BIOGRAPHY
William Tyler Smith is an independent fiction/documentary filmmaker, still photographer and film educator. Smith holds an MFA from the UCLA Graduate School of Theater, Film & Television. At UCLA, he was the winner of various prestigious awards and fellowships. He has directed five feature films and numerous short films across many different genres. His films have won awards at international festivals and have been broadcast, streamed and distributed on DVD all over the world.
His narrative feature, Kiss Me Again, which stars Fred Armisen, Kathryn Winnick and Darryl Hammond, premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and is still enjoying a very successful international run. It also screened at the Zurich International Film Festival, Berkshire International Film Festival and the Moscow American Independent Film Festival. It also had a successful run on the STARZ network. The Brazilian version, Prazer a Tres, has become a cult film as it was broadcast on all of their major cable stations such as Telecine Premium, Pipoca and Lite. A recent YouTube upload had 23 million views. Some of his Brazilian students have purportedly written papers about it in Brazilian film schools. When Kiss Me Again was first introduced on Amazon VOD, it rose as high as the #1 independent movie and #3 dramatic film. It still enjoys respectable rentals and sales on Amazon, iTunes, Google and YouTube. Smith is currently developing a related sequel. For the record, Kiss Me Again, came out before Woody Allen's Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona. One of my producers is convinced that Woody saw my film first. Perhaps.
His first feature documentary, The Third Mind, explores the artistic collaboration between Doors keyboardist and founder, Ray Manzarek and beatnik poet and author of The Beard, Michael McClure. It had a very successful premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, and also screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and was broadcast on the Sundance Channel as the opening film in a series about The Beats, The Beats Go On. It was distributed on DVD by Mystic Fire and Oglio Records.
His second feature documentary, Imagine a School...Summerhill, portrays educator A. S. Neill's influential democratic free school and its fight for survival against the Labour government. It is enjoying a successful video-on-demand and educational market run. He has just completed, Third Mind Blues, the second film Smith has done with Manzarek. It documents the unlikely musical collaboration between Manzarek and slide-guitarist and Johnny Lee Hooker producer, Roy Rogers as they write, record and perform their own "Twenty-First Century Blues." It had a very successful world premiere at the 2017 Mill Valley Film Festival. Given Smith and Manzarek's friendship, it shows a side of Manzarek people have never seen before.
The Flamin Groovies had heard about Smith and Third Mind Blues through Joel Jaffe, who also was Manzarek and Roger's sound producer/engineer. Smith met the band at the Bowery Ballroom and decided to do a test shoot the next day at Maxwell's in Hoboken. Everybody knew the chemistry was right, and a new documentary, The Incredible Flamin Groovies Movie, was born. it's a film that documents the band's history and recent comeback after having been apart for thirty years. Smith was so impressed collaborating with filmmaker and editor, Kurt Feldhun on Third Mind Blues, that the two decided to collaborate as co-directors. Smith and Feldhun followed the Groovies on tour in the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan over the span of four years. The film is currently in post-production and promises to be a modern-day, more intelligent Spinal Tap. Though it is Smith's first time co-directing, the results thus far have been extremely rewarding and inspiring. Smith and Feldhun are currently developing new music projects and are in the process of creating a new kind of production company. Coming soon...
Smith is also developing various documentary and fiction projects.
Smith is currently a film directing instructor held in high esteem at the New York Film Academy and Montclair State University. Many of his students have gone on to direct feature films and to have successful careers in the entertainment industries of their respective countries. He was recently named one of the "15 Most Notable Art Professors in New York City," by The Art Career Project. He is known for his "unorthodox theo-practical" approach to teaching film.