Today we have filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman to discuss her film Roll Red Roll about the rape of an underage Ohio girl, and the unbelievable events that transpired on social media afterward.
Links from the show:
Roll Red Roll documentary
Roll Red Roll book
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About my guest:
Nancy Schwartzman is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a member of the Directors Guild of America.
Nominated for a Peabody Award, her debut documentary Roll Red Roll (Netflix/POV/BBC) exposed the notorious Steubenville, Ohio high school sexual assault case and uncovered the social-media fueled "boys will be boys" culture that let it happen. Roll Red Roll garnered 7 best documentary awards, premiered in 2018 at the Tribeca Film Festival and Hot Docs, and has screened at over 40 film festivals worldwide. The film opened theatrically with 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was a Critic's Pick in The New York Times and reviewed in The New Yorker, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times amongst others.
Her short films including One Shot One Kill, for Mother Jones (2020) and Anonymous Comes To Town (2019), co-produced with the Tribeca Film Institute and Gucci's Chime for Change, have garnered over 5 million views.
She recently finished a Netflix Original documentary feature with the Center for Investigative Reporting and Motto Pictures slated for release in 2023. She is in pre-production on a 6-part original series for Freeform/Hulu with XTR. She is also in development for a series with NBC Universal and Peacock.
She is the author of a recent non-fiction book Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power and Football in the American Heartland released in July 2022 with Hachette and received stellar reviews from the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal. She is developing a scripted series from the storyworld of the documentary and book with Producers Darren Dean and Jed Mellick.
For her human rights filmmaking and technology development to prevent sexual violence, she is the winner of awards from the Obama/Biden White House, the United Nations and the Avon Foundation.
She is represented by UTA, a graduate of Columbia University and newly based in Los Angeles.
Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland