Thom Fitzgerald Biography

Date of Birth: July 8, 1968

Born in New Rochelle, New York, Thom Fitzgerald grew up in New York City. After graduating with a BFA in performance and film from the Cooper Union for the Advancement in Science and Art, he moved to Nova Scotia. He wrote, produced and directed his first feature film, The Hanging Garden (1997), on a budget of $1.5 million. The tale of a gay man who returns to his childhood home after ten years, it was an immediate success, winning awards at several film festivals. It also scored five Genie awards, including Best Screenplay and the Claude Jutra Award for Best Direction for a First Feature.

His next film, Beefcake (1999) was about muscle men's magazines of the 1950s and how they were primarily being purchased by gay men. Unfortunately, the docudrama didn't do nearly as well as his first film. Fitzgerald made his television directing debut with the TV movie Wolf Girl (2001), starring Tim Curry and Leslie Ann Warren. While filming in Romania, he was inspired by the cull of 200,000 stray dogs in Bucharest to write his next screenplay, The Wild Dogs (2002). Fitzgerald not only directed, but took a role in the film, which starred Rachel Blanchard. The movie won Best Canadian Feature at the Atlantic Film Festival, as well as a Best Direction award for Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald returned to his home city, New York, to shoot The Event (2003), about Manhattan's large and varied gay population. Starring Parker Posey and Olympia Dukakis, the film won a Reader Jury award at the Berlin International Film Festival. He worked again with Dukakis in Three Needles (2006), which deals with the topic of AIDS.

Filmography:

3 Needles (2006)
The Event (2003)
The Wild Dogs (2002)
Beefcake (1999)
The Hanging Garden (1997)