Filmmakers

Lawrence R. Hott has been producing documentary films since 1978, when he left the practice of law to join Florentine Films. His awards include an Emmy, two Academy Award nominations, a George Foster Peabody Award, five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons, eleven CINE Golden Eagles, screenings at Telluride, and first-place awards from the San Francisco, Chicago, National Educational, and New England Film Festivals.

Hott’s first production was the highly acclaimed The Old Quabbin Valley (Outstanding Independent Film, New England Film Festival), a portrait of a water resource controversy in Massachusetts. His experience on that film prepared him for work on The Garden of Eden, a 1985 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short. Other co-productions include the award-winning Niagara Falls: The Changing Nature of a New World Symbol, The Adirondacks: The Lives and Times of an American Wilderness, and Sentimental Women Need Not Apply: A History of the American Nurse.

His films The Battle for Wilderness, Wild By Law, and Knute Rockne and His Fighting Irish all aired as part of The American Experience series on PBS. Wild By Law was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1992. He also co-produced Cambodians in America: Rebuilding the Temple, which appeared on PBS in 1993. His co-production The People’s Plague: Tuberculosis in America, a two-part, two-hour special, appeared on PBS in 1995.

His WETA co-production, Divided Highways: The Interstates and the Transformation of American Life, won an Emmy for Outstanding Historical Programming, the George Foster Peabody Award, and the Best Documentary Award from the New England Film Festival. His feature-length dramatic film The Boyhood of John Muir won the Gold Hugo at the Chicago Television Festival, the Gold Award from Parents’ Choice, and was the Christmas Day Special on PBS in 1998. Hott’s film about the American Civil Liberties Union for KCTS-Seattle won the Gold Apple award from the National Educational Media Film and Video Competition.

In 2002-3 Hott completed three films for PBS broadcast, the one-hour Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival, the two-hour The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced, and the one-hour Ohio:200 Years. Imagining Robert was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the outstanding documentaries of 2002. He has just fnished producing and directing “Niagara Falls” for WNED-TV, Buffalo, “History Through Deaf Eyes” for WETA-TV, Washington, D.C. and “Audubon: Drawn From Nature” for American Masters, Thirteen/WNET, New York.

Hott was the Fulbright Fellow in Film and Television in the United Kingdom in 1994. He received the Humanities Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 1995; a Massachusetts Cultural Council/Boston Film and Video Foundation Fellowship in 2001; and the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2001. He has been on the board of non-fiction writers at Smith College and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Commission, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.