William Sachs

WILLIAM SACHS
WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
BILL@ENTERTAINMENTHIGHWAY.COM

Awards
• “Best of Fest,” Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (Spooky House, Ben Kingsley, Mercedes Ruehl).
• “1st Place—Children’s Jury Award," Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (Spooky House).
• Golden Bear (nominated), Berlin Film Festival (There is no 13, Mark Damon, Harvey Lembeck).
• Grand Prize, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina, Dorothy Stratten, Stephen Macht, Avery Schreiber).
• Critics’ Award, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina).
• Audience Award, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina).
• Audience Award, Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film (Galaxina).
• Academy Award (nominated), writer Norman Wexler (Joe, Sachs replaced director, rewrote script, and restructured and remade film as uncredited film doctor; DGA has record of his work).
• Best High Fall, Stuntmen’s Association Award, created and directed stunt (Exterminator 2, Mario Van Peebles, Robert Ginty).
• In addition to the above awards, Sachs’s feature films and shorts, both 35mm and 16mm, have appeared in and won awards at numerous festivals including the Buenos Aries Film Festival, the Oberhausen Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Marienbad Film Festival, the Festival International de Cine de Cortometrage in Buenos Aires, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival (different from the children’s festival), the National Film Theater Festival (in association with the Royal College of Art and The Sunday Telegraph) where Sachs’s multi-award-winning short Breakfast was also put into the permanent archives of the National Film Theater, the Southampton Film Festival, festivals in Italy at Taormina and San Sebastian, the Shanghai International Film Festival (Spooky House was one of only eleven US films invited), and the Seattle International Film Festival.

Unique accomplishments
• First director to use a computer for special visual effects (Galaxina).
• Only Director to use infrared Ektachrome color film stock, which had to be kept frozen until eight hours before use, worked mostly from heat, and gave the film an otherworldly look (Galaxina).
• Only Director to use Dolby EX to spin the music around the theater in a scene where the entire set spun in a 360-degree circle at high speed (Spooky House).
• Made an experimental film without a camera by boiling the film in a pot, scraping off the emulsion, and painting directly on the film. It was used by Pink Floyd as a background during concerts and in music videos seen by millions.
• One of only a few Hollywood film doctors. Retained by both producers and completion bond companies, Sachs has saved films that have gone on to become major grossers and launched stars’ and directors’ careers. One of his early doctoring assignments was an unreleasable motion picture called The Gap. He reconstructed the entire picture and retitled it Joe. It went on to become one of the highest grossing independent pictures ever, launching the acting careers of Susan Sarandon and Peter Boyle and its original director, John Avildsen. It also garnered an Academy Award nomination for its writer, Norman Wexler, whose screenplay was significantly changed by Sachs’s major reworking of the film’s structure and writing of additional dialogue (uncredited). The box office success of Joe single-handedly put Cannon Films on the map. Sachs was later recruited by Cannon to save Exterminator 2, and as a result the film made more money for Cannon and launched the career of Mario Van Peebles. Trimark Pictures enlisted Sachs’s services to salvage two of their films. The first, Servants of Twilight, based on the Dean Koontz novel, was immediately sold to Showtime. The second was an unreleasable horror film, originally intended for straight-to-video and starring the then unknown Jennifer Aniston. He re-made the picture, added a little humor, and brought Aniston and many of the other actors back, and with ADR he improved their performances. The end result was an unexpectedly entertaining picture titled Leprechaun. It became an immediate box office hit, spurring five sequels. Leprechaun helped raise Trimark’s quarterly profits 200% in the first quarter of its release and enabled the company to raise public money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, igniting its rise toward becoming a leading independent motion picture company that is now part of Lions Gate.

Academy Award winning actors and others
Sachs has directed some of the most highly acclaimed actors in the world, including Academy Award winners Sir Ben Kingsley, James Coburn, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Mercedes Ruehl, Academy Award nominees Elliott Gould, and Karen Black, and Emmy winners Jennifer Aniston and Peter Boyle. Other Actors he has directed have won awards and nominations such as the Image Award, Independent Spirit Awards, American Comedy Award, MTV Award, TV Guide Award, and numerous festival and foreign awards.

Selected review quotes and comments
SPOOKY HOUSE
"The kids whooped, hollered, cheered, and applauded during the movie. They held hands like one unit, swung together and danced in the aisles. I haven't seen anything like it in the seventeen years of the festival. All the kids came out asking when they could see the picture again…The kids' jury score was the highest in the seventeen years of the festival. It was a unanimous vote…The darling of the festival, the favorite of the festival, the hit of the festival…It's the most commercial movie we've ever had in the festival!…Spooky House was a resounding success with children of all ages. Kids walked out of the screening asking where they can get copies of the videocassette to see over and over again. It's a tremendous crowd pleaser." (Nicole Dreiske, Founder/Executive Director, Chicago International Children's Film Festival)

THERE IS NO 13
"Unforgettable masterpieces of film that are written in golden letters in the records are rare. There Is No 13, a debut by the young American, William Sachs, is one such masterpiece. Undoubtedly, Sachs, whose remarkable fantasy film gives indications of a new direction in film storytelling, is influenced in his structure by the synthesis of reality and imagination of Fellini, Resnais and Bunuel. Yet this style has been further developed It is a deeply touching film, because this auteur's film, which is at first seen to be about a young man who is pushed by a film producer into fully distorted fantasies that follow one another in turbulent succession along with self ridicule, is then surprisingly experienced as a striking and stirring film about the human condition. The distantiation of Brecht is applied in a masterful manner. We will be hearing again from William Sachs. He has it in his hands." (Piet Ruivenkamp, Haags-che Courant, at the Berlin Film Festival)

GALAXINA
"For the past several years, Hollywood has been foisting comic books on us disguised as movies. By technically perfecting the special effects, Star Wars, Alien, Superman, and Star Trek somehow whizzed by our frontal lobes and made us believe that those ridiculous things could actually be happening. In pretending to be better than comics, they have been subtly putting down the genre from which they sprang. Reading The Empire Strikes Back in its presently available comic book form makes you realize how dependent your enjoyment of the film was upon special effects. As a comic book it's pretty dull. Well Galaxina is the exact opposite. It's a great comic book…Like Airplane, Galaxina zips from gag to gag with nary a thought, making it everything that Barbarella was trying to be. This, combined with the bizarre Hollywood Babylon-type murder of its star, Dorothy Stratten, making this her only picture, seems to indicate that we may have another cult classic on our hands…If you read National Lampoon and miss the old Mad magazine, if you've got a secret box of old Vampirellas and Howard the Ducks stashed away in your mother's garage, if you have every issue of Heavy Metal and are anxiously waiting for their premiere film, then Galaxina may be just the appetizer for you." (Michael Dare, LA Weekly)

"Sachs has directed this wild and woolly picture with aplomb." (Charles Ryweck, The Hollywood Reporter)

"…A clever and almost cute homage to the overblown space epics of recent years…endearing characters and imaginative sets…a touch of technical class…an enjoyable parody of the space genre." (David Linck, Boxoffice)

VAN NUYS BLVD.
Van Nuys Blvd. became so popular among the teenage and young adult audience that the Los Angeles Police Department had to close down the famous Southern California cruising street. One traffic officer told Sachs that after the movie came out people came from places as far away as Japan and were cruising the boulevard in taxis. The low budget picture’s grosses immediately soared into the millions and became another teen classic, garnering excellent reviews in major publications such as: The Hollywood Reporter, “Sachs has directed the proceedings with an affecting light touch;" Variety, “Van Nuys Blvd. has what it takes…it should pay off;” and the Los Angeles Times, “[A] good natured summer season comedy…Writer-director William Sachs has taken a fast, light touch.”

INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN
A horror spoof that was itself spoofed in Robert Rodriguez’s recent Planet Terror, The Incredible Melting Man opened and became an instant cult classic and top-grossing picture, reaching #10 on Variety’s chart of the 50 top-grossing films. Outgrossing films made for more than ten or twenty times the budget and featuring special effects makeup by Academy Award winning makeup artist Rick Baker, it was called “horrendously expert” by The Hollywood Reporter, “a horror gem” by Star force magazine, “stunning” by Famous Monsters Magazine, and Archer Winston, of the New York Post wrote, “Writer-director William Sachs demonstrates simple mastery of the medium.”

HITZ (AKA JUDGMENT, FOREIGN)
This portrayal of the realities of life on the tough streets of Los Angeles’ inner cities and barrios starred two Academy Award nominees, Elliott Gould and Karen Black, and introduced future Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr. in his first feature film role, along with a strong cast of serious actors and actual gang members in major roles. Because of its realism, Hitz has been used by leading LA gang activist Father Greg Boyle (who calls it “a true depiction of gang life in Los Angeles”) to show at-risk youth the hopelessness and hazards of gang life.

Filmography
DIRECTOR
• Spooky House
• The Last Hour
• Judgment
• Hot Chili
• Exterminator 2 (additional scenes)
• Galaxina
• Van Nuys Blvd.
• The Force Beyond
• The Incredible Melting Man
• There Is No 13

WRITER
• Nu Freedom (under option)
• MLK (the true story of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in development)
• Spooky House (co-writer)
• Hitz (aka Judgment)
• Hot Chili (co-writer)
• Exterminator 2 (co-writer)
• Galaxina
• Van Nuys Blvd.
• The Incredible Melting Man
• The Force Beyond (documentary)
• There is No 13
• Joe (uncredited)
• Arthur of the Britons (developed and wrote series proposal, UK TV)

PRODUCER
• Spooky House
• Leprechaun (co-producer)
• Servants of Twilight (co-producer)
• Exterminator 2
• There Is No13
• The Longest Hunt

FILM DOCTOR
Sachs doctored more than 25 domestic and foreign films, most uncredited and subject to non-disclosure. Below are a few he is free to mention.
• Leprechaun
• Servants Of Twilight
• Exterminator 2
• Joe

EDITOR
• The Force Beyond

POSTPRODUCTION SUPERVISOR
• Numerous films—film and digital

PRODUCTION EXECUTIVE
• President, Entertainment Highway, Inc. (production/distribution). Produced and released Spooky House theatrically, handled foreign and home video, developed new projects.
• Heritage Entertainment Inc. As a production executive, Sachs was given a concept and wrote and developed a presentation for a television series based on the legendary King Arthur, which was sold and became the acclaimed and successful British TV series Arthur of the Britons. The series ran for twenty-six episodes and starred Brian Blessed, Rupert Davis, Oliver Tobias and Michael Gothard. Sachs also worked in the US and Europe, acquiring completed motion pictures, “Americanizing” them by re-editing, re-titling and re-dubbing them, creating trailers and TV spots, and selling the films domestically.

Trailers, TV spots, workout video’s, PSA’s, music videos, etc.
• Wrote trailers, TV spots and radio spots for numerous pictures, including Joe, for Cannon Films and other distribution companies.
• Wrote and directed a series of public service announcements and music videos, narrated by the Ambassador to the United Nations from Bosnia Herzegovina, as part of an international campaign that raised money for transporting injured Bosnian children to foreign hospitals.
• Directed workout videos for a Baywatch workout series with Gena Lee Nolin and Donna D’Errico.
• Has worked as an editor, post production supervisor, and music supervisor.

Associations, lectures, and service
• Member of the Directors Guild of America, where he has served on the Creative Rights Committee
• Member of the Writers Guild of America, where he has served as a screen credits arbitrator
• Guest lectured at the UCLA, Cal State Northridge, and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) film schools
• Veteran of the USAF, where he served as an aeromedic.

Education
• University of Maryland. Majors: Sociology/Communications
• The London Film School
• Acting: Michael Gough in London; the Actors Studio in New York; and the Charles Conrad Studios in Los Angeles
WILLIAM SACHS
WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
BILL@ENTERTAINMENTHIGHWAY.COM

Awards
• “Best of Fest,” Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (Spooky House, Ben Kingsley, Mercedes Ruehl).
• “1st Place—Children’s Jury Award," Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (Spooky House).
• Golden Bear (nominated), Berlin Film Festival (There is no 13, Mark Damon, Harvey Lembeck).
• Grand Prize, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina, Dorothy Stratten, Stephen Macht, Avery Schreiber).
• Critics’ Award, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina).
• Audience Award, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina).
• Audience Award, Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film (Galaxina).
• Academy Award (nominated), writer Norman Wexler (Joe, Sachs replaced director, rewrote script, and restructured and remade film as uncredited film doctor; DGA has record of his work).
• Best High Fall, Stuntmen’s Association Award, created and directed stunt (Exterminator 2, Mario Van Peebles, Robert Ginty).
• In addition to the above awards, Sachs’s feature films and shorts, both 35mm and 16mm, have appeared in and won awards at numerous festivals including the Buenos Aries Film Festival, the Oberhausen Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Marienbad Film Festival, the Festival International de Cine de Cortometrage in Buenos Aires, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival (different from the children’s festival), the National Film Theater Festival (in association with the Royal College of Art and The Sunday Telegraph) where Sachs’s multi-award-winning short Breakfast was also put into the permanent archives of the National Film Theater, the Southampton Film Festival, festivals in Italy at Taormina and San Sebastian, the Shanghai International Film Festival (Spooky House was one of only eleven US films invited), and the Seattle International Film Festival.

Unique accomplishments
• First director to use a computer for special visual effects (Galaxina).
• Only Director to use infrared Ektachrome color film stock, which had to be kept frozen until eight hours before use, worked mostly from heat, and gave the film an otherworldly look (Galaxina).
• Only Director to use Dolby EX to spin the music around the theater in a scene where the entire set spun in a 360-degree circle at high speed (Spooky House).
• Made an experimental film without a camera by boiling the film in a pot, scraping off the emulsion, and painting directly on the film. It was used by Pink Floyd as a background during concerts and in music videos seen by millions.
• One of only a few Hollywood film doctors. Retained by both producers and completion bond companies, Sachs has saved films that have gone on to become major grossers and launched stars’ and directors’ careers. One of his early doctoring assignments was an unreleasable motion picture called The Gap. He reconstructed the entire picture and retitled it Joe. It went on to become one of the highest grossing independent pictures ever, launching the acting careers of Susan Sarandon and Peter Boyle and its original director, John Avildsen. It also garnered an Academy Award nomination for its writer, Norman Wexler, whose screenplay was significantly changed by Sachs’s major reworking of the film’s structure and writing of additional dialogue (uncredited). The box office success of Joe single-handedly put Cannon Films on the map. Sachs was later recruited by Cannon to save Exterminator 2, and as a result the film made more money for Cannon and launched the career of Mario Van Peebles. Trimark Pictures enlisted Sachs’s services to salvage two of their films. The first, Servants of Twilight, based on the Dean Koontz novel, was immediately sold to Showtime. The second was an unreleasable horror film, originally intended for straight-to-video and starring the then unknown Jennifer Aniston. He re-made the picture, added a little humor, and brought Aniston and many of the other actors back, and with ADR he improved their performances. The end result was an unexpectedly entertaining picture titled Leprechaun. It became an immediate box office hit, spurring five sequels. Leprechaun helped raise Trimark’s quarterly profits 200% in the first quarter of its release and enabled the company to raise public money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, igniting its rise toward becoming a leading independent motion picture company that is now part of Lions Gate.

Academy Award winning actors and others
Sachs has directed some of the most highly acclaimed actors in the world, including Academy Award winners Sir Ben Kingsley, James Coburn, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Mercedes Ruehl, Academy Award nominees Elliott Gould, and Karen Black, and Emmy winners Jennifer Aniston and Peter Boyle. Other Actors he has directed have won awards and nominations such as the Image Award, Independent Spirit Awards, American Comedy Award, MTV Award, TV Guide Award, and numerous festival and foreign awards.

Selected review quotes and comments
SPOOKY HOUSE
"The kids whooped, hollered, cheered, and applauded during the movie. They held hands like one unit, swung together and danced in the aisles. I haven't seen anything like it in the seventeen years of the festival. All the kids came out asking when they could see the picture again…The kids' jury score was the highest in the seventeen years of the festival. It was a unanimous vote…The darling of the festival, the favorite of the festival, the hit of the festival…It's the most commercial movie we've ever had in the festival!…Spooky House was a resounding success with children of all ages. Kids walked out of the screening asking where they can get copies of the videocassette to see over and over again. It's a tremendous crowd pleaser." (Nicole Dreiske, Founder/Executive Director, Chicago International Children's Film Festival)

THERE IS NO 13
"Unforgettable masterpieces of film that are written in golden letters in the records are rare. There Is No 13, a debut by the young American, William Sachs, is one such masterpiece. Undoubtedly, Sachs, whose remarkable fantasy film gives indications of a new direction in film storytelling, is influenced in his structure by the synthesis of reality and imagination of Fellini, Resnais and Bunuel. Yet this style has been further developed It is a deeply touching film, because this auteur's film, which is at first seen to be about a young man who is pushed by a film producer into fully distorted fantasies that follow one another in turbulent succession along with self ridicule, is then surprisingly experienced as a striking and stirring film about the human condition. The distantiation of Brecht is applied in a masterful manner. We will be hearing again from William Sachs. He has it in his hands." (Piet Ruivenkamp, Haags-che Courant, at the Berlin Film Festival)

GALAXINA
"For the past several years, Hollywood has been foisting comic books on us disguised as movies. By technically perfecting the special effects, Star Wars, Alien, Superman, and Star Trek somehow whizzed by our frontal lobes and made us believe that those ridiculous things could actually be happening. In pretending to be better than comics, they have been subtly putting down the genre from which they sprang. Reading The Empire Strikes Back in its presently available comic book form makes you realize how dependent your enjoyment of the film was upon special effects. As a comic book it's pretty dull. Well Galaxina is the exact opposite. It's a great comic book…Like Airplane, Galaxina zips from gag to gag with nary a thought, making it everything that Barbarella was trying to be. This, combined with the bizarre Hollywood Babylon-type murder of its star, Dorothy Stratten, making this her only picture, seems to indicate that we may have another cult classic on our hands…If you read National Lampoon and miss the old Mad magazine, if you've got a secret box of old Vampirellas and Howard the Ducks stashed away in your mother's garage, if you have every issue of Heavy Metal and are anxiously waiting for their premiere film, then Galaxina may be just the appetizer for you." (Michael Dare, LA Weekly)

"Sachs has directed this wild and woolly picture with aplomb." (Charles Ryweck, The Hollywood Reporter)

"…A clever and almost cute homage to the overblown space epics of recent years…endearing characters and imaginative sets…a touch of technical class…an enjoyable parody of the space genre." (David Linck, Boxoffice)

VAN NUYS BLVD.
Van Nuys Blvd. became so popular among the teenage and young adult audience that the Los Angeles Police Department had to close down the famous Southern California cruising street. One traffic officer told Sachs that after the movie came out people came from places as far away as Japan and were cruising the boulevard in taxis. The low budget picture’s grosses immediately soared into the millions and became another teen classic, garnering excellent reviews in major publications such as: The Hollywood Reporter, “Sachs has directed the proceedings with an affecting light touch;" Variety, “Van Nuys Blvd. has what it takes…it should pay off;” and the Los Angeles Times, “[A] good natured summer season comedy…Writer-director William Sachs has taken a fast, light touch.”

INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN
A horror spoof that was itself spoofed in Robert Rodriguez’s recent Planet Terror, The Incredible Melting Man opened and became an instant cult classic and top-grossing picture, reaching #10 on Variety’s chart of the 50 top-grossing films. Outgrossing films made for more than ten or twenty times the budget and featuring special effects makeup by Academy Award winning makeup artist Rick Baker, it was called “horrendously expert” by The Hollywood Reporter, “a horror gem” by Star force magazine, “stunning” by Famous Monsters Magazine, and Archer Winston, of the New York Post wrote, “Writer-director William Sachs demonstrates simple mastery of the medium.”

HITZ (AKA JUDGMENT, FOREIGN)
This portrayal of the realities of life on the tough streets of Los Angeles’ inner cities and barrios starred two Academy Award nominees, Elliott Gould and Karen Black, and introduced future Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr. in his first feature film role, along with a strong cast of serious actors and actual gang members in major roles. Because of its realism, Hitz has been used by leading LA gang activist Father Greg Boyle (who calls it “a true depiction of gang life in Los Angeles”) to show at-risk youth the hopelessness and hazards of gang life.

Filmography
DIRECTOR
• Spooky House
• The Last Hour
• Judgment
• Hot Chili
• Exterminator 2 (additional scenes)
• Galaxina
• Van Nuys Blvd.
• The Force Beyond
• The Incredible Melting Man
• There Is No 13

WRITER
• Nu Freedom (under option)
• MLK (the true story of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in development)
• Spooky House (co-writer)
• Hitz (aka Judgment)
• Hot Chili (co-writer)
• Exterminator 2 (co-writer)
• Galaxina
• Van Nuys Blvd.
• The Incredible Melting Man
• The Force Beyond (documentary)
• There is No 13
• Joe (uncredited)
• Arthur of the Britons (developed and wrote series proposal, UK TV)

PRODUCER
• Spooky House
• Leprechaun (co-producer)
• Servants of Twilight (co-producer)
• Exterminator 2
• There Is No13
• The Longest Hunt

FILM DOCTOR
Sachs doctored more than 25 domestic and foreign films, most uncredited and subject to non-disclosure. Below are a few he is free to mention.
• Leprechaun
• Servants Of Twilight
• Exterminator 2
• Joe

EDITOR
• The Force Beyond

POSTPRODUCTION SUPERVISOR
• Numerous films—film and digital

PRODUCTION EXECUTIVE
• President, Entertainment Highway, Inc. (production/distribution). Produced and released Spooky House theatrically, handled foreign and home video, developed new projects.
• Heritage Entertainment Inc. As a production executive, Sachs was given a concept and wrote and developed a presentation for a television series based on the legendary King Arthur, which was sold and became the acclaimed and successful British TV series Arthur of the Britons. The series ran for twenty-six episodes and starred Brian Blessed, Rupert Davis, Oliver Tobias and Michael Gothard. Sachs also worked in the US and Europe, acquiring completed motion pictures, “Americanizing” them by re-editing, re-titling and re-dubbing them, creating trailers and TV spots, and selling the films domestically.

Trailers, TV spots, workout video’s, PSA’s, music videos, etc.
• Wrote trailers, TV spots and radio spots for numerous pictures, including Joe, for Cannon Films and other distribution companies.
• Wrote and directed a series of public service announcements and music videos, narrated by the Ambassador to the United Nations from Bosnia Herzegovina, as part of an international campaign that raised money for transporting injured Bosnian children to foreign hospitals.
• Directed workout videos for a Baywatch workout series with Gena Lee Nolin and Donna D’Errico.
• Has worked as an editor, post production supervisor, and music supervisor.

Associations, lectures, and service
• Member of the Directors Guild of America, where he has served on the Creative Rights Committee
• Member of the Writers Guild of America, where he has served as a screen credits arbitrator
• Guest lectured at the UCLA, Cal State Northridge, and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) film schools
• Veteran of the USAF, where he served as an aeromedic.

Education
• University of Maryland. Majors: Sociology/Communications
• The London Film School
• Acting: Michael Gough in London; the Actors Studio in New York; and the Charles Conrad Studios in Los Angeles

WILLIAM SACHS
WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
BILL@ENTERTAINMENTHIGHWAY.COM

Awards
• “Best of Fest,” Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (Spooky House, Ben Kingsley, Mercedes Ruehl).
• “1st Place—Children’s Jury Award," Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (Spooky House).
• Golden Bear (nominated), Berlin Film Festival (There is no 13, Mark Damon, Harvey Lembeck).
• Grand Prize, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina, Dorothy Stratten, Stephen Macht, Avery Schreiber).
• Critics’ Award, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina).
• Audience Award, Paris Film Festival of Science Fiction and the Fantastic (Galaxina).
• Audience Award, Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film (Galaxina).
• Academy Award (nominated), writer Norman Wexler (Joe, Sachs replaced director, rewrote script, and restructured and remade film as uncredited film doctor; DGA has record of his work).
• Best High Fall, Stuntmen’s Association Award, created and directed stunt (Exterminator 2, Mario Van Peebles, Robert Ginty).
• In addition to the above awards, Sachs’s feature films and shorts, both 35mm and 16mm, have appeared in and won awards at numerous festivals including the Buenos Aries Film Festival, the Oberhausen Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Marienbad Film Festival, the Festival International de Cine de Cortometrage in Buenos Aires, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival (different from the children’s festival), the National Film Theater Festival (in association with the Royal College of Art and The Sunday Telegraph) where Sachs’s multi-award-winning short Breakfast was also put into the permanent archives of the National Film Theater, the Southampton Film Festival, festivals in Italy at Taormina and San Sebastian, the Shanghai International Film Festival (Spooky House was one of only eleven US films invited), and the Seattle International Film Festival.

Unique accomplishments
• First director to use a computer for special visual effects (Galaxina).
• Only Director to use infrared Ektachrome color film stock, which had to be kept frozen until eight hours before use, worked mostly from heat, and gave the film an otherworldly look (Galaxina).
• Only Director to use Dolby EX to spin the music around the theater in a scene where the entire set spun in a 360-degree circle at high speed (Spooky House).
• Made an experimental film without a camera by boiling the film in a pot, scraping off the emulsion, and painting directly on the film. It was used by Pink Floyd as a background during concerts and in music videos seen by millions.
• One of only a few Hollywood film doctors. Retained by both producers and completion bond companies, Sachs has saved films that have gone on to become major grossers and launched stars’ and directors’ careers. One of his early doctoring assignments was an unreleasable motion picture called The Gap. He reconstructed the entire picture and retitled it Joe. It went on to become one of the highest grossing independent pictures ever, launching the acting careers of Susan Sarandon and Peter Boyle and its original director, John Avildsen. It also garnered an Academy Award nomination for its writer, Norman Wexler, whose screenplay was significantly changed by Sachs’s major reworking of the film’s structure and writing of additional dialogue (uncredited). The box office success of Joe single-handedly put Cannon Films on the map. Sachs was later recruited by Cannon to save Exterminator 2, and as a result the film made more money for Cannon and launched the career of Mario Van Peebles. Trimark Pictures enlisted Sachs’s services to salvage two of their films. The first, Servants of Twilight, based on the Dean Koontz novel, was immediately sold to Showtime. The second was an unreleasable horror film, originally intended for straight-to-video and starring the then unknown Jennifer Aniston. He re-made the picture, added a little humor, and brought Aniston and many of the other actors back, and with ADR he improved their performances. The end result was an unexpectedly entertaining picture titled Leprechaun. It became an immediate box office hit, spurring five sequels. Leprechaun helped raise Trimark’s quarterly profits 200% in the first quarter of its release and enabled the company to raise public money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, igniting its rise toward becoming a leading independent motion picture company that is now part of Lions Gate.

Academy Award winning actors and others
Sachs has directed some of the most highly acclaimed actors in the world, including Academy Award winners Sir Ben Kingsley, James Coburn, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Mercedes Ruehl, Academy Award nominees Elliott Gould, and Karen Black, and Emmy winners Jennifer Aniston and Peter Boyle. Other Actors he has directed have won awards and nominations such as the Image Award, Independent Spirit Awards, American Comedy Award, MTV Award, TV Guide Award, and numerous festival and foreign awards.

Selected review quotes and comments
SPOOKY HOUSE
"The kids whooped, hollered, cheered, and applauded during the movie. They held hands like one unit, swung together and danced in the aisles. I haven't seen anything like it in the seventeen years of the festival. All the kids came out asking when they could see the picture again…The kids' jury score was the highest in the seventeen years of the festival. It was a unanimous vote…The darling of the festival, the favorite of the festival, the hit of the festival…It's the most commercial movie we've ever had in the festival!…Spooky House was a resounding success with children of all ages. Kids walked out of the screening asking where they can get copies of the videocassette to see over and over again. It's a tremendous crowd pleaser." (Nicole Dreiske, Founder/Executive Director, Chicago International Children's Film Festival)

THERE IS NO 13
"Unforgettable masterpieces of film that are written in golden letters in the records are rare. There Is No 13, a debut by the young American, William Sachs, is one such masterpiece. Undoubtedly, Sachs, whose remarkable fantasy film gives indications of a new direction in film storytelling, is influenced in his structure by the synthesis of reality and imagination of Fellini, Resnais and Bunuel. Yet this style has been further developed It is a deeply touching film, because this auteur's film, which is at first seen to be about a young man who is pushed by a film producer into fully distorted fantasies that follow one another in turbulent succession along with self ridicule, is then surprisingly experienced as a striking and stirring film about the human condition. The distantiation of Brecht is applied in a masterful manner. We will be hearing again from William Sachs. He has it in his hands." (Piet Ruivenkamp, Haags-che Courant, at the Berlin Film Festival)

GALAXINA
"For the past several years, Hollywood has been foisting comic books on us disguised as movies. By technically perfecting the special effects, Star Wars, Alien, Superman, and Star Trek somehow whizzed by our frontal lobes and made us believe that those ridiculous things could actually be happening. In pretending to be better than comics, they have been subtly putting down the genre from which they sprang. Reading The Empire Strikes Back in its presently available comic book form makes you realize how dependent your enjoyment of the film was upon special effects. As a comic book it's pretty dull. Well Galaxina is the exact opposite. It's a great comic book…Like Airplane, Galaxina zips from gag to gag with nary a thought, making it everything that Barbarella was trying to be. This, combined with the bizarre Hollywood Babylon-type murder of its star, Dorothy Stratten, making this her only picture, seems to indicate that we may have another cult classic on our hands…If you read National Lampoon and miss the old Mad magazine, if you've got a secret box of old Vampirellas and Howard the Ducks stashed away in your mother's garage, if you have every issue of Heavy Metal and are anxiously waiting for their premiere film, then Galaxina may be just the appetizer for you." (Michael Dare, LA Weekly)

"Sachs has directed this wild and woolly picture with aplomb." (Charles Ryweck, The Hollywood Reporter)

"…A clever and almost cute homage to the overblown space epics of recent years…endearing characters and imaginative sets…a touch of technical class…an enjoyable parody of the space genre." (David Linck, Boxoffice)

VAN NUYS BLVD.
Van Nuys Blvd. became so popular among the teenage and young adult audience that the Los Angeles Police Department had to close down the famous Southern California cruising street. One traffic officer told Sachs that after the movie came out people came from places as far away as Japan and were cruising the boulevard in taxis. The low budget picture’s grosses immediately soared into the millions and became another teen classic, garnering excellent reviews in major publications such as: The Hollywood Reporter, “Sachs has directed the proceedings with an affecting light touch;" Variety, “Van Nuys Blvd. has what it takes…it should pay off;” and the Los Angeles Times, “[A] good natured summer season comedy…Writer-director William Sachs has taken a fast, light touch.”

INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN
A horror spoof that was itself spoofed in Robert Rodriguez’s recent Planet Terror, The Incredible Melting Man opened and became an instant cult classic and top-grossing picture, reaching #10 on Variety’s chart of the 50 top-grossing films. Outgrossing films made for more than ten or twenty times the budget and featuring special effects makeup by Academy Award winning makeup artist Rick Baker, it was called “horrendously expert” by The Hollywood Reporter, “a horror gem” by Star force magazine, “stunning” by Famous Monsters Magazine, and Archer Winston, of the New York Post wrote, “Writer-director William Sachs demonstrates simple mastery of the medium.”

HITZ (AKA JUDGMENT, FOREIGN)
This portrayal of the realities of life on the tough streets of Los Angeles’ inner cities and barrios starred two Academy Award nominees, Elliott Gould and Karen Black, and introduced future Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr. in his first feature film role, along with a strong cast of serious actors and actual gang members in major roles. Because of its realism, Hitz has been used by leading LA gang activist Father Greg Boyle (who calls it “a true depiction of gang life in Los Angeles”) to show at-risk youth the hopelessness and hazards of gang life.

Filmography
DIRECTOR
• Spooky House
• The Last Hour
• Judgment
• Hot Chili
• Exterminator 2 (additional scenes)
• Galaxina
• Van Nuys Blvd.
• The Force Beyond
• The Incredible Melting Man
• There Is No 13

WRITER
• Nu Freedom (under option)
• MLK (the true story of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in development)
• Spooky House (co-writer)
• Hitz (aka Judgment)
• Hot Chili (co-writer)
• Exterminator 2 (co-writer)
• Galaxina
• Van Nuys Blvd.
• The Incredible Melting Man
• The Force Beyond (documentary)
• There is No 13
• Joe (uncredited)
• Arthur of the Britons (developed and wrote series proposal, UK TV)

PRODUCER
• Spooky House
• Leprechaun (co-producer)
• Servants of Twilight (co-producer)
• Exterminator 2
• There Is No13
• The Longest Hunt

FILM DOCTOR
Sachs doctored more than 25 domestic and foreign films, most uncredited and subject to non-disclosure. Below are a few he is free to mention.
• Leprechaun
• Servants Of Twilight
• Exterminator 2
• Joe

EDITOR
• The Force Beyond

POSTPRODUCTION SUPERVISOR
• Numerous films—film and digital

PRODUCTION EXECUTIVE
• President, Entertainment Highway, Inc. (production/distribution). Produced and released Spooky House theatrically, handled foreign and home video, developed new projects.
• Heritage Entertainment Inc. As a production executive, Sachs was given a concept and wrote and developed a presentation for a television series based on the legendary King Arthur, which was sold and became the acclaimed and successful British TV series Arthur of the Britons. The series ran for twenty-six episodes and starred Brian Blessed, Rupert Davis, Oliver Tobias and Michael Gothard. Sachs also worked in the US and Europe, acquiring completed motion pictures, “Americanizing” them by re-editing, re-titling and re-dubbing them, creating trailers and TV spots, and selling the films domestically.

Trailers, TV spots, workout video’s, PSA’s, music videos, etc.
• Wrote trailers, TV spots and radio spots for numerous pictures, including Joe, for Cannon Films and other distribution companies.
• Wrote and directed a series of public service announcements and music videos, narrated by the Ambassador to the United Nations from Bosnia Herzegovina, as part of an international campaign that raised money for transporting injured Bosnian children to foreign hospitals.
• Directed workout videos for a Baywatch workout series with Gena Lee Nolin and Donna D’Errico.
• Has worked as an editor, post production supervisor, and music supervisor.

Associations, lectures, and service
• Member of the Directors Guild of America, where he has served on the Creative Rights Committee
• Member of the Writers Guild of America, where he has served as a screen credits arbitrator
• Guest lectured at the UCLA, Cal State Northridge, and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) film schools
• Veteran of the USAF, where he served as an aeromedic.

Education
• University of Maryland. Majors: Sociology/Communications
• The London Film School
• Acting: Michael Gough in London; the Actors Studio in New York; and the Charles Conrad Studios in Los Angeles