Michael Shamberg - Life and Career

Life and Career

His credits include Erin Brockovich, A Fish Called Wanda, Garden State, Gattaca, Pulp Fiction and The Big Chill. His production companies include Jersey Films, with Stacey Sher and Danny DeVito, and Double Feature Films, with his wife, Carla Santos Shamberg, executive producer of the Brockovich movie.

In the 1960s and 1970s, counter-culture video collectives extended the role of the underground press to new communication technologies. In 1970, Shamberg co-founded a video collective called Raindance Corporation, which published a newspaper-magazine called Radical Software. Raindance Corporation later became TVTV, or Top Value Television. Shamberg and his first wife Megan Williams were founding members of TVTV. The collective believed new technology could effect social change. One example of this was Shamberg's work on In Hiding: A Conversation with Abbie Hoffman, which was broadcast on public TV's WNET/13 in May 1975, despite its content and dealings with America's renowned radical fugitive.

Shamberg preferred the term Guerrilla television (the title of his 1971 book), because despite its strategies and tactics similar to warfare, Guerrilla television is non-violent. He saw Guerrilla television as a means to break through the barriers imposed by Broadcast television, which he called beast television.

The group urged for the use of Sony's Portapak video camera, introduced in 1968, to be merged with the documentary film style and television, and later pioneering the use of 3/4" video in their works. Shamberg will co-produce with Stacey Sher the film adaption of the British novel Paul Is Undead.

Not to be confused with the producer and director, Michael H. Shamberg, who has a long history of association with the Manchester band, New Order.

Shamberg is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, MO.