American filmmaker and activist Jeffrey Friedman was BOTD in 1951. Born in Los Angeles, California, he grew up in New York City, and became involved in acting from an early age. He began his professional career apprenticing as a film editor, working on projects including William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and the documentaries Marjoe and Visions of Eight. In 1987, he formed the production company Moving Pictures with Rob Epstein. Their first co-directed documentary, 1989’s Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, recounted the history of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and profiled many of the victims of HIV/AIDS memorialised in the Quilt project. Screened on cable network HBO and given a theatrical release worldwide, it won the Oscar for best documentary feature. Their next project The Celluloid Closet, was based on Vito Russo‘s book about the history of LGBTQ (mis)representation in Hollywood film. Narrated by Lily Tomlin, it featured interviews with actors Tony Curtis, Antonio Fargas, Whoopi Goldberg, Farley Granger, Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon; directors John Schlesinger and Jan Oxenberg; screenwriters Mart Crowley, Harvey Fierstein, Arthur Laurents, Ron Nyswaner, Paul Rudnick, Barry Sandler and Gore Vidal; film historian Richard Dyer; and commentators Susie Bright, Quentin Crisp and Armistead Maupin (who scripted Tomlin’s commentary). Originally screened on HBO in 1996, it became a critical and commercial hit, winning an Emmy Award for Epstein’s and Friedman’s direction, though was critiqued for its reluctance to embrace New Queer Cinema and more transgressive representations of homosexuality. Their other projects include Paragraph 175, a documentary about Nazi Germany’s persecution of LGBTQ people; And the Oscar Goes to for Turner Classic Movies; and the Grammy-winning 2021 documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. They made their narrative feature debut with 2010’s Howl, a biopic about Allen Ginsberg starring James Franco, followed by Lovelace, a revisionist portrait of Deep Throat porn actress Linda Lovelace. Their most recent project, Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, reimagines American history as an over-the-top queer-inflected counter-cultural musical extravaganza.