By:Jeff Lipton
Morris- film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, is a documentary on the former secretary of defense, who served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and subsequently became president of the World Bank. The film combines an interview with McNamara, in which he discusses some of the tragedies and glories of the 20th century, with archival footage. It features an original score by Philip Glass.
This was the first Academy Award nomination for the 56-year-old Morris, a nonfiction director. He could not be reached for comment on his Oscar.
Prior to the McNamara profile, Morris was best known for his controversial 1988 feature, The Thin Blue Line, an investigation of the 1976 murder of a Dallas policeman. Morris actually helped solve the crime by using unorthodox film techniques to help dramatize the facts.
I sometimes joke about being not just a director-producer or writer-director, but a director-detective, Morris said at the time.
His works have earned him distinction as one of the most important and influential nonfiction filmmakers of his generation.
Morris was born in 1948 in Hewlett, the son of the late Dr. Abner Morris and the late Cinabelle Morris Esterman, a former music teacher at the Woodmere Elementary School who lived in Lawrence. Morris- mother later married Dr. Benjamin Esterman, an ophthalmologist.
Morris attended Hewlett Elementary School and Woodmere Junior High School, and graduated from the Putney School in Vermont in 1965 before moving on to the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a degree in history. After a year as a graduate student at Princeton, he moved across the country to the University of California at Berkeley, completing a master-s degree in philosophy.
Morris was on his way to getting a Ph.D. in philosophy when he discovered his true calling making movies. He spent much of his time at the Pacific Film Archives screening movies. I went from looking at no movies to looking at a lot of movies, Morris has said.
After meeting German film director Werner Herzog, Morris signed on as Herzog-s consultant for the film Storoszek, and later worked with director Volker Schlondorf.
The Thin Blue Line, dubbed by critics a murder mystery that actually solved a murder, helped save the life and win the release of Randall Adams, who had been wrongly sentenced to death for killing a police officer. Shortly after his release from prison, Adams sued Morris for a share of the film-s profits. The film was also called a landmark of documentary cinema.
In previous documentaries, Morris remained hidden behind his camera. The Thin Blue Line is a film he stumbled upon while making another film, and it became an obsession. I-ve become trapped by this story, he said in 1988. It has taken control of my life.
In 1999, Morris released Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter. Originally titled The Accidental Nazi, the film focuses on Leuchter, an electric-chair designer and Holocaust revisionist.
Morris created one of the most highly regarded films of 1997, the critically acclaimed Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, which interwove the fascinating yet seemingly unrelated stories of a lion tamer, an expert on the African mole rat, a topiary gardener who carves giant animals out of hedges and an MIT scientist who designs robots. The film won awards from the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Florida Film Critics Circle and the Society of Texas Film Critics. It was also awarded the Independent Spirit Award.
In the early days of his career, Morris worked as a door-to-door cable salesman as well as a private detective when movie jobs weren-t available.
Morris has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.
He now lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife, Julia Sheehan, an art historian, and their son, Hamilton.
