Howard Smith (director) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Howard Smith is an Oscar

Academy Awards

An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...

winning film director, producer, journalist, screenwriter, actor, and radio broadcaster.

Early career

Howard Smith started his career as a photographer. His work appeared in Life

Life (magazine)

Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

, Newsweek

Newsweek

Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...

and many other national publications.

Journalist

Several years later, he pursued journalism from another perspective and became a writer for more than thirty years. His articles appeared in newspapers and magazines ranging from Playboy

Playboy

Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...

to The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

; from the Ladies Home Journal to The Village Voice

The Village Voice

The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...

.

He wrote regularly for the New York City based weekly newspaper, The Village Voice, in the 1960s and 1970s. One of his regular columns was "Scenes".

During the Village Voice's early and formative years, his column, "Scenes", with its reporting on the emerging counterculture, became a part of the paper's groundbreaking new journalism. The column ran weekly for twenty years and became known for its cutting edge coverage and innovative short-form critiques. His work for the Village Voice is frequently cited as one of the highly influential examples of the new participatory journalism that made less rigid the distinction between the observer and the observed.

Film producer and director

Howard produced and directed, with Sarah Kernochan

Sarah Kernochan

Sarah Kernochan is a documentarian, film director, screenwriter and producer from the United States.After graduating in 1965 from Rosemary Hall , where she was a classmate of Glenn Close, and in 1968 from Sarah Lawrence College, she worked as a ghostwriter for The Village Voice for about a year...

, the Oscar

Academy Awards

winning feature-length documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, "Marjoe

Marjoe

Marjoe is a 1972 American documentary film produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan about the life of evangelist Marjoe Gortner. It won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.- Story:...

", in 1972, about the evangelist Marjoe Gortner

Marjoe Gortner

Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner, generally known as Marjoe Gortner , is a former revivalist who first gained a certain fame in the late 1940s when he became the youngest ordained preacher at the age of four...

.

When it was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival

Cannes Film Festival

The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...

, and subsequently played in theatres worldwide, the movie caused a sensation by exposing, for the first time ever, the underbelly of a corrupt movement, including its self righteous religious leaders, that was about to burst into public awareness.

He followed up with a documentary film in 1977, called "Gizmo!

Gizmo!

Gizmo! is a 1977 documentary film produced and directed by Howard Smith about improbable inventions, and uses old newsreel footage about these inventions. Early examples of parkour and buildering are also featured, including footage of urban acrobat John Ciampa, the "Brooklyn Tarzan".-External...

", about improbable inventions of modern times, caught on film. The film received wide distribution and acclaim.

He was also a film actor

Actor

An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...

and a screenwriter

Screenwriter

Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...

Radio personality

In the 1960s and 1970s, Howard had a weekend overnight show on WPLJ

WPLJ

WPLJ is a radio station in New York City owned by the broadcasting division of Cumulus Media. WPLJ shares studio facilities with sister station WABC inside 2 Penn Plaza in midtown Manhattan, and its transmitter is atop the Empire State Building. The station currently plays a Hot Adult...

FM radio in New York City, and syndicated nationally, conducting extensive in-depth interviews with well-known musicians and notable figures, as well as playing an interesting mix of albums and songs in the "progressive" freeform

Freeform (radio format)

Freeform, or freeform radio, is a radio station programming format in which the disc jockey is given total control over what music to play, regardless of music genre or commercial interests. Freeform radio stands in contrast to most commercial radio stations, in which DJs have little or no...

rock music and Album-oriented rock

Album-oriented rock

Album-oriented rock is an American FM radio format focusing on album tracks by rock artists.-Music played:Most radio formats are based on a select, tight rotation of hit singles...

formats.

He covered many of the tumultuous era's most legendary events including Woodstock, from which America heard his live radio reports, broadcast around the clock for five full days. At the peak of the historic Stonewall Riots

Stonewall riots

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City...

, he managed to get inside the now famous
bar. He was the only journalist who reported about the siege from that dangerous vantage point.

Over the years he interviewed an array of pop-culture icons: From Mick Jagger

Mick Jagger

Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger is an English musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones....

to Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....

; from Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin

Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer, songwriter, painter, dancer and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist with her backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band...

to Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....

. The list continues with Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison

James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...

, Hugh Hefner

Hugh Hefner

Hugh Marston "Hef" Hefner is an American magazine publisher, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises.-Early life:...

, Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an...

, John Lennon

John Lennon

John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...

and Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono

is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

, Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

, Ravi Shankar, Dustin Hoffman

Dustin Hoffman

Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters....

, Carole King

Carole King

Carole King is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists during the 1960s, many of which have become standards. As a singer, King had an album, Tapestry, top the U.S...

, Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson

John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...

and many others.

Lecturer and pundit

Howard Smith became particularly well known for his insights into the growing influence and economic power of America's rapidly expanding Youth Culture. As a result, he frequently lectured and was a guest on many network TV shows.

1990s and beyond

In the early 1990s, he shifted his creative focus to concentrate his activities in the world of non-profit organizations. Amongst these, he is a former board member, and current Director of Operations for the Mood Disorders Support Group (MDSG), a New York City organization helping people with depression

Depression (mood)

Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless...

, manic depression, and their families and friends.

He was writing a book about his involvement, as both participant and commentator, in the late 1950s beatnik

Beatnik

Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...

scene, the explosive hippie

Hippie

The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...

1960s, right through to the brouhaha that was to characterize the Nixonian

Nixonian

The term Nixonian, or "Nixonite" is a term used to signify extreme secretiveness or corruption. It can also refer to liberal Republicans.The term is used to refer to a regime of dirty election tricks or abuses of power for political gain.-Other usage:...

mid-1970s.

On November 15, 2005, in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, the IFC Center

IFC Center

IFC Center is an art house movie theater in Greenwich Village, New York City in the United States of America. It is located at 323 Sixth Avenue, on the former site of the Waverly Theater, which was itself a well known art house movie theater...

showed "Marjoe

Marjoe

" as the closing film in a series of documentaries called "Stranger Than Fiction". In their program they called it "a lost gem."

Personal life

Smith is the father of Cass Calder Smith

Cass Calder Smith

Cass Calder Smith is an internationally recognized American architect. He and his firm, CCS Architecture are known for high-profile restaurant designs in San Francisco, California, and New York City.-Early life:...

, a restaurant architect in New York City and San Francisco, California.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.