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Speaker BUD GREENSPAN Subjects excellence, sports Video Clip

Bud Greenspan has been called the foremost writer/producer/director of sports films and one of the world's leading sports historians. In 1997 he was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award, the broadcast and cable industry's most prestigious honor, for his lifetime of work.

His book 100 Greatest Moments in Olympic History, published in November 1995 is in its third printing. He recently completed two more books; The Olympians Guide to Winning the Game of Life released in June l997 and Frozen in Time: The Greatest Moments at the Winter Olympics released in December 1997.

Greenspan's Nagano '98, the official film of the 1998 Winter Olympic Games, aired on SHOWTIME in December 1998. He is currently in production on a 90-mixiute special on the legends of boxing, one of four additional sports specials he is producing for SHOWTIME.

His PBS special entitled 'Ageless Heroes, " celebrating the continued vibrancy of an age group that has long been ignored, aired in April 1998.

In 1995, he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Director-Guild of America (DGA). He was also awarded the coveted "Olympic Order" by President Juan Antonio Samaranch and the International Olympic Committee for his contribution to furthering the Olympic movement. Bud Greenspan was the 17th American to receive this award.
Nagno '98 marks the fifth in a series of Official Olympic Films produced by Greenspan. The first three were on the 1984 Los Angeles, 1988 Calgary, and 1994 Lillihammer Olympic Games.

His official film Lillehammer '94: 16 Days of Glory, aired on The Disney Channel in 1994 and won three EMMY Awards that year for Cinematography, Film Editing and outstanding Edited sports Special.

In 1996, Bud Greenspan continued to document the Olympic saga, producing two highly acclaimed television specials celebrating the centennial of the Modern Olympic Games which aired on TBS. 100 Years of Olympic Glory, a three-hour film exploring great international stories of the Olympic Games, and America's Greatest Olympians, two-hours chronicling the inspiring stories of American Olympic athletes.

In 1988 and in 1992, the International Olympic Committee commissioned Bud Greenspan and his company, Cappy Productions, Inc. to produce two films celebrating the Seoul and Barcelona Olympic Games, which premiered on The Disney Channel.

16 Days of Glory, Los Angeles, distributed around the world by Paramount Pictures, established a new level of sports filmmaking, capturing the emotion and spirit of the individual athlete at the Olympic Games... whether they are successful or not. No longer were onlv the winners featured.

Other Olympic films include Triumph and Tragedy, The 1972 Munich Olympics, which was televised worldwide, in the summer of 1992 and The Measure of Greatness, a film about the history of timing at the Olympic Games, aired on The Discovery Channel in the U.S. Greenspan also produced a 36 monitor Multi-Screen visual and musical tribute to the Olympic Games titled: .The Spirit of the Olympics, which is on permanent display at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Bud Greenspan wrote, produced and directed a two-hour docudrama titled: Time Capsule: The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. The premise is if network television had existed in 1936, how it would have covered the Berlin Olympics and the world events of the day. Actors portrayed the various newsmen, sports reporters and anchormen as they report the day's news.

Before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Greenspan wrote, produced and directed a one hour television special, An Olympic Dream, which featured the lives of teenage athletes from different parts of the world as they trained for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which aired on the Disney Channel.

This was followed by a one-hour special for HBO Sports titled: The Golden Age of Sport, a show which highlights those legendary sports heroes from the 1920s including Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey and Red Grange. The show aired for the first time on December 20. 1988 and won an ACE award as the Outstanding Sports Documentary of the Year.

Greenspan also produced For the Honor of Their Country, a series of thirteen half-hour hows highlighting the Olympic heritage of 13 countries from around the world, which was distributed worldwide for viewing before the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Bud Greenspan and his wife, Cappy Petrash Greenspan, who died in 1983, won Emmy awards for their television series. The Olympiad, which is currently available in video cassette through DreamWorks/SKG Television and has been seen in over 80 countries around the world, most recently In the United States on ESPN. Together, Cappy and Bud Greenspan built Cappy Productions into one of the most respected, independent production companies in the world.

Greenspan's critically acclaimed NBC movie of the week, Wilma, based on the life of Olympic champion, Wilma Rudolph, was one of the highest rated television films of the 1977 season.

On July 4th, 1984 in prime time, the CBS Television Network aired Bud Greenspan's: America at the Olympics, a two-hour documentary in which nine American gold medal winners return to the sites of their Olympic victories.

Greenspan's other credits include Time Capsule., The Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1932, a ninety-minute docudrama broadcast by NBC, which recreated the world events of one of the most pivotal years of the twentieth century. Using the 1.932 Los Angeles Games as the central backdrop, 1932 featured a time-capsule look at the people and events that shaped this period.

Greenspan also wrote and directed The Heisman Trophy Award Specials in 1981-1985. These annual one-hour television specials were broadcast live via satellite throughout the country and were both commercial and critical successes, Each year's special culminated in the announcement of that year's Heisman Trophy winner, live from the Downtown Athletic Club in New York.

Bud Greenspan has won widespread recognition in a variety of television formats. The Numero Uno series, which he wrote, produced and directed, was first aired nationally on PBS in April of 1982. This series of half-hour documentaries features legendary sports champions from thirteen different countries around world-

T'his Day in Sports, twenty-second features that highlight the most thrilling sports events for each day of the year, was broadcast on the CBS Owned & Operated Television Stations. -Greenspan has also produced historical vignettes and personality pieces for all three major networks, including the Winter Olympic Vignettes for ABC-TV's coverage of the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, which won him another Emmy award.

PBS broadcast Greenspan's The Glory of Their Times, based on Lawrence Ritter's best-selling book about the early days of baseball, and the show was nominated for both the TV Critics Circle and Emmy awards. His television series, Sports in America, based on the book by Pulitzer Prize winner, James Michener, was also broadcast nationally on PBS.

Besides his award-winning films, Bud Greenspan has written several books, including Play It Again, Bud, and We Wuz Robbed, both dealing with famous controversies in the field of sports.

His first spoken-word record album, Great Moments in Sport, earned Greenspan a Gold Record. It was followed by 18 more spoken-word albums, including Witness (the Army/McCarthy bearings), Voices of the 20th Century, The Nuremberg War Crime Trials, The Day FDR Died, Madison Square Garden and December 7, 1941 - the last, an album he produced in association with The New York Times.

Bud Greenspan began his career as a sports broadcaster. At 21 he became sports director of radio station WMGM in New York City, then the largest sports station in the country. Greenspan broadcast such programs as Warm-Up Time and Sports Extra, the pre- and post-game coverage of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He also covered hockey, basketball, track and tennis events, play-by-play, from Madison Square Garden.

After leaving WMGM, Greenspan turned to magazine writing. Since then, he has sold hundreds of fiction and non-fiction articles to major publications in the United States and abroad and is a frequent contributor to Parade Magazine.

Prior to forming his own film company in 1967, Greenspan produced television commercials for such agencies as the Lawrence Gumbinner Agency and Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample, Inc. and SSC&B in New York City. 
  
 
  

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