Jeff Feuerzeig (born 1964) is an American film director and screenwriter best known for The Devil and Daniel Johnston, his profile of cult musician and outsider artist Daniel Johnston, for which he was awarded the Directing prize for Documentary at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and which was released theatrically in March 2006 by Sony Pictures Classics.
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Jeff Feuerzeig grew up in Hazlet, New Jersey, coming of age just in time to receive the full impact of the punk rock wave and its attendant do-it-yourself aesthetic, an influence that dominates his approach and subject matter to the present. He graduated with honors from Trenton State College in 1986 and immediately enrolled in New York University’s six-month Intensive Filmmaking Program, where he studied under Thierry Pathé.[1] He has spent 25 years directing commercials for a wide assortment of corporate clients, including IBM,[2] Delta Air Lines[3] and Budweiser.[4]
In 1990, he directed Jon Hendricks: The Freddie Sessions, a profile of the famed jazz singer and member of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. The half-hour film featured appearances by George Benson, Al Jarreau and Bobby McFerrin and was broadcast nationally on PBS.[5]
In 1993, marshaling his continuing interest in the outer limits of alternative music, Feuerzeig directed a 16mm feature documentary on brothers Jad and David Fair and their seminal proto-punk band Half Japanese, a passion project that was booked for an independent two-week run at Film Forum in New York and subsequently distributed by Tara Releasing in art-houses nationwide – often in conjunction with the band playing full concerts after the screening.[6]
"Half Japanese has the feel of a complete put-on,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times.[7]
Over a five-year period beginning in 2000, Feuerzeig created an innovative and sympathetic portrait of West Virginia-born cult singer-songwriter and outsider artist Daniel Johnston, whose early-20s onset of manic-depression and schizophrenia enabled him to create a nakedly confessional body of work unfiltered by the limitations of his contemporaries. Working from the conceit of clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993), and utilizing techniques from the New Journalism of the 1970s (the creation of first-person POV and internal monologue through audio cassette letters, journal entries, home movies, etc.), Feuerzeig documented the musician-artist’s struggles with his private demons – many of them quite literal in his own mind – elevating what might have been a footnote in rock history to world acclaim.[8]
New York Press film critic Matt Zoller Seitz said of Devil: “A true nonfiction film, a movie that tries to do with sound and image what journalists like Nick Tosches (Dino) and Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night) tried to do with prose, bending prose into poetry to find a more subjective route to truth.” [9]
The film appeared on many best of the decade lists.[10][11][12] It was named by Mojo Magazine one of the 10 best music documentaries of all time [13] and by Rolling Stone magazine one of the Top 25 music DVDs of all time.[14] On the strength of the film, Feuerzeig spent a year working with Albert Maysles,[15] where he created award-winning short-form documentaries for IBM. He is currently represented by Ridley Scott Associates (RSA) for commercial and television work.[16]
In 2009, Feuerzeig began production on a proposed feature documentary about artist Shepard Fairey, the lawsuit brought against him by the Associated Press and his Fair Use defense in creating the iconic Barack Obama "Hope" poster during the 2008 presidential election. To be called The Boy Who Cried Hope, the film was postponed indefinitely following revelations that Fairey had lied about the photographic source material for the poster.[17][18]
Feuerzeig has completed the screenplay for God Bless Tiny Tim with filmmaker/playwright Julien Nitzberg. This portrait of the latterday crooner and accidental cultural icon is currently in development.[19] He is also slated to direct The Bayonne Bleeder, a biopic of boxer Chuck Wepner, “The Bayonne Bleeder,” who in 1975 went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali and whose life story served as the basis for (and was in turn greatly affected by) the Sylvester Stallone film Rocky. Feuerzeig co-wrote the script with Jerry Stahl, and the film is set to star Liev Schreiber as Wepner.[20][21]