
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.
Hotts
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 Peoples 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. Hotts 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