BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Dennis Doros (Co-President)
Dennis Doros started working in cinema in 1979 as the President of the Athens Film Society at Ohio University and soon afterward was promoted to the programmer for the Athens International Film Festival. In 1984, he started working at Kino International where he restored Queen Kelly and Sadie Thompson, both starring Gloria Swanson. In 1990, Doros co-founded Milestone Films with his wife Amy Heller. Working with film archives and labs around the world, they have restored and distributed independent films, including works by Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Kathleen Collins, Ayoka Chenzira, David Hockney, Kent Mackenzie, Eleanor Antin, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. For the last fourteen years, he has been a consultant to Turner Classic Movies. Dennis and Amy have been awarded the Arthouse Convergence Spotlight Lifetime Achievement Award, Denver Silent Film Festival Career Achievement Award, National Society of Film Critics’ Special Archival Award and its Film Heritage Award (five times), the NY Film Critics Circle’s Special Award (twice), the LA Film Critics Legacy of Cinema Award and the Film Preservation Honor from Anthology Film Archive. He is a 24-year member of AMIA and a four-term member of the Board of Directors. He recently completed two more terms as AMIA’s President and was the winner of AMIA’s 2016 William O’Farrell Award.
Amy Heller (Co-President)
Amy Heller is co-founder (with husband Dennis Doros) of Milestone Films, an independent distribution and restoration company. After studying American history at New York University and Yale, she began her career in film distribution in 1985 at First Run Features and later at New Yorker Films. Heller and her newlywed husband started Milestone in 1990 in a their one-bedroom New York City apartment. For the last 22 years they have run the company from their New Jersey home.
Committed to rediscovering and restoring lost, overlooked, and underappreciated films, with a focus on those made by and about women, African Americans, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, Milestone’s releases include Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep; Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles; Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back, Africa; and the films of Shirley Clarke. The company has received awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the International Film Seminars, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Fort Lee Film Commission, Anthology Film Archive, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the Art House Convergence.
Heller has written about challenging and expanding the cinematic canon for the Walker Art Center’s Soundboard and Caligari magazine. She is a founding member of Missing Movies, an organization dedicated to educating and advocating about the problem of lost films and to working with filmmakers and the entertainment industry to making these titles available.
Richard Guay (Treasurer)
Richard Guay is an independent producer, writer and consultant based in New York. He began his career as a CPA and has worked for 37 years as a producer, writer, studio executive, and production accountant. True Love, Guay’s first producing effort which he also co-wrote, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He has been nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards – two for Best Feature Film (True Love & Ghost Dog) and one for Best Screenplay (as co-writer of Household Saints). He was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Long Form Original Teleplay as co-writer of Dirt. Guay has worked with a range of directors from first timers to industry veterans Nancy Savoca, Jonathan Demme, Bill Condon and Jim Jarmusch. Guay was a Vice President at Entertainment Partners for five years. He has also conducted producing workshops around the world, as well as at NYU, Columbia and City College of New York where he currently teaches in the MFA program. His latest film, Clover, directed by Jon Abrahams was released in April 2020.
Sue Bodine
Bodine is a partner at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, a bi-coastal law firm dedicated to media and entertainment. She represents a diverse clientele in the motion picture, television, and digital media industries. Her clients include major and specialty motion picture studios, cable television networks, media lenders, private equity financiers, as well as production and distribution companies, and individual directors, writers, and producers.
Over the several decades of her legal career she has been honored numerous years as a New York Super Lawyer, named by Variety as a Woman of Impact in the Entertainment Industry, and an Elite Deal Maker, and a Power Lawyer by Hollywood Reporter multiple times.
She has taught Entertainment Law as an adjunct professor at NYU Law School, and University of New Hampshire,s Franklin Pierce Intellectual Property Institute and has presented at many seminars, conferences, and film festivals including, for the WGA, DGA, PGA, AFM, Sundance, SXSW, Berlinale, Guadalajara, DOC NYC, Ventana Sur, and Rio Content Market.
Ira Deutchman
Ira Deutchman has been making, marketing and distributing films since 1975, having worked on over 150 films including some of the most successful independent films of all time. He was one of the founders of Cinecom and later created Fine Line Features—two companies that were created from scratch and, in their respective times, helped define the independent film business. He was also a co-founder of Emerging Pictures, the first digital projection network in the United States and a pioneer in delivering live cultural events into movie theaters.
Currently Deutchman is an independent producer, and a consultant in marketing and distribution of independent films. He is also Professor Emeritus in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1987 and was the Chair of the Film Program from 2011-2015.
His current projects include serving as producer of Nickel & Dimed, based on the book by Barbara Ehrenreich and directed by Debra Granik (in pre-production), director/producer of the feature documentary Searching for Mr. Rugoff” (currently in release) and producer of the stage adaptation of Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (in development).
In 2017, Deutchman was awarded the Spotlight Lifetime Achievement Award by the Sundance Art House Convergence for his service to independent film marketing and distribution.
Geoffrey Fletcher
Initially working with a video camera and a cast of action figures as a child, Geoffrey went on to win an Academy Award® for his screenplay, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. He is the first African American to win an Oscar for writing, directing, or producing a feature film.. A graduate of Harvard University and NYU’s Tisch Graduate Film Program, Geoffrey’s student films won numerous awards, including one from the Director’s Guild of America.
Violet & Daisy, Geoffrey’s feature directorial debut, stars Saoirse Ronan, Alexis Bledel, and the late James Gandolfini. Violet & Daisy received the Cinevation Award from Savannah College of Art and Design. The film was also an official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival. Trial By Fire, Geoffrey’s screenplay about a landmark death penalty case, debuted at the 2018 Telluride Film Festival. In 2021, Geoffrey served as an Executive Producer and the Director of Animation for the documentary series Mike Tyson: The Knockout, presented by ABC News and available on Hulu.
Geoffrey’s upcoming films include his adaptation of His Truth is Marching On, based on Jon Meacham’s biography of civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis, for Apple and Eden Productions and 715!, a film about Hank Aaron’s harrowed journey toward becoming baseball’s home run king. 715! will be produced by Mandalay Sports Media, and Bluestone.
Mary Harron
One of the most distinctive voices of the independent film movement of the last twenty years, Harron made her debut as a feature-film writer and director in 1996 with I Shot Andy Warhol. The film won star Lili Taylor a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and garnered nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards and London Film Critics Circle for best first feature. In 2000, she directed American Psycho, starring Christian Bale, followed by The Notorious Bettie Page in 2006 and The Moth Diaries in 2011. Her most recent film, Charlie Says, debuted in September 2018 at the Venice Film Festival and was released in Spring 2019. Harron has also directed highly distinguished TV dramas, including episodes of The L Word, Oz, and Six Feet Under, as well as the entire award-winning Netflix series Alias Grace. Her latest film, DaliLand, starring Ben Kingsley and Barbara Sukowa, will be released later this year.
Nancy Savoca
Along with her numerous festival screenings and honors, Savoca’s films True Love and Household Saints are listed in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, and True Love was named one of the “50 Greatest Independent Films of All Time” by Entertainment Weekly. HBO’s If These Walls Could Talk won multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and Women in Film’s Lucy award. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause (Unrestrained Reflections on September 11th) was awarded the Seal for Peace & Liberty by the City of Florence, Italy and Dirt, a Spanish-English dramedy about class and immigration won Best Director at LA’s Latino Film Festival and a Writer’s Guild nomination. In 2019, Savoca’s archives were acquired by University of Michigan’s Film Mavericks Collection which holds the works of Orson Welles, Robert Altman, and her mentors John Sayles and Jonathan Demme.
STAFF
Steve Jeannot, Operations Manager
Steve Jeannot is an Executive Assistant supporting several partners at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, a bi-coastal law firm dedicated to media and entertainment. A native New Yorker, Steve has a lifelong passion for Film, Music, and Sports. He joins Missing Movies as Operations Manager with a focus on developing the organization’s social media presence.