Gregory Orr
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Gregory Orr is an American writer/director of documentary and fiction films.
Born in Los Angeles, California to (retired) actress Joy Page and (deceased) TV producer William T. Orr, he attended Boston University and the California Institute of the Arts where he studied under film director Alexander Mackendrick (Man in the White Suit, Sweet Smell of Success).
He began his career sweeping the floor of a special effects company that made Pillsbury Dough Boy commercials and moved on to become a production manager and cinematographer. In 1993 he produced his first documentary, a feature-length biography of his grandfather, movie pioneer Jack Warner.
He is an Emmy Award nominee whose films have investigated the New York State parole system (Parole: Prison Without Bars), the life of a legendary Hollywood producer (Jack L. Warner: The Last Mogul), and the manners in which certain famous people in history met their end (The Day They Died).
In 2004 he wrote and directed the critically acclaimed short film Alone which film reviewer Richard Schickel called "a deft, cinematic short story, handsomely staged and acted by a new writer/director of great and singular talent".Mr. Orr is the author of over seven collections of poetry, including Orpheus and Eurydice and the forthcoming The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems. His poetry has appeared in numerous national literary magazines, among them The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of two critical books, Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry and Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems, and is co-editor of Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World. He has won the YM-YWHA Poetry Center's Discovery Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has served as poetry consultant to the Virginia Quarterly Review for over twenty years. He is also the author of the forthcoming memoir, The Blessing (Council Oaks Press) and the non-fiction work Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry (University of Georgia Press).
He currently lives in New York City.
