First Face: The Buck Starts Here

A Brown University graduate, Jim Wolpaw has worked in independent film for 20 years. His films include the Academy Award-nominated documentary Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date; Cobra Snake for a Necktie, a portrait of Bo Diddley which aired on Showtime; and the feature comedy Complex World. He has freelanced as a writer, film editor, post-production supervisor, and creative consultant on numerous documentary projects, and for the past six years has taught film production and screenwriting at Emerson College. His films have won awards at more than a dozen film festivals worldwide and his honors include a Cine Golden Eagle.

Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, Steve Gentile has had an extraordinarily diverse film career. His animated films The Ant Who Loved a Girl and The Soldier have won awards at more than 30 film festivals, including London, Hong Kong, and Zagreb. As an editor, he has six feature credits, including the cult comedy Complex World. He was also the post-production coordinator on Miramax’s Next Stop Wonderland. As a screenwriter, Gentile has scripted three one-hour teleplays for Roger Corman’s Sci-Fi Channel series Black Scorpion. He has freelanced in a variety of technical capacities on numerous documentary and industrial projects, and has taught film production and animation at Emerson College, Boston Film/Video Foundation, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Boston University. His honors include a Regional Student Academy Award nomination, a Cine Golden Eagle and a NEA/Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation fellowship.