Ft. Benning, Georgia, 1967
Robert Edwards is a writer and filmmaker based in New York City. He is the author of Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm (2024), a handbook for confronting right wing autocracy in America, published by OR Books in New York.
An Army brat, Edwards was born in a US Army hospital in Germany and grew up on and around military installations across the United States. He attended ten schools in thirteen years, including a brief overlap with Barack Obama at Punahou School in Honolulu. (Shockingly omitted from all of Barack’s books.) He graduated with a BA in history magna cum laude from Lafayette College, where he won the Gilbert Prize in English and the MacKnight Black Poetry Prize. He then served for six and a half years as an infantry and military intelligence officer in the US Army, and was a captain in the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. His father, Robert H. Edwards, was a rifle company commander in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965, as memorialized in We Were Soldiers Once….and Young by Lt. General (Ret.) Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway.
After leaving the Army, Edwards worked as a private eye, a telemarketer, and a nightclub doorman before earning an MA from the Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford. As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed the feature films Land of the Blind (2006) starring Ralph Fiennes, Donald Sutherland, and Tom Hollander, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2006, and was the Opening Night Gala film at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London; and When I Live My Life Over Again (aka One More Time) (2016), starring Christopher Walken and Amber Heard, which premiered at Tribeca. Most recently he completed screenplays for The Goldsboro Incident for producer David Permut, The Beirut Spy for producers Daniel Dubiecki and Lara Alameddine, and an adaptation of James Patterson’s novel Swimsuit, for producers Bill Robinson, Patrick Santa, and Alexandra Hunter and Katya Yarotskaya of Immigrant Parents.
Edwards won a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Land of the Blind, and a Sloan Foundation / Sundance Grant along with producer Carol Polakoff for his adaptation of American Prometheus, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, a property that was subsequently adapted by Christopher Nolan as the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. His other screenwriting work includes scripts for directors such as Bennett Miller and Mark Romanek, and uncredited rewrites on films ranging from Black Mass to Olympus Has Fallen. Among his other screenplays are the Cuban missile crisis thriller “One Minute to Midnight,” based on the book by Washington Post correspondent Michael Dobbs, for producer John Davis and Fox; “Blackwater,” based on the award-winning book about the mercenary industry by Jeremy Scahill, for HBO; “Hello to All That,” based on war correspondent John Falk’s memoir of Sarajevo, for producer Scott Stuber and Universal; and “House of War,” an eleven-part miniseries about the Cold War based on the book by James Carroll, for Plan B and HBO.
As a documentarian, Edwards works with his wife and partner, director/ cinematographer Ferne Pearlstein (winner of the 2004 Sundance Cinematography Prize for her work on Ramona Diaz’s Imelda). Edwards co-wrote, co-produced, and co-edited Pearlstein’s feature documentary Sumo East and West (2003), about Americans in that ancient Japanese sport, and co-wrote and co-produced her new film The Last Laugh (2016), about the Holocaust as the last taboo subject for humor, starring Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Alan Zweibel, Harry Shearer, Susie Essman, Gilbert Gottfried, Larry Charles, David Steinberg, Shalom Auslander, Etgar Keret, Renee Firestone, and many others. Both films had their world premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens series. Edwards’s own documentary short The Voice of the Prophet (2001) about the death of Vietnam veteran Rick Rescorla on 9/11, was shown at Sundance, Toronto, Human Rights Watch and numerous other festivals. In his earlier life as a film editor, Edwards edited the PBS documentaries In Search of Law and Order: Catching Them Early (1997) by Michael Schwarz and Roger Graef and Stopwatch (1998) by Bill Jersey and Michael Schwarz; Barry Levinson’s feature documentary for Showtime, Yesterday’s Tomorrows (1999), produced by Richard Berge, which was part of a traveling exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution; and David Belle’s Abandoned (2000) for PBS, which won a duPont-Columbia Journalism Award; as well as other television projects for networks such as PBS, A&E, and TLC. Most recently he produced and co-directed (with Justin Schein) the feature documentary Death & Taxes, about wealth inequality and the American Dream, featuring Paul Krugman, Matthew Desmond, Felicia Wong, Darrick Hamilton, Amy Hanauer, and Robert Reich; and was story producer on XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture, directed by Pearlstein, for Trevor Noah’s Day Zero Productions and Time Studios for MSNBC’s Turning Point series.
After living for many years in Chinatown, Edwards now lives in Brooklyn with Ferne and their daughter, as mandated by law.
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