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Ed Sherin
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Teamwork has been a part of Ed Sherin's work ethic since his days as a boy, when he learned to throw a football from Chicago Bears Hall of Fame quarterback Sid Luckman and lugged the water bucket up and down the East Coast — in cities like New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., — when the Bears were on the road. Four years as a Navy gunnery officer during the Korean War, followed by decades of lessons learned in countless theaters and soundstages, invariably led to his most recent prize: seven years as executive producer of the award-winning television drama Law & Order.
Sherin's teamwork and commitment to his profession were recognized by the DGA when, in 1997, he was elected as the Guild's National Vice President, helping the East Coast membership achieve a more active and vital role in national Guild affairs.
Sherin, this year's recipient of the DGA's Robert B. Aldrich Award for extraordinary service to the Guild and its members, is in the tradition of the Award's namesake, who was dedicated to both the DGA and rugged individualism. Aldrich was President of the Guild from 1975 to 1979 and was one of the great battlers of Hollywood's stormy labor history and an impassioned individualist.
Of the Aldrich Award, Sherin said,"I'm overwhelmed by it. Now, in my 70s, I'm either finally on the fast track or, like my friend, Henry Fonda, said to me once,'If you live long enough they'll start giving you awards.' I was flabbergasted; actually I'm beyond that, as I look to see who also has won the Award." Past recipients include Tom Donovan, Robert Butler, Arthur Hiller, Martha Coolidge, Delbert Mann, Daniel Petrie, Max A. Schindler, Burt Bluestein, Gene Reynolds, John Rich, current Guild President Jack Shea, Larry Auerbach, Milt Felsen, George L. Schaefer, Gil Cates, Sheldon Leonard, George Sidney, Elliot Silverstein and Robert B. Wise.
Sherin's idea of teamwork has helped alter the perception of the Guild as a bicoastal operation with a bipolar complex."There was an unnecessary division between the East and West," Sherin said."When I became National Vice President, I began to feel very strongly that we had to find some unifying force, some way to bring the East closer to the West and the divergent membership in the East particularly closer together.
"The working in trade amendment has helped," Sherin said, referring to the landmark amendment to the DGA constitution that requires candidates for Guild elected positions to have worked for a total of at least 30 days under a DGA contract within the preceding seven years."There were members on the Eastern Directors Council who hadn't worked in Guild categories in 25 years. I felt these members did not have sufficient contact with current Guild problems. What was clear was the need to make the East Coast portion of the guild a stronger and more involved part of the overall DGA. The amendment brought people who were more active in their profession to the forefront. I may have provided the initial energy for that, but it was the hard work of many committees and the entire Eastern Council that made this change feasible. I also feel that I was instrumental in developing the DGA Honors, an annual celebration of filmmakers as well as labor, government and business leaders who have made contributions to American culture."
Sherin has won many awards during his career, including an Emmy for Outstanding Dramatic Series (Law & Order), a New York Drama Critics Award, The New England Theatre Award and off-Broadway's Obie Award. In 1998 he received a Crystal Apple Award, presented by the city of New York. He is the husband of Tony- and Emmy-winning actress Jane Alexander (who's also a four-time Oscar nominee). Two of his three sons, Tony and Jace, are in the business, and John is a medical doctor.
His involvement with the Guild began when he was asked to direct Burt Lancaster in an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard Western novel, Valdez Is Coming (1970). He had just directed Alexander and James Earl Jones to great acclaim on Broadway in The Great White Hope, which won the Pulitzer Prize."That was an experience, not knowing one end of the camera from the other and having to direct Burt Lancaster right out of the box — he was tough," Sherin said."That picture has had some underground success through the years, and I still get residuals. But more importantly, that picture got me into the Guild.
"I was glad I was in the Guild and had Guild benefits," he said."But I didn't fully understand what those benefits meant until many years later when I was in New York directing Law & Order. In the early 1990's, James Powers, our accountant, embezzled my wife and me. We were stone-broke and owed a half million dollars in back taxes which Powers had failed to pay. Our life savings were gone and I was in my 60's.
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Edwin Sherin at DGA Awards Photo by Elisa Haber |
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"I went to the Guild. They told me that I had accumulated enough credit under the Guild's pension plan to see us through this difficult time. Then, last year, while receiving cortisone shots for my aching knees, I got a systemic infection from a bacterial contamination in one of the shots. Last year at this time, I was fighting for my life. There again was the Guild. The health plan provided benefits that paid the vast majority of my medical expenses. Naturally, I feel an enormous indebtedness to the Guild.
Sherin began his career as an actor in the late 1950's and first directed an off-Broadway production of Deirdre of the Sorrows in 1959. After ten years directing off-Broadway and regional theatre, he made his spectacular Broadway debut, crossed media with the Lancaster picture, then veered to opera for Cosi Fan Tutte in 1971. He was one of the most prolific and accomplished Broadway directors of the 1970's, guiding the hit 6 Rms, Rv Vu with Alexander and Jerry Orbach, several Tennessee Williams plays, Gore Vidal's An Evening With Richard Nixon, and The Masterbuilder with Richard Kiley and Alexander for the Kennedy Center, among a dozen others.
An actor in 1950s television, Sherin began directing in the medium for Great Performances on PBS, including versions of Deirdre of the Sorrows and King Lear. In the 1980s he directed several made-for-TV movies and 25 episodes of such hour-long dramas as L.A. Law, Moonlighting and Hill Street Blues. He counts as his favorite production, A Marriage: Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz (1991), starring Alexander and Christopher Plummer for PBS' American Playhouse.
The football experience he collected was full of drama, as a player in high school and college and as waterboy with the Chicago Bears. His many awards and accomplishments can be attributed to this teamwork. But it is a different teamwork that is being recognized — working side-by-side with his director colleagues to give something back to an organization that has been there to cheer for him — and that has now given him another reminder of the difference he has made along the way: the Aldrich Award, for the goodwill fostered and forged within the DGA.
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