Marc Smerling

Marc Smerling produced and shot much of "Capturing the Friedmans," winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in the same year. He is a partner in Hit The Ground Running Films, a motion picture development and production company located in New York City. Before that, he was founder and executive producer of Notorious Pictures, a production company with offices in New York and Los Angeles. There, he produced and directed television commercials and music videos for musicians as diverse as The Fugees, Santana, POD, Sarah McLachlan, Wyclef Jean, Diana King and Slipknot, as well as documentaries, animated and reality series for broadcast. Marc began his career in documentaries as the associate producer of Gangs, Cops and Drugs for NBC with Tom Brokaw and The New Hollywood, also for NBC and Tom Brokaw about the state of Hollywood in the late 1980's. He has worked as a newspaper reporter in Upstate New York. He is a 1985 graduate of Syracuse University¹s Newhouse School of Journalism and a 1989 graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, where his thesis film, "Driving The American Dream," won a FOCUS award. There, he earned a Masters in film production.