Film Festival Producer
Lewis is a long-term member of the Board of Trustees of The American Cinematheque. He has produced and hosted multiple film festivals in Los Angeles since 1993 including the Mods & Rockers Film Festival celebrating 1960s and rock-related movies (presented annually since 1999)- and Lust For Glory! the official 25th Anniversary celebrations of the Monty Python troupe (1994). Other film festivals produced and hosted by Lewis in Hollywood have saluted Peter Sellers, Richard Pryor, Peter Cook, Graham Chapman, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and the feature film output of Britain's Channel Four. He also organized the official celebrations marking the 90th birthday of actor Glenn Ford in 2006.
Lewis has served as Chairman of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Los Angeles), sitting on its Board of Directors for six years. He produced and hosted multiple film events for BAFTA/LA including co-presentations with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Directors Guild of America.
In 2009, Lewis instigated, produced and hosted The Secret Policeman's Film Festival an in-depth retrospective of 25 films and TV specials produced as fund-raisers for Amnesty International over the preceding three decades. The festival was presented over five weeks in the summer of 2009 in New York at Lincoln Center and the Paley Center For Media, Manhattan and in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque's Grauman's Egyptian Theatre and the Paley Center For Media, Beverly Hills. The festival was subsequently presented in Washington DC in December 2009 at the American Film Institute coinciding with International Human Rights Day.
Read more about this topic: Martin Lewis (humorist)
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