Zach Helm

Zach Helm (born January 21, 1975 in Santa Clara, California) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He wrote the internationally-performed stage play Good Canary, wrote and directed the film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (2007), and has staged one-man performance pieces, most notably his revival of Spalding Gray's Interviewing the Audience.

Zach Helm
Born
Zachary E. Helm[1]

(1975-01-21) January 21, 1975
Santa Clara, California, United States
EducationDePaul University (BFA)
OccupationFilm director, film producer, screenwriter

Career

In 2006 Helm was approached to direct Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, for which he had previously written a screenplay. Helm said that the film and production process were troubled and he has never seen the released version.[2]

In 2006, Zach Helm also authored the film Stranger Than Fiction.

He began Interviewing the Audience in 2008, a revival of one of Spalding Gray's performance pieces which he had seen while in college. As the title suggests, audience members are brought onto stage and interviewed, their personal stories and insights extracted in long-form conversations meant to create a sense of communal intimacy but challenge the convention of theater and story. Helm's approach differed from Gray's in that Helm's conversations were entirely extemporaneous, without any prepared questions, and the audience members were drawn at random. Helm tended to find and illuminate themes and connections within the interviews, thereby creating a through-line for each performance as it happened.[3]

Helm wrote Le Bon Canari (Good Canary), which was produced in France in 2007, then translated into Spanish (El Buen Canario) and produced in Mexico. It was translated into English in 2016 for the Rose Theatre Kingston. Drawn from Helm's personal experiences, the play is known for its dark humor, coarse language, and views on sexism and misogyny as well as its use of Brechtian devices.[4]

In 2015, Helm directed Culo Quasars Cocaine Chaos, which he adapted from the true story of Paul Frampton.[5] He adapted the Epic Magazine article "The Mercenary" for Fox in 2016, collaborating with journalists Josh Davis and Josh Bearman.[6]

References
  1. https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VLP2-ZPM
  2. "'Mr. Magorium' Director to 'Breaking Bad' -- I Hate My Movie, Too". TMZ. Retrieved 2020-12-22.
  3. "Interviewing the Audience". Vineyard Theatre. 2013-01-14. Retrieved 2020-12-22.
  4. "John Malkovich to make London debut as a theatre director". the Guardian. 2016-02-05. Retrieved 2020-12-22.
  5. Swann, Maxine (2013-03-08). "The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble (Published 2013)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-12-22.
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