Michael Nozik

Michael Nozik (born 1954) is an award-winning American film producer famous for producing Quiz Show (1994), Slums of Beverly (1998), Syriana (2005), and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), for which he won a BAFTA award in "Best Film Not in the English Language" in 2004.

Michael Nozik was born in 1954 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He attended The Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where he was friends with acclaimed photographer Mitch Epstein, with whom he would collaborate later.

Nozik later studied English at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

After graduating from Skidmore College, Nozik worked at Athenaeum Cinema, in Hartford, and the Orson Welles Cinema, in Cambridge. He then moved to New York to pursue a career in the film business. 

He started his career as a production manager in 1983, making his debut with director Claude Zidi's French adventure comedy Banzaï, starring Coluche and Valérie Mairesse.

Nozik's first film as a producer was the 1985 TV movie Death of a Salesman, with Volker Schlöndorffas the director and Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid, and John Malkovich in the lead cast. For his work, Hoffman won "Best Performance by an Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television" award at the 1986 Golden Globes. Two years later, he produced China Girl, which starred James Russo, Richard Panebianco, and Sari Chang.

In 1994, he created Quiz Show — a detective docudrama directed by Robert Redford, written by Paul Attanasio and based on Richard N. Goodwin's 1988 memoir Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties. The film tracks the "Twenty-One" quiz show scandals of the 1950s, the rise and fall of popular contestant Charles Van Doren after the fixed loss of Herb Stempel, and the subsequent probe by Congressional investigator Richard N. Goodwin. The film was nominated for the "Best Film" award at the 1995 BAFTA Awards and the "Best Picture" award at the 1995 Oscars.

In 2004, Nozik produced one of his best works, The Motorcycle Diaries, starring Gael García Bernal and Rodrigo De la Serna. The film won many awards, including Cinema Brazil Grand Prize (2005), César Awards, France (2005), Danish Film Awards (Robert) (2005), and BAFTA Awards (2005). For the film, he enlisted Brazilian director Walter Salles to direct the film, after he saw his work on his 1998 film Central Station.

In 2015, Nozik served as a consulting producer on the TV mini-series Show Me a Hero. His last production was the 2016 crime drama Gold, starring Matthew McConaughey and Edgar Ramírez. He is also working on Inversion — a visual effects movie about the intermittent loss of gravity on Earth, and an adaptation of Ranger's Apprentice, a series of young adult books by Australian author John Flanagan. The film is being directed by Mark Waters.

All films, he was producer unless otherwise noted.

Film

Television