Blowback Productions

Marc Levin

Independent filmmaker Marc Levin brings an original blend of narrative and verite techniques together in his feature films, television series, and documentaries. His Brick City TV series won the 2010 Peabody award and was nominated for an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking. His dramatic feature film, SLAM, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera D'Or at Cannes in 1998, received international recognition for its seamless blending of the real world with a narrative flow. Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Brace yourself for a slam-dunk of a movie, in an in-your-face cinema verite-style that makes Godard's 'Breathless' seem like a cartoon."

Levin’s Brick City is a ground-breaking docu-series about the city of Newark, its Mayor, Cory Booker, and the people on the frontlines of a city struggling to change. Executive produced and directed with Mark Benjamin and produced with Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, the 5-hour series aired its first Peabody Award-winning season on the Sundance Channel in September 2009. The show also received a 2010 Golden Eagle Cine Award and was nominated for both an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking and a NAACP Image Award. The second season premiered on January 30, 2011. TV Guide wrote, “Brick City plays like a verité version of The Wire, one of TV's finest series ever. It's the ultimate reality show.” Season two of Brick City was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy in the category "Outstanding Informational Programming - Long Form" on July 12, 2012.

Levin’s Street Time, a television series produced by Columbia/Tristar for Showtime, received critical acclaim for its authenticity and verite style. Levin executive produced the series and directed 10 episodes. The show stars Rob Morrow, Scott Cohen, Erica Alexander and Terrence Howard. The Los Angeles Times called it "some of the most seductive television ever: vivid, distinctive, explosive storytelling . . .”

Levin’s documentary feature, Godfathers and Sons, was part of the highly regarded Martin Scorsese PBS series, The Blues. Scorsese recruited an international team of directors with both feature and documentary experience - Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Richard Pierce and Wim Wenders. Variety called Levin’s show "the crown jewel in the Scorsese series."

In the late nineties Levin created a hip-hop trilogy beginning with SLAM, a searing prison drama, which starred Saul Williams, Sonja Sohn and Bonz Malone. Whiteboys, a black comedy about white kids who want to be black rappers, starred Danny Hoch, Dash Mihok, Mark Webber and Piper Perabo. Brooklyn Babylon, a fable inspired by the “Song of Songs,” starred Tariq Trotter, Bonz Malone, and featured music by the legendary Grammy winners The Roots.

In Twilight Los Angeles, an adaptation of Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show, Levin fused a Broadway play with a documentary look at the LA riots. Twilight premiered at the Sundance 2000 Film Festival and was selected as the opening film of the International Human Rights Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

In 1992 Levin, along with Mark Benjamin, directed Oscar nominee Robert Downey, Jr. in The Last Party, a gonzo look at the Presidential campaign, weaving together the personal and the political fortunes of Downey and Bill Clinton.

Levin and his documentary film partner, Daphne Pinkerson, have produced 11 films for HBO's documentary film division, including Triangle: Remembering the Fire, Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, Mob Stories, Prisoners of the War on Drugs, The Execution Machine: Texas Death Row, Soldiers in the Army of God, and Gladiator Days. Thug Life in D.C. won the 1999 National Emmy for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special. Gang War: Bangin' in Little Rock won the CableACE Award for Best Documentary Special of 1994. The sequel, Back in the Hood, premiered on HBO ten years later. They also produced Heir to an Execution, a documentary feature following Ivy Meeropol’s journey on the 50th anniversary of the execution of her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Heir was in competition at the Sundance film festival and aired on HBO.

In 1998, Levin was awarded the prestigious duPont-Columbia award for CIA: America's Secret Warriors, a three-part series that aired on the Discovery Channel. From the mid-seventies through the eighties he teamed up with one of America's most respected journalists, Bill Moyers. In 1988 Levin won a national Emmy award as a producer/editor of Moyers' The Secret Government - The Constitution in Crisis. He directed The Home Front with Bill Moyers, which was honored with the duPont-Columbia Gold Baton Award in 1992. Levin and his father, Al, teamed up on Portrait of an American Zealot which was made part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent film collection.

Levin made his on-camera debut in Protocols of Zion, his street level look at the rise of anti-Semitism since 9/11 and the renewed popularity of the anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was released theatrically in the fall of 2005 and on HBO the spring of 2006.

Mr. Untouchable, the story of the original Black Godfather, Harlem heroin kingpin, Nicky Barnes, was released in theatres in 2007. It tells the true-life story of a real American Gangster from the point of view of law enforcement, associates, and Nicky Barnes, who appears for the first time in over a quarter century. "It makes American Gangster look like a fairy tale," declared E!

Marc Levin has also assumed the role of Executive Producer on a number of projects. In 2008 Levin was Executive Producer alongside Beyoncé Knowles on Cadillac Records, the Chess Records story starring Jeffrey Wright, Adrian Brody, and Beyoncé. In the same year he executive produced the indie feature documentary Captured, the story of artist activist Clayton Patterson, the man who videotaped the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot and who has dedicated his life to documenting the final era of raw creativity and lawlessness in New York City's Lower East Side, a neighborhood famed for art, music and revolutionary minds. Levin executive produced a follow-up feature in 2010, Dirty Old Town, an absurdist valentine to a disappearing downtown Bohemia, by his son Daniel B. Levin, Jenner Furst and Julia Nason.

Levin continued his twenty-year working relationship with HBO with a trilogy on labor and the economy: "Triangle: Remembering the Fire", "Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags", and "Hard Times: Lost on Long Island", a film about the white-collar fallout of the Great Recession, which will air on HBO in 2012. "Hard Times" won the Audience Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October. Levin's first film for HBO Sports, "Prayer for a Perfect Season", a film on the top high school basketball team in the country, premiered to widespread acclaim on HBO in October 2011. His next film, Hard Times: Lost on Long Island, about white-collar professionals hit by the Great Recession, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the Hamptons International Film Festival and premiered on HBO July 9, 2012.

Levin's most recent project with longtime collaborator, Marc Benjamin, chronicled the historic 2012 Presidential election. A partnership between Brick City TV, BET and Academy Award nominee Sam Pollard, "Second Coming? Will Black America Decide 2012?" aired on BET in October 2012.

Levin also periodically directed episodes of the classic TV series, Law and Order.

Daphne Pinkerson

Daphne Pinkerson (born January 24, 1970) is an American film and television producer, writer and director. She has worked on a range of award-winning social and political documentaries for HBO, PBS, Bill Moyers, and NBC, among others. Her last film, Triangle: Remembering the Fire, which she directed, won the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award and premiered on HBO in March 2011. It was also shown at the White House, hosted by the US Secretary of Labor. Pinkerson has been Marc Levin’s documentary film partner for the past 15 years. Along with Marc, she won the National Emmy for best documentary of 1999 for producing Thug Life in D.C., which premiered on HBO. Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, a film about what happened to manufacturing in America through the emblematic story of the Garment Center in Manhattan, premiered on HBO in October 2009. That year, she was also the Supervising Producer on Brick City, a five-hour docu-reality series on Newark, NJ, which premiered on the Sundance Channel and ran for two seasons. In 2007, she was the Supervising Producer on Mr. Untouchable, a film about heroin kingpin Nicky Barnes, which was theatrically released by Magnolia Films. In 2006, she was the Supervising Producer on Protocols of Zion, Levin’s personal look at 9/11, which aired on HBO/Cinemax and was theatrically released by ThinkFilm. Heir to an Execution, a film she produced about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO in 2004. In 2003, she produced Godfathers and Sons, a film on Chicago Blues for Martin Scorsese’s PBS series on Blues music. In 2001, NARAL presented their Courageous Advocate Award to her for Soldiers in the Army of God, a film she produced and co-directed for HBO. In the year 2000, she produced two films, Speak Truth to Power, a PBS special on human rights activists and Twilight Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith’s performance film on the riots in South Central. For The Execution Machine, which also aired on HBO, she was able to secure unprecedented access to Death Row in Texas. She was the Supervising Producer for the critically acclaimed Discovery Channel series, CIA: America’s Secret Warriors. Her other HBO films include Mob Stories, Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock and its ten-year follow-up Back in the Hood, Prisoners of the War on Drugs, and Gladiator Days. For Bill Moyers she produced The Home Front, The Politics of Addiction, Oklahoma City: One Year Later, and three parts of his series on youth violence. In addition to producing, she also shoots stylized film and video with small format cameras. She has captured some cinematic firsts, filming a gang drive-by shooting in Little Rock, Arkansas (HBO’s Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock) and inmates injecting drugs in prison (HBO’s Prisoners of the War on Drugs.) She was the Associate Producer on the dramatic feature SLAM and shot its montage footage. In 1988, during the press restrictions in South Africa, she launched South Africa Now, a weekly half-hour news program which commissioned pieces from inside South Africa for broadcast on Public Television, CNN World Report and ITN. Her most recent film, Hard Times: Lost on Long Island, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the Hamptons International Film Festival, and premiered on HBO on July 9, 2012.

Al Levin

Alan M. Levin (February 28, 1926 - February 13, 2006) was a distinguished producer and recipient of journalism’s highest awards, including multiple Emmys.

Levin’s TV work spanned over three decades, starting with PBS in the seventies and continuing with HBO through the nineties. He was one of Bill Moyers’ first producers at Public Television and one of Sheila Nevins’ most respected producers for the groundbreaking HBO series America Undercover. Levin appeared on the big screen in Protocols of Zion, a documentary film about the resurgence of anti-Semitism, directed by his son, Marc. The film was showcased at the Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically released on HBO.

Levin was committed to the struggle for social justice and wanted to use media as a force for social change. He first came to national attention in 1970 with his controversial indictment of US foreign policy, “Who Invited U.S.?” The Nixon White House pressured the young Public Television service to cancel the broadcast but most stations defied the administration and the film was honored with the George Polk Award for best documentary. Levin went on to help renowned journalist Bill Moyers start his television career. They teamed up on a number of award-winning shows over the next fifteen years, including “Why Work?” “The Remarkable Yamato Family,” and “The Detroit Model.” He was senior producer on Moyers’ “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis,” a history of covert CIA operations leading up to Iran Contra, which won the National Emmy Award for News and Documentary in 1988.

Levin was one of the original producers at WNET/13, where he worked on the public affairs show “The 51st State” and the innovative magazine show, “The American Dream Machine.” In 1979 he produced the Emmy-winning 6 part series, “The New Immigrants.” At Channel 13, he met a young producer, Sheila Nevins, who went on to become the head of HBO’s non-fiction programming and winner of the Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. He teamed up with Nevins at HBO and with his son Marc, and their producing partner, Daphne Pinkerson, they made a series of films including “Gang War: Bangin in Little Rock” which won the CableACE Award for Best Documentary of 1994 and “Thug Life in D.C.”, which won the 1999 National Emmy for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special.

Levin was one of the first to report on the rise of America’s religious right in the 1980 film “Portrait of an American Zealot,” now part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. He also broke new ground in the 1986 Frontline special “Inside the Jury” which captured the first jury deliberation ever recorded for television. Since his army service in the Philippines at the end of World War II, he was fascinated by Asian culture. He was the senior producer on public television’s 10-part series, “The Pacific Century,” which won the 1993 duPont-Columbia Award and a gold medal at the Houston Film Festival.

Levin’s career came full circle when he returned to one of his favorite themes in the three-hour series for the Discovery Channel on the Central Intelligence Agency, “CIA: America’s Secret Warriors,” which won the duPont Columbia Silver Baton Award in 1998.

Al Levin was born in Brooklyn on February 28, 1926, the first child of Herman and Shirley Levin. He quickly showed signs of things to come when he won the baby of the year contest that summer at the Rock Island Illinois State Fair. He grew up in Flatbush Brooklyn with two younger sisters, Helen and Sue, and attended the prestigious NY City Townsend Harris High School. At age 16, he left for Wesleyan University and in 1944 he enlisted in the Army and was sent to an intensive Japanese language program at Yale University. He was shipped overseas at the very end of the war, and worked as a translator in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Philippines.

After the war, he married Hannah Alexander, also from Brooklyn, and they quickly started a family. Marc was born in 1951, Nicole in 1952, Danielle in 1954, and Juliette in 1960. During the fifties, Al and Hannah became active in both the labor and civil rights movement. Al worked at the Jersey Central Railroad and Hannah at a Westinghouse factory, where they were both union organizers. They brought their three young children to the famous 1963 Washington, D.C. Civil Rights march where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have A Dream Speech.”

By the sixties they grew restless and moved on to pursue professional careers. Al started as a local journalist for AP covering the New Jersey state house, while Hannah got her Ph.D in psychology and became a professor and therapist. Levin then moved on to the New York Post in 1961 where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his series on mob activity. In 1964, during a major NYC newspaper strike, Levin made his move into television. He became the assignment editor at WCBS-TV and then in 1965 he became a producer for the WABC-TV local evening news. He produced his first documentary in 1968, “Sleep: The Fantastic Third of your Life,” and won his first New York Emmy for best documentary and best writing.

Levin was married to Hannah Alexander Levin for 49 years until she died in December 1997. They had a legendary love affair which touched everyone who knew them.

Levin was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the women’s rights movement. He constantly encouraged his wife and three daughters to challenge the system. In addition to their four children, they had eight grandchildren. Al, as he was known to his friends and colleagues, was an extraordinary character, a unique mix of family man, political activist, teacher and humorist. His interests ranged from the political economy to Japanese stone gardens and exotic horticulture. He was a lifelong athlete and avid tennis player, who could still be seen well into his seventies in Maplewood’s parks working on his new serve.

He was revered by his four children and beloved by his two sisters.

Marc described his father as a “hope-aholic who saw the potential for good in almost everyone. He had a passion to make the world better and a rage toward injustice. But he had no malice or bitterness. Always curious, compassionate and optimistic, he was truly forever young.”

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