December 14, 2011
Director Ed Sherin will be presented with the DGA Honorary Life Member Award at the Guild’s 64th Annual DGA Awards on January 28, 2012. This prestigious honor is given in recognition of outstanding creative achievement, contribution to the DGA or to the profession of directing.
Sherin is being honored for his tenure as the National Vice President where he served from 1997 to 2004, as well as his dedication and contributions to the New York theater and film community. He also held the post of Second Vice President of the DGA from 2004-2007, and continues to serve as a member of the National Board. He has also served as a member of the Eastern Directors Council since 1996. In 2002, he was presented with the Robert B. Aldrich Award for extraordinary service to the Directors Guild of America and to its membership.
“The Directors Guild’s most valuable asset is the dedication and commitment of its members to the Guild,” said Hackford. “Ed Sherin devoted himself to advocating on behalf of our Eastern members. His leadership and energy reinvigorated the membership and inspired many to become involved in Guild service.”
Born in Danville, Pennsylvania, Sherin originally had no plans for a life behind the camera. “I had always been interested in live theater but I had no intention of going into the entertainment business. I enrolled at Brown University and after graduation spent three years of the Korea War as the gunnery officer on the USS Twining, a destroyer in the Western Pacific and China Sea. “Shortly after I was released from active duty, I was at a party with college friends without any idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I met an actress who was training at a method acting workshop. Several days later I sat in the back of the acting class and watched. The beauty of what I experienced was theater’s capability of taking human behavior and slowing it down to the point where you could examine it and might understand it as well. So I gained admission to the workshop and three months later I was an extra on television and my career ‘took off.’”
After a decade of intermittent success acting in television shows like Playhouse 90, Omnibus and Studio One, (where Dan Petrie gave him his first speaking role), and in Broadway stage productions such as Gore Vidal’s Romulus, Pierre Boulle’s Face of a Hero, and Howard Teichmann’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and several roles with the New York Shakespeare Company, Sherin was coaxed into directing.
“A group of young actors from the American Shakespeare Festival asked me to adapt and direct a stage version of Tristrim. It was a success and great fun for me to do. Then I directed Deidre of the Sorrows by J.M. Synge and that led to interest in me as a stage director.”
Hollywood came knocking after he directed the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning production of The Great White Hope by playwright Howard Sackler. “It was an enormous success and United Artists approached me direct a movie.”
He soon found himself in Almeria, Spain, shooting the 1971 Western classic, Valdez Is Coming. “I had no idea how to look through a camera. I could stage a scene well and to survive I learned to shoot brilliant ‘oners’, shots which held on the action often through an entire scene. I found if I did it ‘in one’ I didn’t have to worry about camera direction. That habit followed me throughout my career in film and television. It became my trademark later with Law & Order. In fact, once I did nine and one-half pages in eight setups and wrapped at 5:45 pm!”
Sherin’s resume includes the feature films Valdez Is Coming and My Old Man’s Place; movies for television including, A Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Daughter of the Streets, and The Father Clements Story; and television series including LA Law, Moonlighting, Medium, Homicide, Hill Street Blues, Tour of Duty, and Law & Order, where he also later worked as Executive Producer. It wasn’t an easy journey. After his first two feature films he returned to directing plays in New York until the 1980s when his wife, actress Jane Alexander, was producing and acting in L.A. and he moved to the West Coast.
“I was 56 and trying to find work in television. I was interviewed by producers a bit more than half my age who looked at my resume and said, ‘You should be retiring.’ Finally John Rich let me shadow directors in shows he was producing and I got good lessons in the system of episodic directing. John set about taking credit for anything good I did henceforth and we became life-long friends. I cracked the ageism ceiling with Hill Street Blues and from that point I began a career directing television.”
Sherin’s decision to become more involved in Guild service occurred after the DGA was able to aid him in a dire situation. “In the early ‘90s, Jane and I were embezzled by a management company and we lost every penny we’d tucked away from the time we started in theater.” Sherin went to the Guild to see if anything could be done to help. “We were broke and by giving me a lump sum retirement the Guild made it possible for us to keep our home. After—with enormous good fortune — Dick Wolf hired me as Executive Producer of Law & Order, I decided it was time to give something back to the Guild and a member of the Eastern Directors Council asked me to run for a seat on the Council.”
After spending a year on Council, Sherin was nominated by Dan Petrie for National Vice President, was elected in 1997 and embarked on making some changes. “When I was first elected to Council, there were members who’d been there for 20 years and were out of touch with what was going on in the Guild. I wanted to change the rules so that that couldn’t happen. The ‘Working in Trades’ amendment evolved and that changed the nature of the governance of the Guild enormously.”
He also sought to bring the DGA Annual Meetings live to the membership in the East as well as the West and to see the remodeling of the DGA’s New York offices into a state-of-the art business center. But he holds a special pride in the establishment of the DGA Honors Gala. “We used to watch a broadcast of the DGA Awards in Los Angeles from a large room in a New York hotel. We were three hours later so the awards would go on into the night often the early morning.” I thought, ‘We can do better than this. We’re going to have another something here. That’s where the notion of the Honors Gala developed.”
Looking back on how he was able to accomplish so much, Sherin believes it had a lot to do with his lack of subtlety. “I was always passionate about what I believed. I was vocal and honest and I took risks. And I was very loyal to the organization. I was angered by the fact that there were members unfairly discounting their guild. I think my point of view was adopted by lots of the working members.”
Even though he’s now vacated the National Vice President’s post, Sherin still serves the Guild as a member of the National Board and of the Eastern Directors Council. “I had a wonderful time as the National Vice President. I served for three terms and finally resigned because I thought there should be some new blood in that seat and I was right. We have a brilliant National Vice President now in Steven Soderbergh. I admire him and he’s taken the Guild up a few notches.”
Asked how he feels about becoming the latest recipient of the DGA’s Honorary Life Membership Award, the Sherin sense of humor shines through and he laughs, “I’ve always dreamed of not having to pay dues.”
Past recipients of the DGA Honorary Life Member Award
Robert Iger & Barry Meyer (2010) • Roger Ebert (2009) • Jay D. Roth (2008) • Carl Reiner (2007) • Larry Auerbach (2004) • John Rich (2003) • Delbert Mann (2002) • Jack Valenti (2001) • Chuck Jones (1996) • Sheldon Leonard (1995) • Arthur Hiller (1993) • Charles Champlin (1992) • Gilbert Cates (1991) • Barry Diller & Sidney Jay Sheinberg (1990) • Elliot Silverstein (1990) • Sidney Lumet (1989) • Michael H. Franklin (1988) • Tom Donovan (1985) • Elia Kazan & • Robert E. Wise (1983) • Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1981) • David Butler (1978) • H.C. Potter (1977) • Lew Wasserman (1975) • Charles Chaplin (1974) • David Lean (1973) • Darryl F. Zanuck (1968) • Jack L. Warner (1965) • Joseph C. Youngerman (1964) • Hobe Morrison (1962) • Y. Frank Freeman (1961) • George Sidney (1959) • Donald Crisp (1957) • Walt Disney (1955) • Louis B. Mayer (1952) • J.P. McGowan (1951) • Rex Ingram (1949) • Tod Browning (1948) • Maurice Tourneur (1945) • Frank Capra (1941) • Marshall Neilan (1940) • Mabel Walker Willebrandt (1939) • D.W. Griffith (1938)