Joe Berlinger Signs With Range

Justin Kroll
·3 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Range Media Partners has signed Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger.

As a pioneering crime and justice filmmaker, Berlinger’s early work is widely credited for having been the launchpad for the explosion in true crime storytelling. His work has drawn attention to social justice issues in the U.S. and abroad through his documentaries and films such as the Sundance and DGA Award winner Brother’s Keeper, about an alleged 1990 murder in the town of Munnsville, NY which has influenced a generation of nonfiction filmmakers, and HBO’s Paradise Lost trilogy, which resulted in the freeing of the wrongly convicted West Memphis Three after almost two decades in prison and earned Berlinger multiple Emmy and Peabody awards and an Oscar nomination.

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Berlinger’s passion for using media to bring attention to the issue of wrongful conviction served as his inspiration for Wrong Man on Starz, which captured an in-depth look into six separate cases of alleged wrong convictions over the show’s two seasons.

“Joe Berlinger is a pioneer,” Range said Tuesday. “His documentary work has changed lives, shined a light on corporate malfeasance, our criminal justice system and rad rock music. And he continues to raise the bar in social change storytelling. We are honored to work with him and continue to build upon his unparalleled body of work.”

Berlinger’s body of social justice work has expanded through his many collaborations with Netflix, where Berlinger is currently under an overall deal, including a half dozen series that have debuted at No. 1 including Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a painstaking look at the true story behind one of the world’s most vile serial pedophiles. He also has the ongoing series Conversations with a Killer and Crime Scene, the latter of which examined the social and systemic forces that allowed Los Angeles’ Cecil Hotel in Season 1, and 1970s-era Times Square in Season 2, to become areas of unabated criminal activity.

Season 3 of Crime Scene is currently in production. Season 2 of Berlinger’s Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, launched in April and became his fifth consecutive Netflix release to debut at No. 1 on the platform.

Berlinger also helped redefined the rockumentary genre with 2004’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, his intimate portrait of Metallica during a period of the band’s upheaval that is considered on the greatest rock documentaries of all time,

He also challenged the landscape in 2019 by becoming the first filmmaker to cover the same subject in scripted and unscripted formats simultaneously with Netflix’s Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and the Bundy drama Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile which starred Zac Efron as Bundy.

Berlinger’s appetite for virtuous storytelling has made him a decorated filmmaker with an Oscar nomination and eight Emmy nominations in addition to a Peabody and two Emmy wins. Eight of Berlinger’s films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, earning three Grand Jury prize nominations and an audience award. He has received multiple awards from the Directors Guild of America, the National Board of Review and the Independent Spirit Awards.

Berlinger continues to house his production operations with RadicalMedia, his production partner for the past two decades. He continues to be represented by CAA and attorney Andre Des Rochers.

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