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| Paris Barclay and Taylor Hackford are being honored with the 2006 Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award for extraordinary service to the DGA and its membership. While each is being recognized for his considerable individual contributions as vice presidents on the National Board, they are also being honored for their work with the DGA PAC, which Hackford chairs, and the PAC Leadership Council which they both co-chair. The DGA PAC ensures that the Guild’s voice is heard when important issues that affect the members’ economic and creative livelihood are decided in Washington and in state capitols. |
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DGA First Vice President Paris Barclay - click images for larger views.
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Grateful to have received some early, crucial support from the Guild in a creative rights dispute, Paris Barclay started attending Western Directors Council meetings and encouraged his peers to do the same. True to his easy charm and enthusiasm, Barclay assumed you were supposed to sit at the boardroom table, and one evening he struck up conversation with the person next to him. “He said, ‘I’m Bob’ and it dawned on me a little later that this was Robert Wise I was talking to – I’m talking to the gentleman who not only directed West Side Story, which was one of my favorite movies of all time, but who had edited Citizen Kane. I said this is an incredible place to come and meet the directors I’ve always admired. That feeling still continues to this day and it always awes and humbles me just to be in the company of that kind of talent,” he recalls.
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Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R-ME)
greets co-chairs Barclay and Hackford
at a PAC LC event.
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It didn’t take long for Barclay to earn his own seat on the National Board and Western Directors Council, where he continues to demonstrate extraordinary commitment to the DGA. For these and numerous other contributions Barclay, currently First Vice President, is the recipient of the 2006 Robert B. Aldrich Award in recognition of service to the Guild. “Everything that I do for the Guild is not about awards and acknowledgment, it’s about giving back to the Guild that, in my very earliest days as a member, stood behind me in some difficult times,” Barclay says. “I have always felt that if an organization is going to do what the Directors Guild does for individual members in terms of supporting their rights and going to bat for them, then the very least a member can do is to participate.” The honor is being shared with another highly committed member, Third Vice President Taylor Hackford, who has co-chaired the DGA PAC Leadership Council with Barclay since 2002.
Barclay became a member of the African American Steering Committee in 1993 and co-chaired the group from 2000-2002. He has served on the Single-Camera Creative Rights Negotiating Committee since 1996 and created and coordinated the Single Camera Directors Prep Program in 2001. He was elected a National Board alternate in 1997 and was elected to the Board as Third Vice President from 1999 to 2005, when he became First Vice President. He joined the Western Directors Council as an alternate in 1997 and has served as a member since 1999. Barclay also serves as a member of the Violence and Social Responsibility Task Force. He has co-chaired the Diversity Committee (with President Michael Apted) since 2004.
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Barclay and Hackford escort
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI)
to a PAC LC luncheon.
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Barclay remains especially committed to the Guild’s Political Action Committee. He believes there are things the DGA wants to accomplish that can only be addressed through federal, state and local lawmakers. “I decided in my own mind that unless we engage them, unless we can get them in the room and talk to them and convince them of our point of view, then we’re going to fall behind,” he says. “It’s become much more of a global fight for us to maintain our status as directors and maintain our livelihood and we need the government’s assistance to do that.”
At the same time, Barclay is working to sustain the core philosophy of the DGA Founders – that established directors should use their clout and experience to help younger directors and their teams. “I’m always moved by it because I think we’ve continued to make that the most important thing,” he says. “Certainly not every director understands or believes in this, but it isn’t really about you once you’ve established a career – it’s about the new up-and-coming person and making sure they have as much of a chance to make a livelihood as you do.”
Barclay has managed to balance Guild service and a thriving directing career. He has received a DGA Award and two Emmy Awards for his work on NYPD Blue (including Jimmy Smits’ final episode) and was nominated for an Emmy Award for directing an episode of The West Wing. He has received six DGA Award nominations for episodes of ER, NYPD Blue, House and for every episode he ever directed of The West Wing. He has directed more than 80 hours of television including Lost, CSI, Law & Order, The Shield, Numb3rs and F/X’s new series Dirt – earning a Golden Globe nomination, the Peabody Award, the Alma Award, and sharing two Humanitas prizes. Barclay co-created the series City of Angels (an NAACP Award Winner for Best Drama Series), co-wrote and directed the pilot Hate for Showtime, and served as co-executive producer and principal director of Cold Case. He also directed the HBO Film The Cherokee Kid (starring Sinbad, James Coburn and Burt Reynolds) and the Miramax feature parody Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
The Chicago native developed an early love of music and theater, leading him to write plays and songs while being a star football player. “It was this weird combination of a jock who also wrote musicals, so no one knew what to do with me,” he says. A football scholarship to the LaLumiere School in Indiana, where there were only about 100 students, allowed him to continue writing and performing while serving as co-captain of the football team. (The quarterback was Supreme Court Chief Justice-to-be John Roberts.)
Barclay attended Harvard College but gave up football to focus on theater. After graduation, he moved to New York and wrote and composed a few plays but found more financial stability as an advertising copywriter and eventually creative supervisor. It was there that he started gravitating toward production. “I saw so few minorities in the production of commercials that I felt something had to be done about it,” Barclay says. “So I created a company with a partner that made that its goal, which proved to be a major disaster and money-losing proposition in the first year.” By the second year, though, the company was booming, allowing Barclay to direct MTV and Billboard award-winning music videos for LL Cool J, Bob Dylan, Harry Connick, Jr., Janet Jackson and others.
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Barclay and Hackford at a PAC LC luncheon with Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA) and DGA National Executive Director Jay D. Roth.
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Writer-producer John Wells saw Barclay’s video reel and hired him to help direct a new series, Angel Street, in 1992. “He wanted the scenes done in one shot, so the focus was on choreography and that was liberating because I’ve been in the theater and it was very natural for me to stage things so they continue to move and that suited me very well visually,” he said.
With that show, Barclay joined the Guild but was immediately warned of an unpleasant truth. “I did hear at my very first orientation that there was a very difficult path for African-American directors to succeed in the industry and so the first thing I got involved with was the African-American Steering Committee,” Barclay recalled. “I figured it would be a place to learn about what was going on and to help both myself and other members address the situation.” Barclay said he was further inspired to join the Western Directors Council after hearing then-DGA President Gene Reynolds make an impassioned call to engage the industry on the employment of women and minorities.
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Barclay addresses membership
at the DGA Annual Meeting.
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The value of the Guild was further emphasized when Barclay experienced creative rights violations, and was vigorously supported by Guild staff. “They stepped in and helped me in a way that was both effective and, to me, personally moving,” he said. “And I said, ‘Oh, I see, this is what the Guild does.’ The Guild is there for the youngest and least experienced director. The idea is we use our juice to make sure everybody, even the person who just became a member this year, has the same protections and rights that we enjoy. I saw the Guild was an amazing apparatus to support directors, so it made sense to me to become an apparatus to support the Guild.” |
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DGA Third Vice President Taylor Hackford. - photo by Verity Smith
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Taylor Hackford’s commitment to the DGA, for which he shares this year’s Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award, is reflective of his trademark focus and drive. From working his way up from the mailroom of Los Angeles’ public broadcasting station to creating the DGA and Academy Award-nominated film Ray, Hackford has pursued his goals with single-minded determination. |
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Hackford is no less devoted to the Guild, where he has moved from Special Projects committee member to the Western Directors Council and ultimately to a key role on the National Board as Third Vice President. He has served on the Creative Rights Committee, co-chairs the DGA Task Force on Social Responsibility and chairs the DGA’s Political Action Committee. For this and other contributions, Hackford is being honored for his extraordinary service to the Guild and its members.
“My work for the Guild has given me a great deal of pleasure over the years. I wasn’t doing it for recognition, but I must admit that being selected by this organization that I love so much, is a great honor.”
Hackford is sharing the Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award with fellow National Board member and First Vice President Paris Barclay. In addition to their individual contributions, the two men co-chair the DGA PAC Leadership Council, a group of prominent Guild members who personally represent the concerns of the membership in face-to-face meetings with members of Congress and other political bodies.
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Barclay and Hackford with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
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“Both Paris and I accepted the responsibility to communicate with our colleagues and try to convince them to put some real financial teeth into the DGA PAC,” Hackford said. “We made a commitment to each other to build the DGA Leadership Council into a truly effective force in Washington DC, and neither of us has ever shrunk from that task. Today the PAC is stronger than it has ever been, and we have established a beachhead for the DGA in our nation’s capitol.”
The PAC has achieved several major successes, including influencing more than 30 U.S. states to adopt tax incentive programs to counter runaway production. More importantly, Hackford says, the committee was instrumental in getting lawmakers in Washington to enact a federal production tax credit as part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, giving producers a viable alternative to foreign incentives. “While these are real accomplishments which we are proud of, we certainly can’t stop and rest on our laurels,” Hackford says. “Unfortunately, politics continues to intrude into our creative rights and economic rights so we must continue to fight for the Guild’s legislative agenda.”
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Hackford chats with Senator Hilary Clinton (D-NY) at a PAC LC lunch in NY.
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Hackford’s service to the DGA began when he volunteered to sit on the Special Projects Committee chaired by former DGA President Robert Wise. The level of his commitment grew greatly when he ran for the Western Directors Council and was elected as an alternate. As needed, he would fill in for an absentee, and he found he enjoyed the opportunity to have a say in Guild affairs. “At first I kept my mouth shut and listened (Not an easy thing for a director to do),” he says. “There were many smart people in the Guild leadership with years of experience so there was much to learn. When I began to express my opinion people were respectful and listened. They didn’t throw me out. It was a real participatory democracy and I just loved it.”
Hackford was eventually elected to serve as a full time member of the Council, as well as the National Board and various committees. He found it highly rewarding and continues to encourage his peers to devote time to the DGA. “We have a great tradition - that initial group of founding Directors who decided to risk their livelihoods to stand up for their colleagues who were not so powerful,” Hackford says. “That’s our birthright, and I believe that each member of this Guild has inherited a bit of that responsibility. In this era of media consolidation and the corporatization of entertainment, the DGA still stands up and fights for a filmmaker’s creative rights, and I’m very proud of that.”
Hackford was Student Body President at USC and a pre-law major, focusing on international relations and economics. As a senior he started hanging out with some of the film students and became interested in the power of film as political tool to communicate a point of view and affect change. After he graduated from USC, he entered the Peace Corps in 1968, landing in Bolivia where he started to experiment with Super 8 film in his spare time. “After coming out of the Peace Corps, I went to law school for two weeks, but I realized that law was not what I really wanted to do so I just got up and left,” he recalled. “When I was Student Body President at USC, I had been interviewed at the Public TV Station in LA, KCET so on a whim I went back there and applied for a job. I really had no training in film at all. Luckily, they gave me a job in the mail room.” KCET became Hackford’s film school. “When someone finally said, ‘Can you shoot film?’ I lied and said I could and went out and started shooting news reports and doing music shows.”
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Hackford chats with Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) at a PAC LC luncheon.
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Hackford pioneered the presentation of uninterrupted rock n’ roll performances on U.S. television and created several award-winning documentaries for the station’s cultural department. He also served as an investigative reporter in the news division and won an Associate Press Award and two Emmy Awards for his journalism.
As successful as he was, Hackford realized that his true desire was in narrative filmmaking. He quit the station and directed a short film, Teenage Father, that won the Academy Award in 1979 for best live-action short film. That led to the opportunity to direct his first feature film, The Idolmaker. His second film, An Officer and a Gentleman, was a commercial and critical hit in 1982. The film received a DGA Award nomination, and won two Academy Awards and was nominated for four others.
Hackford has both directed and produced all of his subsequent films, which include Against All Odds, White Nights, Everybody’s All-American, and the acclaimed documentary Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock n’ Roll.
Hackford also developed and produced La Bamba, the most successful Latin-themed feature film in history. As a producer, Hackford formed New Visions Pictures to produce modestly-budgeted films with other directors, such as The Long Walk Home, Mortal Thoughts, Defenseless, and Queens Logic.
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Hackford testifies on Capitol Hill
about the effects of film piracy.
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Hackford returned to directing with the epic drama about East Los Angeles, Blood In, Blood Out (Bound By Honor), and followed it up with Dolores Claiborne.
In 1996, after discovering some unreleased documentary footage of the legendary Muhammad Ali/George Foreman title fight in Zaire, Hackford gathered new material and interviews to create the feature length documentary When We Were Kings, which won the 1997 Academy Award for best documentary feature. That was followed by The Devil’s Advocate in 1998 and Proof of Life in 2001. Ray, a dramatic film portrait of American musical icon, Ray Charles, led Hackford to be nominated for best director at the Academy Awards and DGA Awards.
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