1. William Garfield Greaves was an American documentary filmmaker and a pioneer of film-making.
17 Facts About William Greaves
1. 2.
William Greaves was born in Harlem in New York City on October 8,1926.
3.
William Greaves was one of seven children of taxi driver and minister Garfield Greaves and the former Emily Muir.
4.
In 1948, William Greaves joined the Actors Studio and studied alongside the likes of Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Anthony Quinn, Shelley Winters, and others.
5.
William Greaves appeared in Souls of Sin, one of the last race films, which saw him sing and act.
6.
William Greaves ran the show until 1970 winning an Emmy award for himself and the show in 1969.
7.
In 1970, after working on Black Journal for three years, William Greaves opted to leave television to focus on film making.
8.
William Greaves then went on to produce and make films for various commissions and government agencies, including NASA and The Civil Service Commission.
9.
In 2001, William Greaves released one of his most ambitious works Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey.
10.
The final project, narrated by Sidney Poitier, sought to bring the name of Ralph Bunche back into the public lexicon as William Greaves felt he was an important, yet forgotten, political figure, one important to African-American history and the Civil Rights Movement.
11.
William Greaves employed three sets of camera crews to document this audition process.
12.
William Greaves, in turn, incorporates their footage into his final product.
13.
Ten years later, Buscemi and director Steven Soderbergh teamed up to secure widespread distribution for the film as well as financing for the making of one of the four sequels William Greaves had considered once he had finished the initial product in the late 1960s.
14.
Between 1969 and 1982, William Greaves taught film and television acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York.
15.
William Greaves died at the age of 87 at his home in Manhattan on August 25,2014.
16.
Besides the Emmy he won for his work as executive producer of Black Journal in 1969, William Greaves was nominated for an Emmy for his work Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, which won the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival.
17.
In 1980, William Greaves was honored alongside Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, Arthur Penn, Sally Field, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, Shelley Winters, Dustin Hoffman, Estelle Parsons, and Ellen Burstyn with the Actors Studio in New York's first ever Dusa Award.