Neil Hollander is an Award-winning film director, producer and screenwriter best known for producing documentaries like The Last Sailors (1984), First Flights with Neil Armstrong (1991), H for Hunger (2009), and others. Hollander is also well-known author of books including The Courageous Voyage of Joan De Penguin (1979), Sailor talk: Essential words and phrases in 6 languages (1980), The Great Zoo Break (1985), The Yachtsman's Emergency Handbook: The Complete Survival Manual (1986), The Last Sailors: The Final Days of Working Sail (1987), Elusive Dove: The Search for Peace During World War I (2014) and many more.

Synopsis

Neil Hollander was born 1939, in New York City. He won an Octavian award for best documentary film, Grand Prix for best film, Golden oil lamp and the award for best director at the NY Film Festival for his early television work and made his feature film directorial debut with Riding the Rails in 1982. His film The Last Sailors marked the first film about the bygone era of working sail.

Early Career

Director, producer and screenwriter Neil Hollander was born on July 9, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in the working class neighborhood of the city, Hollander graduated from RISD high school in 1960 and attended the University of Wisconsin, where he received his BA in literature. After college, Hollander started to work as a journalist writing for the local newspaper. After that he has gone through several professions. Because of his passion for sailing Hollander went on a three-year long trip during which time he had a chance to visit and live on places like Thailand, Costa Rica, to finally settle in France.

Hollander moved to France in 1971 where he began writing for television, scripting the prime time dramas. His first TV directorial effort, a drama called Call out the Jungle (1976), won Hollander a Director's Guild of America Award. In 1982, Hollander made his feature film directorial debut with Riding the Rails, about a man who finds himself broke and homeless in New York.

His next offering as a director on Rotten Tomatoes, The Last Sailors (1984), is about boat history, building, and their repairing. Hollander's third effort was Gold Lust (1984), a little-seen film based on his book from previous year.

Television Success

Though directing feature films was Hollander's first love, he had considerably more success early on as a producer for documentary films. This is more pronounced with his work as executive producer for the 1990s First Flights with Neil Armstrong. Hollander served as the mastermind behind the Nobel Voices, which aired in 2001 and more than thirty interviews with Nobel Prize winners.