Richard Pearce Filmography

Food, Inc.

Crew: Cinematographer

Synopsis: Documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner uses reports by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser and The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan as a springboard to exploring where the food we purchase at the grocery store really comes from, and what it means for the health of future generations. By Read More

Marjoe

Crew: Cinematographer

Synopsis: Marjoe Gortner, today known primarily for his acting roles in "B"-movies, was at one time a boy faith healer and evangelist. Wildly popular in the American South, he could fill huge tent revival meetings with his promises of eternal salvation and healing. What the people who came to his meetings Read More

Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America

Crew: Director

Actors: Joely Richardson, Stacy Keach, Ann Cusack, Justina Machado, Scott Cohen, David Ramsey

Synopsis: Forget about Hitchcock's Birds, because in this made-for-television disaster film an outbreak of the dreaded Avian Flu mutates to cause a worldwide pandemic that will shake the very foundations of modern society. The worst case scenario has finally become a reality. Born in Hong Kong and gradually Read More

Law & Order: Trial by Jury [TV Series]

Crew: Co-Executive Producer

Actors: Bebe Neuwirth, Jerry Orbach, Amy Carlson, Kirk Acevedo, Fred Dalton Thompson

Plainsong

Crew: Director

Actors: Aidan Quinn, Rachel Griffiths

Synopsis: Based on a novel by Kent Haruf, the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie Plainsong looks back on a year in the lives of several very special people in a close-knit Colorado prairie community. Deserted by his seriously disturbed wife Ella (Megan Follows), dedicated high school teacher Tom Guthrie (Aidan Quinn Read More

The Blues: The Road to Memphis

Crew: Cinematographer, Director

Actors: B.B. King, Bobby Rush, Ike Turner, Little Milton, Rosco Gordon

Synopsis: Part of The Blues documentary film series on PBS, The Road to Memphis is directed by Richard Pearce. This installment explores the movement from the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, TN, during the early '50s. This generation of artists went from working in the cotton fields to playing on the radio Read More

South Pacific

Crew: Director

Actors: Glenn Close, Robert Pastorelli, Harry Connick, Jr.

Synopsis: Rodgers and Hammerstein's award-winning musical South Pacific, based on stories by James A. Michener, successfully debuted in 1949, and has since been performed scores of times on-stage and onscreen. Its revered musical score is infused with many singable favorites. This made-for-TV movie Read More

Witness Protection

Crew: Director

Actors: Tom Sizemore, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Forest Whitaker

Synopsis: Would you be willing to walk away from everyone and everything you've ever known in exchange for your safety? This is the question facing career criminal Bobby "Bats" Batton (Tom Sizemore); on the outs with the mob and facing prosecution for a number of serious crimes, Batton is offered a deal by Read More

Thicker Than Blood

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Based on a true-story, this touching, inspirational drama follows an idealistic, upper middle-class Ivy Leaguer as he temporarily shelves his plans for law school to teach at an inner-city mission school. He signs on for one year. His first day is real culture shock for the genteel fellow, as he Read More

A Family Thing

Crew: Director

Actors: Robert Duvall, James Earl Jones, Michael Beach, Irma P. Hall, Grace Zabriskie

Synopsis: In this family drama, a white Southerner discovers that his family history isn't what he thought it was -- with the fact that he's half-black only one of his many surprises. Earl Pilcher, Jr. (Robert Duvall) runs a gas station in Arkansas; he's a typical middle-aged Southern man who likes his Read More

Christo's Umbrellas

Crew: Cinematographer

Synopsis: One of the latest efforts of famed outdoor avant-garde artist Christo is chronicled in this documentary. Christo's 1991 project, on which he and his wife Jeanne-Claude spent $26 million, was to erect over 31,000 20-foot high umbrellas along certain Japanese and California valleys. They were to Read More

Homicide: Life on the Street - The Last of the Watermen

Crew: Director

Actors: Daniel Baldwin, Ned Beatty, Richard Belzer, Andre Braugher, Isabella Hoffman

Synopsis: Depressed by the unsavory aspects of her most recent murder case, Kay Howard (Melissa Leo) takes a leave of absence and returns to her home town -- only to be promptly swept up into the investigation of a local environmentalist's death. Making things uncomfortably personal is the fact that Kay's Read More

Leap of Faith

Crew: Director

Actors: Steve Martin, Debra Winger, Lolita Davidovich, Liam Neeson, Lukas Haas

Synopsis: Steve Martin has one of his best roles in Leap Of Faith as Jonas Nightengale, a high-tech faith healer and revival preacher who takes pride in the money he squeezes out of people, convincing himself that he can't deliver hope, but "I give my people a good show." As the film begins, Nightengale's Read More

The Long Walk Home

Crew: Director

Actors: Sissy Spacek, Whoopi Goldberg, Dwight Schultz, Ving Rhames, Dylan Baker

Synopsis: The Long Walk Home is a recreation of a troubled era in American history. The time is 1955; the place, Montgomery, Alabama. When Rosa Parks, an African American woman, is arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, it is the first volley in the great Bus Boycott, organized by Dr. Read More

The Final Days

Crew: Director

Actors: Ann Hearn, Lane Smith, Amanda Wyss

Synopsis: The three-hour TV docudrama The Final Days was based on the Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein chronicle of President Richard M. Nixon's last months in the White House. Given his behavior during the entire Watergate imbroglio, Nixon cannot help but come off as a paranoid power-abuser. As played by Lane Smith Read More

Dead Man Out

Crew: Director

Actors: Danny Glover, Rubén Blades

Synopsis: Danny Glover and Ruben Blades costar in this made-for-cable death row thriller. Blades plays a condemned prisoner, while Glover plays his psychiatrist. The prisoner's behavior is so violent and erratic that he may be too sick to execute. Glover is brought in to calm Blades down--and if he does so Read More

No Mercy

Crew: Director

Actors: Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Jeroen Krabbé, George Dzundza, Gary Basaraba

Synopsis: High-powered gangsters move this crime drama along at a fast pace. When two cops, Eddie Jillette (Richard Gere) and Joe Collins (Gary Basaraba), hear about a contract out on local crime boss Losado (Jeroen Krabbe), they go undercover posing as hitmen, and the result is murder. Collins and the man Read More

Country

Crew: Director

Actors: Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard, Wilford Brimley, Matt Clark, Therese Graham

Synopsis: Released in the mid-1980s, this farm drama stars Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard as Jewell and Gil Ivy, who run a small farm in Iowa that has been in Jewell's family for several generations; her father Otis (Wilford Brimley) lives with them, along with their three children. While the work is hard Read More

Sessions

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Veronica Hamel makes the first of several 1980s breaks from her Hill Street Blues image in the made-for-TV Sessions. Hamel plays Leigh Churchill, the sort of high-cost, high-class call girl who seemingly exists only on screen. As of late, Leigh's professional calls have been fewer and farther Read More

Threshold

Crew: Director

Actors: Donald Sutherland, John Marley, Sharon Acker, Mare Winningham, Jeff Goldblum

Synopsis: Donald Sutherland plays a brilliant surgeon who becomes a media celebrity after performing an artificial-heart transplant. Jeff Goldblum, inventor of the ersatz heart, likewise basks in the glow of sudden fame. The only person to have reservations about the procedure is heart recipient Mare Winningham Read More

Heartland

Crew: Director

Actors: Conchata Ferrell, Rip Torn, Lilia Skala, Barry Primus, Megan Folsom

Synopsis: The "heartland" of the title is rural Wyoming in the early 20th century, where dwells taciturn, reclusive Scottish farmer Rip Torn. Conchata Ferrell arrives at the Torn spread to work as his housekeeper. Paid near-starvation wages, Ferrell continues working day and night, hoping to use her savings Read More

Baby Snakes

Crew: Cinematographer

Actors: Frank Zappa, Adrian Belew, Terry Bozzio

Synopsis: Composer, bandleader, satirist and all-around mad genius Frank Zappa offers an up-close look at "people who do stuff that is not normal" in this off-center concert documentary. Primarily filmed during a 1977 Halloween show by Zappa and his group (which at the time included Adrian Belew, Terry Read More

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Rust Never Sleeps

Crew: Cinematographer

Actors: Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot

Synopsis: Don't be misled by the director's name; "Bernard Shakey" is really rock star Neil Young, who is also the center attraction of this music documentary. There's no plot, of course, just 103 minutes' worth of concert footage, filmed during Young's 1979 tour with his back-up band Crazy Horse. Musical Read More

No Other Love

Crew: Director

Synopsis: The made-for-TV No Other Love stars Julie Kavner as a marginally retarded young adult. Sent to live in a hostel for the mentally challenged, Julie falls in love with similarly afflicted Richard Thomas Jr. Despite the misgivings of their families and the prejudices of outside world, Kavner and Read More

Christo's Running Fence

Crew: Cinematographer

Synopsis: When Christo set out to erect a fabric fence across 24 miles of California ranch land, he encountered massive resistance from landowners and bureaucrats alike, in addition to conservationists who thought he would harm the landscape. Permission was eventually obtained from the California Coastal Read More

Siege

Crew: Director

Actors: James Sutorius

Synopsis: Siege is set in a big-city housing development. Retiree Martin Balsam, along with the rest of the building's residents, live in terror of a street gang commandeered by self-styled "king" hoodlum Dorian Harewood. Police lieutenant James Sutorius tries to rally the older citizens to stand up against Read More

Hearts and Minds

Crew: Cinematographer

Synopsis: The title of this documentary was inspired by the mantra recited by those in charge of the Vietnam War: "In order to win the war, we must win the hearts and minds of the people." The failure to achieve this, coupled with the disastrous no-win policies of the higher-ups, is the nucleus of this Read More

Woodstock

Crew: Cinematographer

Actors: Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, The Who, Crosby, Stills & Nash

Synopsis: This musical documentary covers the three-day 1969 music festival on the property of Max Yasger's farm that symbolized the late 1960s in terms of musical, social and political ideology of the era. American audiences are introduced to Ten Years After, featuring guitar great Alvin Lee. Jimi Hendix Read More