Biography
Richard Brick was senior producer of a two-hour HD special, Peter Jennings Reporting- UFOs: Seeing is Believing for ABC. In 2003, he was senior producer of another two-hour special for ABC, Peter Jennings Reporting - The JFK Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy. Previously, he was the Co-Producer of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity and Sweet and Lowdown and of Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream. He produced Robert M. Young's Caught and Joe Vasquez' Hangin' with the Homeboys. He was the unit production manager of Mike Nichol's Silkwood and Robert Benton's Places in the Heart and was the Assistant Unit Production Manager/Location Manager of Milos Forman's Ragtime.
On Peter Gimbel's syndicated television feature documentary, Andrea Doria: the Final Chapter, he was associate producer and production manager. He served as production manager on Waris Hussein's Little Gloria...Happy At Last, television mini-series; as production manager of John Lowenthal's theatrical feature The Trials of Alger Hiss, which won the Grand Prix at the 12th Annual Nyon Film Festival; and as production manager of Michael Roemer's Pilgrim...Farewell, a dramatic feature for PBS. Brick was the production manager of Westinghouse Broadcasting's bicentennial television series Six American Families, winner of a Gabriel and DuPont/Columbia Awards. On Paul Ronder's Part of the Family, winner of the Prix George Sadoul, a feature documentary made for PBS and released theatrically in Europe, he was production manager. Brick produced and directed Last Stand Farmer.
Brick had a highly successful tenure as the first Commissioner of the New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, 1992-94. He was Chairman of the M.F.A. degree film program at Columbia University, 1988 and 1989, where he continues as an Adjunct Professor in the producing program. In 1987 he established the Columbia Film Festival for the M.F.A. program, which celebrated its 25th anniversary at Lincoln Center in 2012, at which he endowed the Richard Brick Producing Prize at Columbia.
Brick has in active development with Ira Deutchman, Barbara Ehrenreich's best-seller Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America; James Salter's stunning mountain climbing novel Solo Faces, with Mark Obenhaus; and with Kenneth Murphy, Fire on the Beach, the gripping 1880 true story of former slave Richard Etheridge, who is made "Keeper" of the Pea Island Life Saving Station on the North Carolina coast. He is Executive Producer of Shadow 19, a sci-fi feature in development by Joel Silver at Warner Brothers.
Brick is a member of the Producers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America, which he's served since 2002 on the Eastern Assistant Directors/Unit Production Managers Council, as a Delegate to the National Conventions in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2011, and 2013 (elected but unable to attend), and on the National Negotiating Committee 2010-11 and 2013-14. He served on the board of directors of the IFP, 1985-2001, as Chairman, 1995-97. In 1985 he founded and Chairs the Advisory Board of the Geri Ashur Screenwriting Award, a $10,000 fellowship administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was an official Guest at Emir Kusturica's 2010 Kustendorf Film Festival and Juror at the 2011 Kustendorf Film Festival. President of the Jury, the 2012 Targowa Street Film and Music Festival of The Leon Schiller Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre, Lodz, Poland
Brick received an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Grant in 1977; the Vermont Council on the Arts' Grant-in-Aid in 1974 and the Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues' Regrant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1974. His awards include a 2004 Radio-Television News Directors Edward R. Murrow Award and the British Broadcasting Press Guild Television Awards: Best Single Documentary, 2003, for The Kennedy Assassination; Best Feature nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards for Hangin' with the Homeboys in 1991; the 1993 Motion Picture Bookers Club Award; the Directors Guild of America Best Picture nomination as UPM for Places in the Heart in 1984; the John Grierson Award for Social Documentary and the Blue Ribbon from the 1976 American Film Festival, and the 1975 Gold Ducat of the Mannheim Internationale Filmwoche, all for Last Stand Farmer. He lives in New York City and northern Vermont and is married to Sara Bershtel, Publisher of Metropolitan Books at Henry Holt and Company.
