Nancy Savoca

Nancy Savoca
Born	Nancy Laura Savoca (1959-07-23) July 23, 1959 Bronx, New York
Occupation	Director, writer, producer
Years active	1982 to present
Notable work	True Love, Dogfight, Household Saints, If These Walls Could Talk, The 24 Hour Woman
Spouse(s)	Richard Guay (m. 1980 to present)
Children	Bobby Guay (b. 1986), Kenny Guay (b. 1989), Martina Guay (b. 1992)
Website	http://nancysavoca.com/

Nancy Laura Savoca (born July 23, 1959) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter.

Early life and education

Nancy Laura Savoca was born in 1959 in the Bronx, New York, to Argentine and Sicilian immigrants Maria Elvira and Calogero Savoca, respectively. She attended local schools. After completing her courses at Queens College, Flushing, New York, Savoca went on to graduate in 1982 from New York University's film school, the Tisch School of the Arts. While there she received the Haig P. Manoogian Award for overall excellence for her short films Renata and Bad Timing.

Career

1985 - 1999

After film school, Savoca worked as a storyboard artist and assistant editor on an independent film. Her first professional experience was as a production assistant to John Sayles on his film The Brother From Another Planet, and as an assistant auditor for Jonathan Demme on two of his films: Something Wild (1986), and Married to the Mob (1988).

In 1989, she directed her first full-length movie, the privately funded True Love, about Italian-American marriage rituals in the Bronx. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie, starring Annabella Sciorra and Ron Eldard, both making their film debuts (and co-starring a number of now-familiar faces from The Sopranos including Aida Turturro and Vincent Pastore), was hailed as one of the best films of the year by both Janet Maslin and Vincent Canby of the New York Times. Savoca was nominated for a Spirit Award as Best Director. MGM/UA picked up the distribution rights and RCA released the soundtrack, with two songs reaching the Top 40 hits on the Billboard charts.

Since then she has written, directed and produced movies for the big screen and television, written or polished scripts for other directors, and directed a number of episodes in ongoing television series.

She was among five writers and co-wrote all three segments of the Demi Moore produced If These Walls Could Talk, a mini-series about abortion rights, and directing the first two segments. The second segment starred Sissy Spacek, a married woman who does not think she can afford another child. Cher starred in and directed the third segment, in which she played a doctor targeted by anti-abortion activists. It was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards, including Best Miniseries or Television Film.

In 1998, Savoca was feted as a "New York trailblazer" at the New York Women's Film Festival. Savoca was also honored by the Los Angeles chapter of the advocacy organization, Women in Film and Television (WIFT).

Two of Savoca's films, Household Saints and True Love, are listed in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made St. Martin's Griffin. Her film True Love was called one of the "50 Greatest Independent Films of All Time" by Entertainment Weekly.

Nancy Savoca's work has also been the subject of a retrospective by the American Museum of the Moving Image.

2000 to present

Savoca and Guay are shooting a documentary on Gato Barbieri, an Argentinian jazz saxophonist. They are also currently working towards the filming of Ki Longfellow's novel The Secret Magdalene (Eio Books, 2005; Random House, 2007) in which Savoca is again the screenwriter and director, while Guay is producing.

Revolution Books screened "Dirt" on August 11, 2010. Savoca appeared for a Q&A. DIRT is an award-winning tragic-comedy about an undocumented cleaning woman. Shot in NYC and El Salvador.

In February 2011, Colombia held a retrospective of Savoca's work which she attended.

Savoca has completed her independent feature Union Square starring Mira Sorvino, Tammy Blanchard, Patti LuPone, Mike Doyle, Michael Rispoli and Daphne Rubin-Vega. Madeleine Peyroux recorded an end song for the film which was invited to open in 2011's Toronto International Film Festival. It is now being released in selected theaters throughout the United States.

On June 4, 2012, Nancy Savoca received a Best in the Biz tribute in Canada's 10th Anniversary Female Eye Film Festival.

On July 13, 2012 (a Friday), Union Square opened to packed houses in New York City, Los Angeles and Toronto. An indie shot in 12 days for less than $100,000, it has received widespread notice from major print sources such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, to online sources like Newsday, Yahoo Voices and the Pasadena Sun.

In the fall of 2012, Nancy directed a short film for Scenarios USA. This is an organization that uses the stories of high school students, transforming them into professionally made short films. Nancy worked with student screenwriters to help develop their original ideas into films that air on Showtime and become part of an innovative teaching curriculum used in high schools around the country.

Personal life

While in college, Savoca met Rich Guay, then an accounting student working at an Italian deli near her home. They were married in 1980. They have three children together, two sons and a daughter.

Awards and nominations

• Haig P. Manoogian Award, 1982, New York University
• Grand Jury Prize, 1989 Sundance Film Festival - True Love
• Winner, 1989 San Sebastián International Film Festival - True Love
• Nominated, Best Director, 1990 Independent Spirit Award - True Love
• Nominated, Best Screenplay, 1994 Independent Spirit Award - Household Saints
• Winner, 1996 Lucy Award - If These Walls Could Talk
• Nominated, Outstanding Director of a Feature Film, 2000 ALMA - The 24-Hour Woman
• Winner, Best Director, 2004 Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival - Dirt

Filmography

• Renata (1982) (short film)
• Bad Timing (1982) (short film)
• True Love (1989)
• Dogfight (1991)
• Household Saints (1993) (also co-writer, with Richard Guay)
• Dark Eyes (1995) (TV)
• Murder One (1995) (TV)
• If These Walls Could Talk (1996) (TV) (also co-writer, with I. Marlene King and Susan Nanus)
• The 24 Hour Woman (1999) (also co-writer, with Richard Guay)
• Third Watch (2000) (TV)
• The Mind of the Married Man (2001) (TV)
• Reno: Rebel without a Pause (2003) (TV) (also co-producer)
• Dirt (2003) (also co-writer, with Richard Guay)
• Union Square (2012) (also co-writer, with Mary Tobler)

Television director

• Chapter Five, Murder One, ABC (1995)
• 1952 and 1974 - If These Walls Could Talk miniseries (1996)
• Know Thyself, Third Watch, NBC (2000)
• Anywhere, Anytime, The Mind of the Married Man, HBO (2001)
• Dirt, Showtime (2003)
• The Great Spacecoaster syndicated children's series (1980s)

As writer

• Renata (short film, co-writer) (1982)
• Bad Timing (short film, co-writer) (1982)
• True Love (co-writer with Richard Guay) (1989)
• Household Saints (co-writer with Richard Guay) (1993)
• If These Walls Could Talk (co-writer) (1996)
• The 24 Hour Woman (co-writer with Richard Guay) (1999)
• The Secret Magdalene (2012)
• Union Square (co-writer with Mary Tobler) (2012)

References

• Women Filmmakers and Their Films, St. James Press, 1998

External links

• Official site
• Nancy Savoca at the Internet Movie Database