Mt. Airy Academy Award
winner returns to his roots

by SHARON SEXTON

Bill Guttentag, who grew up in West Mt. Airy, returned to William Penn Charter School last Friday to talk with students about his work as executive producer of NBC’s Crime & Punishment, which he described as “the ultimate reality show.” A 1975 graduate of Penn Charter, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker recalled that he took his first film class at Penn Charter under the tutelage of Oliver W. Nuse, retired head of the art department. It was “pretty cutting edge to have a film class” in those days, according to a filmmaker whose work has always been cutting edge.

Guttentag, who now lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife and two children, gets a daily dose of some of life’s most terrifying and tragic events courtesy of the San Diego district attorney’s office, which allows him open access to pretrial preparations and courtroom proceedings for the NBC summer series Crime & Punishment. The critically acclaimed series will return to a weekly schedule next summer.

Filming in high-definition video and using three remote-control cameras inside the courtroom, Guttentag’s team of documentary filmmakers produces a dramatic, compelling series that features no actors, no scripts, no soft-focus phony reenactments of horrendous crimes. It’s all real — the D.As, the victims, the defendants, the jury, the verdict.

“We are truly flies on the wall,” said Guttentag. “There are extraordinary moments in the courtroom. As much as I like Law & Order, those people are actors. We have real people on the witness stand, and when the D.A. wins, the defendants go out the back door in handcuffs. When the DA loses, they go out the front door and back into society. The stakes are exceedingly high.”

Crime & Punishment is “the ultimate reality show,” he said. “… you don’t get voted off the island, you get voted into the joint.”

Because so much of his work deals with violent subjects, Guttentag said, new colleagues are often surprised to learn that he graduated from a Quaker school. “I’m interested in social subjects and, tragically, they often involve violence and drugs and guns,” Guttentag said. “I’m hoping to educate people by tackling tough subjects. Crime & Punishment is about justice. We show that people can have a horrendous experience, but with the help of the D.A., they can still seek justice.”

Guttentag is a graduate of Penn Charter, the University of Pennsylvania and the American Film Institute. He won an Academy Award in 1989 for You Don’t Have to Die, a documentary about a young boy with cancer. He picked up his second Oscar for Twin Towers, a documentary about two brothers — one a firefighter, one a police officer — who responded to the terrorist attacks on New York City. For more information, call 215-844-3460 x 133.