ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stewart Bird is a playwright, author and filmmaker. He has been a lifelong New Yorker, born in the Bronx, and now living on Long Island.
Contact Stewart Bird at swazo61@gmail.com
1970-1986 He wrote, directed, and co-produced a dramatic feature film, Home Free All, which is distributed by Almi Films. Furthermore, he has also produced and directed numerous feature-length documentaries, including the award-winning Finally Got the News (with Peter Gessner and Rene Lichtman) on auto workers in Detroit, Michigan; Retratos on Puerto Rican community; Coming Home on Vietnam veterans; and The Wobblies (with Deborah Shaffer) on the turn of the century labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World and Building the American Dream: Levittown, New York on William Levitt's creation of suburbia.
1987 He wrote and produced for WCBS in New York a half-hour special on Teenagers and Alcohol. Additionally, in 1987, he wrote an original one-hour dramatic story for Wonder Works entitled The Mighty Pawns which won numerous awards including the NAACP Image Award and Silver Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival.
Distribution:
The Mighty Pawns played nationally on PBS and the Disney Channel.
Home Free All was at the Montreal Film Festival, USA Film Festival, and was distributed theatrically across the country by Almi Films. It is also distributed nationally on videocassette by Vestron.
Retratos was aired nationally on PBS.
The Wobblies played theatrically and educationally throughout the world. The Wobblies was selected in 2022 to The National Film Registry, Library of Congress. It has been restored by the Museum of Modern Art and is in their permanent collection.
Finally Got the News and Coming Home are distributed educationally by The Cinema Guild.
Building the American Dream: Levittown, New York, is distributed by The Cinema Guild. Credited on ABC's Nightline (with Jeff Greenfield).
Grants:
Grants for his films have been received from many sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, N.Y. Council For the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York State Council on the Arts.
Books:
Stewart Bird, All Roads Lead to Murder. 2023
Steward Bird, Dan Georgakas, Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever (Lake View Press, Chicago, 1985).
Stewart Bird, Peter Robilotta, The Wobblies, The U.S. vs. Wm. D. Haywood, et al. (Smyrna Press, Brooklyn, NY, 1980).
CBS NEWS, New York, Producer 48 Hours
Segments:
FIRE: Two parts on a 9 alarm fire in Boston's Chinatown. A portrait of the Boston Fire Department and its Commissioner, Leo Stapleton. (4:37, 455).
Trauma: A story about former boxer, Juan Collado was struck by a hit and run driver and miraculously survived his wounds at a local emergency ward but was refused lifesaving treatment by 11 California hospitals basically because he didn't have the right medical insurance. (6:50).
Another America: Two parts on country singer Dwight Yokam. Although he now lives in Hollywood we see the strong connection to his roots in Floyd County, Kentucky as reflected in his music and his life. A story on the economic hardships in Floyd County, Kentucky: A look at family-run coal mine and the booming underground business of cockfighting. (6:50, 3:35).
Underground: A story about Incest in Baltimore. A look at a child who is recovering victim and a father in jail who is unrepentant about his incestuous relationship with his daughter. (5:17).
Stuck on Welfare: He was Point Producer on this hour and also produced two stories: A portrait of Welfare Worker Norman Klobarcher #1469. The perfect bureaucrat struggling with a stressful job. (7:28). A story about how Wisconsin is attempting to prevent poor people from surrounding states coming to Wisconsin for higher welfare benefits and how a young woman from the Chicago Ghetto brought her whole family to Wisconsin for the better life. (6:18).
Earth Wars: A portrait of Bonnie Reiss the Executive Director of ECO (Earth Communication Office), a former Theatrical Attorney in Hollywood who is now rallying the Hollywood Community to save the environment. (6:00).
FOX TELEVISION, New York. Producer A Current Affair
Segments:
Alan Berg: This is the story of the murder of the irreverent Denver radio talk show host, Alan Berg, and the growing violent movement of white supremist neo-Nazis. (9:00).
A Cycle of Justice: Six members of a hard working farm family, the Aldays, were murdered in the small, rural Georgia town of Donalsonville by three escaped convicts. Fourteen years ago in the Seminole County Court House the escaped convicts were convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair in an apparent open and shit case. (7:00).
This Jail's for You: This is the story about a Florida inmate in a half-way house doing the last year of a sentence for armed robbery and working full-time outside the facility. On Christmas Eve he is caught with two six-packs of "cold" beer in his room. He is arrested and convicted and given fourteen years' additional sentence to serve and sent back to maximum security prison. (5:00).
Elvis Presley: This is an unswerving look at Elvis' rise to stardom and his slow tragic demise. There are interviews with Red West, his best friend and bodyguard, David Stanley, his step-brother, and Lynda Thompson, his lover, who had to leave because she could not watch Elvis kill himself. (18:00).
Big Foot: This is the story of a murder in upstate New York where a woman was bludgeoned to death and a likely suspect, 6-foot-9-inch Terrence Murname, was arrested and convicted of the crime. Police claimed they found a bloody sneaker print that matched Murname's size-16 sneaker. But police could find no other forensic evidence to link Murname to the murder. (9:00).
Ivan Boesky: The greed that led Ivan Boesky to commit crimes in order to illegally make hundreds of millions of dollars by insider trading information is paralleled in the film Wall Street. (6:00).
Scenario for Death: Three Joplin, Missouri high school youths including the class president were accused of murdering their classmate Steven Newberry by beating him with baseball bats in a brutal Satanic murder and then stuffing him down a well. They claimed Steven was inferior and showed no removes in his killing. But Newberry, a nice kid, had become obsessed with good and evil after hanging out with his classmates and wrote a short story which predicted and paralleled his demise at the bottom of a well. (7:00).
The Night Natalie Died: This investigative piece raises the possibility of a cover up by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Coroner's Office on how and when Natalie Wood died. (22:00).
Son of Sam: Along with author Maury Terry, who spent ten years writing his book The Ultimate Evil, an examination of Satanic cults in the U.S., we look at the thirteen shootings and six murders David Berkowitz was convicted of as the lone crazed killer who heard voices in the Son of Same shootings in the summer of 1977. A convincing case is made that Berkowitz was part of a Satanic cult based in Westchester County that was involved in all the shootings. (16:00).
Son of Satan: In this segment we look at a Satanic murder in East Northport, Long Island, and its connections to some other unsolved murders and appearances in neighboring Nassau County. In these cases, drugs, heavy metal music, child pornography, prostitution and Satanism are involved. (19:00.)