Dan Klores
With “Black Magic,” a new four-hour, two-part film scheduled to air commercial-free on ESPN in mid-March 2008, award-winning filmmaker Dan Klores will complete his fifth documentary in the last six years. “Black Magic” is the story of the injustice that defines the Civil Rights Movement, told through the lives of basketball players and coaches who attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s).
Mr. Klores’ work has been universally lauded for its depth and passion. His most recent feature, “Crazy Love” (Magnolia Pictures), was released in June 2007 to huge critical acclaim. Ty Burr, critic from the Boston Globe, said “Klores…has emerged over the past few years as a documentarian of a distinctly New York tang. He makes barstool tales, the sort Joseph Mitchell or Damon Runyon might have leaned in to hear." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote of “Crazy Love”, “Michael Moore isn’t the only filmmaker packing enough heat to bust out of the documentary ghetto…director Dan Klores covers four decades of rampaging passion…Klores uncovers the dark heart of obsession. The electrifying result will blow you away.” In the New Yorker review of the film, David Denby said, “Dan Klores’ documentary is a real-world story, as redolent of time and place as a song by Dion and The Belmonts, in which possessiveness, stupidity, loyalty, and need are joined together in bewildering combinations. It’s as if some disreputable and unending liaison out of the Greek myths arose on the streets of the East Bronx.”
“Crazy Love,” the disturbing and rollicking examination of love and obsession, was voted the Best Documentary of the Year by the Boston Society of Film Critics and the San Diego Film Critics Society. The film was also nominated for Best Documentary of the year by the Independent Spirit Awards and International Documentary Association and won Best Documentary honors at The Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Like Klores’ first two films, “The Boys of Second Street Park” (Showtime, 2003) and “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story” (NBC-Universal, 2005), “Crazy Love” made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
Klores draws from his early childhood. He grew up in a lower middle class section of Brooklyn in a seemingly innocent post-war America. His subject matters, however, revolve around the issues of love and loss and support and protection. In his films, the characters, struggling to assimilate, seek refuge, escape or comfort in the status quo. Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star Ledger, in writing about “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” said, “It was as much an American tragedy as anything Theodore Dreiser ever wrote.”
The surface, though, never tells the full story. Klores’ first film, “The Boys of Second Street Park” (Best Documentary at the River Run Film Festival), may seem to be an autobiography of baby boomer pals in Brooklyn seeking refuge on the basketball court. In the end though, it tells a much larger story of a generation immersed in the counterculture and unable to see and feel the limitations such adherence brought.
“Viva Baseball” (Spike TV, 2005), a beautifully told story about the struggles of Latino immigrants and exiles coming to this country to escape and play a beloved game, finds us in a bitter and never-ending fight against a triple form of discrimination: skin color, language and culture. The film was awarded the Imagen Award for Best Documentary for Television and Film, as well as the 2006 BANFF World Television Award for Best Sports Program.
Mr. Klores has pursued theater as well. His first play, a one-act, “Myrtle Beach,” showcased a conversation between the head and the torso of the same American soldier killed in Iraq. “Myrtle Beach” debuted at The Duke Theater in April, 2007, as part of Naked Angels Theater Company. Variety called it, “A poetic and unsettling mediation that erupts into keening for the innocent man who was destroyed. The force of its imagery almost terrifies.” The play starred the actors Yul Vasquez and David Deblinger, and was directed by John Gould Rubin.
Dan Klores, who resides in Manhattan with his wife Abbe and three young sons, is also producing the feature re-make of “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story” with Scott Rudin for Sony/Paramount. The film will be directed by Tony Award winner George C. Wolfe. Klores is in the midst of writing the feature remake for “Crazy Love” for a major studio once the writers strike is settled. Mr. Klores previously served as the Executive Producer of “City by the Sea,” starring Robert DeNiro and Frances McDormand and also as a producer for the Paul Simon Broadway musical, “The Capeman”.
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