Telling Pictures

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s partnership making non-fiction and feature films began in 1987 when they opened an office in a former convent and Catholic girl’s school in San Francisco and founded Telling Pictures. Their creative styles clicked and their films have all since played in movie theaters, at major international film festivals (Sundance, Berlin, Venice, Telluride, Toronto, New York), and on television throughout the world. Between them they have received two Academy Awards, five Emmy Awards, three Peabodys, as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships.

Their new film HOWL, starring James Franco and featuring Jon Hamm, David Strathairn, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, Alessandro Nivola and Bob Balaban, was the opening night film at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, in the official feature competition at the Berlin Film Festival, and is currently in theatrical and home video release by Oscilloscope Laboratories in the U.S. and The Match Factory abroad (Freedom of Expression Award, National Board of Review, 2011).

Their films together include Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Academy Award, Feature Documentary, 1989), Where Are We? (Sundance Documentary Competition, 1991), The Celluloid Closet (Emmy Award for directing, Peabody, duPont-Columbia Awards, 1995), and Paragraph 175 (Sundance Film Festival jury award for directing, 2000). Prior to their partnership, Rob directed the Oscar-winning classic The Times of Harvey Milk.

For television they produced and directed episodes of Crime & Punishment (2001-2), Dick Wolf's non-fiction NBC prime-time spin-off of Law & Order, HBO's America Undercover and Real Sex, as well as for ABC, PBS, and MSNBC.

After taking a bus from New York City to San Francisco at age 19, Rob Epstein answered a classified ad seeking a production assistant on a documentary in early development and met his mentor Peter Adair, thus beginning his filmmaking career. Rob quickly rose to co-director, along with the other members of the Mariposa Film Group. The film became the landmark documentary Word Is Out, released in theaters in 1977, and recently restored for DVD.

Rob’s next project was the Oscar-winning feature documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which he conceived, directed, co-produced and co-edited. The film touched audiences immediately, becoming an international festival sensation, and winning the Academy Award for Best Feature documentary as well as the New York Film Critics Award for Best Non-Fiction film of 1985.

Rob won his second Oscar for the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, made with Jeffrey Friedman, with whom he started Telling Pictures in 1987. Rob's other films with Jeffrey include Where Are We?, The Celluloid Closet (Emmy Award for directing), and Paragraph 175 (Sundance Film Festival jury award for directing). 

In moving from documentary to dramatic narrative, Rob was the recipient of the American Film Institute Directing Intern Fellowship, on the 1991 Martha Coolidge film Rambling Rose, Starring Laura Dern, Robert Duvall, and Diane Ladd.

Rob and Jeff's latest film Howl—their first scripted dramatic narrative, featuring James Franco and a stellar cast—premiered at this year's Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, and was released in the US by Oscilloscope Laboratories. It received the Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review, and was a project of the Sundance Institute Writer's Lab.

Rob’s work has been shown in theaters, on television, at festivals, and museums throughout the world, including retrospectives at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, the Taiwan International Film Festival, and CameraImage in Poland. In addition to his Oscars for The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads, Rob has received several Peabody and Emmy Awards, and Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships. In 2008, Rob was recognized with the Pioneer Award from the International Documentary Association for distinguished lifetime achievement. He has also received achievement awards from Frameline (1990) and Outfest (2000). Rob and Jeffrey were Sundance Screenwriting Fellows in 2009 with the screenplay for HOWL.

In addition to his filmmaking career, Rob is a professor at California College of the Arts, where he also serves as chair of the Film program. He has also been a visiting professor at the Graduate Film Program at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. He currently serves on the board of the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco. Rob is a member of the Directors Guild of America, and of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where he currently serves on the Board of Governors and is chair of the documentary branch.

Jeffrey grew up in New York City, where his mother was an actor and his father taught 20th Century American literature and edited and published a small literary magazine. Jeffrey began studying acting at age nine, and by the time he was twelve he had acted professionally in two off-Broadway productions.

He began his film training by apprenticing to some of the most respected filmmakers in the business, making himself useful in the editing rooms of such films as Marjoe (Academy Award, Documentary Feature, 1972) and William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). He worked with the legendary editor Dede Allen on the Arthur Penn segment of Visions of Eight (1973) and later with Thelma Schoonmaker on Martin Scorcese's Raging Bull (Academy Award, Film Editing, 1980).

Jeffrey went on to edit a number of documentaries for television, starting with the NBC prime-time documentary series Lifeline (1978). He worked with director Carroll Ballard for three years, in the Yukon, Alaska, and Northern California, on the Disney feature Never Cry Wolf (1983). He then edited the PBS documentary Faces Of the Enemy (1987), for which he received a co-directing credit with Bill Jersey. He edited the PBS Great Performances special Jammin: Jelly Roll Morton on Broadway (1992), about the George C. Wolfe musical Jelly's Last Jam featuring Tonya Pinkins and Gregory Hines, narrated by Denzel Washington.

He first worked with Rob Epstein as a consultant on The Times of Harvey Milk, and then as an editor on Rob's episode in the PBS series We The People with Peter Jennings. In 1987 Jeffrey and Rob started working together as a filmmaking team and formed their production company Telling Pictures.  

Together Jeffrey and Rob produced and directed (and Jeffrey co-edited) Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt, narrated by Dustin Hoffman (Academy Award, Documentary Feature, 1989) and The Celluloid Closet, narrated by Lily Tomlin and featuring interviews with Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, Shirley MacLaine, Tony Curtis, Gore Vidal, Arthur Laurents, and John Schlesinger (Emmy Award for directing, 1995). They also produced and directed the international documentary co-production Paragraph 175, narrated by Rupert Everett (Sundance Jury Prize for Directing, 2000).

Their first dramatic narrative film is HOWL (2010), in which they directed James Franco, Jon Hamm, David Strathairn, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels, Alessandro Nivola, Treat Williams, and Bob Balaban. Howl premiered on opening night at the Sundance Film Festival, followed by the Berlin and London International Film Festivals. It was the closing night film at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the opening night film at Outfest. It is currently in theatrical and home video release by Oscilloscope Laboratories in the U.S. and internationally by The Match Factory. HOWL received a 2011 Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review.

In 2000 Jeffrey and Rob were honored with an achievement award by Outfest, the Los Angeles LGBT film festival. In 2009 they were Sundance Screenwriting Fellows with their screenplay for HOWL.

Jeffrey has taught filmmaking at California College of the Arts and in the graduate program at Stanford University. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.