. He also served as the production manager on Michael Roemer’s Pilgrim…Farewell, of John Lowenthal’s The Trials of Alger Hiss, which won the Grand Prix at the 12th Annual Nyon Film Festival, and on Paul Ronder’s Part of the Family, winner of the Prix George Sadoul, a feature documentary made for PBS and released theatrically in Europe.
In television Brick was senior producer of a two-hour HD special, Peter Jennings Reporting – UFOs: Seeing is Believing broadcast by ABC in 2005. In 2003, he was senior producer of another two-hour special for ABC, Peter Jennings Reporting – The JFK Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy .On Peter Gimbel’s syndicated television feature documentary, Andrea Doria: the Final Chapter, he was associate producer and production manager. He served as production manager on Waris Hussein’s Little Gloria…Happy At Last, a television mini-series, and Brick was the production manager of Westinghouse Broadcasting’s bicentennial television series Six American Families, winner of a Gabriel and DuPont/Columbia Awards. Brick also produced and directed Last Stand Farmer.
Brick had a highly successful tenure as the first Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, 1992-94. He was Chairman of the M.F.A. degree film program at Columbia University, 1987-89, from which he received his M.F.A., and where he continues as an Adjunct Professor in the producing program. He served on the board of directors of the Independent Feature Project, 1985-2001, and as Chairman, 1995-97. In 1985 he founded, and continues to Chair, the Advisory Board of The Geri Ashur Screenwriting Award, a $10,000 biennial award administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Brick is actively developing with Ira Deutchman, Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-seller Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America; with Mark Obenhaus, James Salter’s stunning mountain climbing novel Solo Faces; and with Kenneth Murphy, Fire on the Beach, the true story of former slave Richard Etheridge, who become the first African American “Keeper” of the Pea Island Life Saving Station in North Carolina in the 1880s. He is Executive Producer of Shadow 19, a sci-fi feature in development by Joel Silver at Warner Brothers. Brick is a member of the Producers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America, where he was First Vice-Chair of the Eastern Assistant Directors/Unit Production Managers Council, 2002-08, a Delegate to the National Conventions in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, a member of the PAC Leadership Council since 2005, and served on the National Negotiating Committee 2010-11.
Brick received an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Grant in 1977; a Vermont Council on the Arts’ Grant-in-Aid in 1974, and the Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues’ Regrant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1974. His awards include a shared 2004 Radio-Television News Directors Edward R. Murrow Award and a shared British Broadcasting Press Guild Television Award: Best Single Documentary, 2003, for The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy; Best Feature nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards for Hangin’ with the Homeboys in 1991; the 1993 Motion Picture Bookers Club Award; the Directors Guild of America Best Picture nomination as UPM for Places in the Heart in 1984; the John Grierson Award for Social Documentary and the Blue Ribbon from the 1976 American Film Festival, and the 1975 Gold Ducat of the Mannheim Internationale Filmwoche, all for Last Stand Farmer.
Syllabus (PDF): Pre-Production – Brick – Fall 2011