Biography
Director/producer/editor Chuck Workman won a well-deserved Oscar for his short "Precious Images" (1986), which wove together iconic moments from a wealth of legendary Hollywood films, while also maintaining a prolific career as a documentarian, montage editor, television commercial director and editor on many notable theatrical trailers. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Workman began his career in cinema as an editor, cutting the Argentinean feature films "Monday's Child" (1967) and "Traitors of San Angel" (1967) for director Leopold Torre-Nilsson. In the early 1970s, he branched into directing and producing a wide array of projects, ranging from promotional featurettes for MGM's "The Last Ride" (1971) and a making-of documentary on "The Deep" for broadcast on the CBS network. Workman made his first theatrical feature, "The Money" (1976), during this period while also serving as editor on theatrical trailers for such films as "Star Wars" (1977) and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1978), main title designer for movies and television series, and director for numerous TV commercials. After producing a pair of documentaries for the Directors Guild, Workman was tapped to create a short film to celebrate the long-running organization's 50th anniversary. The result was "Precious Images" (1986), a staggering compilation of 470 half-second-long splices of movie images from the history of American film. The project, which took nearly three months to complete, won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 1987, and firmly established Workman as a gifted documentarian and craftsman. He remained remarkably active throughout the 1980s and 1990s, serving as producer and director on several notable feature-length documentaries and feature films while also retaining his position as editor for the "In Memoriam" segment on the annual Academy Awards broadcast until 2010. In 1990, he directed "Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol," an overview of the famed postmodern artist's career, before winning a Cable ACE award for the documentary "The First 100 Years: A Celebration of American Movies" in 1995. Four years later, he turned his attention to the legacy of the Beat movement with "The Source" (1999), a documentary featuring performances by Johnny Depp and Dennis Hopper, among others. After directing and editing projects for CBS, Disneyworld and Eastman Kodak, Workman helmed his second dramatic feature, "A House on a Hill" (2003), with Phillip Baker Hall as an architect who is given the chance to rebuild his own life by reconstructing a house he once owned. He then returned to the documentary form, directing projects on subjects as varied as Martin Luther King, Jr. ("The Making of a Dream," 2004), Jack Kerouac ("A Kiss at Kerouac's Grave," 2004), a meditation on kitsch values ("Everything is Beautiful, 2006) and avant-garde film critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas ("Jonas Mekas and the (Mostly) American Avant-Garde Cinema," 2009). In 2014, his documentary "Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles," opened to mostly positive reviews during its theatrical release.
