Jeffrey Friedman (filmmaker)

Jeffrey Friedman (born in Los Angeles, California on August 24, 1951) is a non-fiction filmmaker, director, producer, writer and editor. Friedman has won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for the film Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

Jeffrey Friedman grew up in New York City, where his mother was an actor and his father taught undergraduate English literature and edited and published a small literary magazine. Jeffrey began studying acting when he was nine, and at age twelve he acted professionally in two off-Broadway productions. He played Emil in "Emil and the Detectives" and a schoolboy on the first day of integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in "Black Monday" by Reginald Rose.

Friedman began his film training by apprenticing in the editing rooms of such films as Marjoe (Academy Award, Documentary Feature, 1972) and William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). Other early credits include the pole-vault segment directed by Arthur Penn and edited by Dede Allen for Visions of Eight (1973), about the 1972 Munich Olympics, and Raging Bull (Academy Award, Film Editing, 1980), edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and directed by Martin Scorsese.

Friedman has been making films with Rob Epstein since 1987, when they formed the production company Telling Pictures in San Francisco, California. Friedman and Epstein's first film together was Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Common Threads recounts the first decade of AIDS in America through stories of five individuals featured in the Quilt. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Common Threads in 1990, as well as a Peabody Award, and an Emmy Award for Bobby McFerrin's original all-vocal score.

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