LAWRENCE R. HOTT
FLORENTINE FILMS/HOTT PRODUCTIONS, INC.

Lawrence R. Hott has been producing documentary films since 1978, when he left the practice of law to join Florentine Films. His awards include an Emmy, two Academy Award nominations, a George Foster Peabody Award, five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons, ten CINE Golden Eagles, screenings at Telluride, and first-place awards from the San Francisco, Chicago, National Educational, and New England Film Festivals.

Hott’s first production, The Old Quabbin Valley about a water resource controversy in Massachusetts, won outstanding Independent Film at the New England Film Festival. That experience prepared him for work on The Garden of Eden, a 1985 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short. Other productions include the award-winning Niagara Falls: The Changing Nature of a New World Symbol, The Adirondacks: The Lives and Times of an American Wilderness, and Sentimental Women Need Not Apply: A History of the American Nurse.

His films The Battle for Wilderness, Wild By Law, and Knute Rockne and His Fighting Irish all aired as part of The American Experience series on PBS. Wild By Law was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1992. He also co-produced Cambodians in America: Rebuilding the Temple, which aired on PBS in 1993, and The People’s Plague: Tuberculosis in America, a two-part, two-hour special on PBS in 1995.

His co-production, Divided Highways: The Interstates and the Transformation of American Life, won an Emmy for Outstanding Historical Programming, the George Foster Peabody Award, and the Best Documentary Award from the New England Film Festival. Hott’s feature-length dramatic film The Boyhood of John Muir won the Gold Hugo at the Chicago Television Festival, Gold Award from Parents’ Choice, and was the Christmas Day Special on PBS in 1998. His recently finished film about the American Civil Liberties Union for KCTS-Seattle won the Gold Apple award from the National Educational Media Film and Video Competition. He has just finished production on Imagining Robert, a one-hour film about mental illness that is the centerpiece of a year-long series of screenings and dialogue programs sponsored by the Animating Democracy Initiative of the Ford Foundation. Hott is now producing the Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced, a two-hour film for broadcast on PBS in 2003. The film is a co-production with the Clark Science Center, Smith College.

In addition to the honors and awards listed below, Hott has been on the board of non-fiction writers at Smith College and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Commission, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

MAJOR AWARDS

Massachusetts Cultural Council/Boston Film and Video Foundation Merit Fellowship, 200

Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, 2001

Humanities Achievement Award, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, 1995

Fulbright Fellowship in Film and Television in the United Kingdom, 1993-1994

Emmy Award, Outstanding Historical Programming, 1998

George Foster Peabody Award, 1998

Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary Feature 1992

Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary Short 1985

Five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons

Ten CINE Golden Eagles

Six National Educational Film Festival Gold Apples

Outstanding Independent Film, New England Film Festival

Best Documentary, New England Film Festival

Gold Hugo, Chicago International Television Festival

Gold Award, Parents’ Choice

Awards from Telluride Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, Birmingham International Film Festival and others

Member, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences