Fayer, Steve 1935–

PERSONAL: Born March 11, 1935, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Saul S. (an artist, film animator, and bookseller) and Pearl R. (a bookseller) Fayer. Education: University of Pennsylvania, B.A. (with honors), 1956.

ADDRESSES: Office—189 Bay State Rd., Boston, MA 02215; fax: 617-536-3295. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Independent film and television writer, Boston, MA, 1977–. Also consultant or creative consultant for television documentaries, including the miniseries America's War in Poverty, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1995; Driving Passion, PBS, 1995; and Chicano! History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement, PBS, 1996. Military service: U.S. Naval Reserve, 1952–60.

AWARDS, HONORS: Emmy Award for outstanding individual achievement in writing, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1987, and Christopher Award, 1988, both for Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965; citation among "notable books of the year," New York Times Book Review, 1990, for Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s; MacDowell Colony fellow, 1991; Writers Guild of America Award, outstanding television documentary script, and Special Jury Award, documentary scriptwriting category, Sundance Film Festival, both 2000, both for George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire.

WRITINGS:

(With Henry Hampton and Sarah Flynn) Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, Bantam (New York, NY), 1990.

Contributor of short fiction to periodicals, including Natural Bridge, New York Stories, Bellevue Literary Review, North American Review, Potpourri, Potomac Review, Jewish Currents, and Night Train.

TELEVISION SCRIPTS

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (miniseries), Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1987.

Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads (miniseries), PBS, 1990.

"After the Crash" (special), broadcast as an episode of The American Experience, PBS, 1991.

The Great Depression (miniseries), PBS, 1993.

(Coauthor) "Malcolm X: Make It Plain" (special), broadcast as an episode of The American Experience, PBS, 1994.

Frederick Douglass—When The Lion Wrote History (special), PBS, 1994.

Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery (miniseries), PBS, 1998.

"George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (special), broadcast as two episodes of The American Experience, PBS, 2000.

Also wrote episodes of the television series The Trouble with Normal, broadcast by American Broadcasting Companies, 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: In Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, a companion book to the television mini-series Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965, Steve Fayer and coauthors Henry Hampton and Sarah Flynn draw upon nearly 1,000 filmed interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and many others who took part in America's civil rights struggle. Fayer and Hampton, the executive producer of the miniseries, assembled the voices of the ordinary people who manned the barricades, the laborers, the students, and the housewives without whom there might have been no civil rights movement at all. Other voices include those of Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, John Lewis, George Wallace, and Muhammad Ali. As Fayer told CA: "Marches and murders, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, JFK and LBJ, from the bus boycott in Montgomery to busing in Boston, from the marches in Selma to the riots in Miami, the book illuminates the long, impassioned, sometimes painful and sometimes joyful struggle for a truly democratic society that continues today."

Each chapter focuses on a battleground in the struggle. The interviews and narrative passages form, according to New York Times Book Review contributor Henry Mayer, "a vast choral pageant." "The choice of witnesses and participants, the selection of interview fragments, and the ordering of these elements into a 667-page book reveals that much care, thought and even love were applied to working the raw material," Jonathan Kirsch wrote in his Los Angeles Times critique. "As a result, 'Voices of Freedom' is something much greater than the sum of its parts, a taut and vivid narrative on an epic scale."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1990, Jonathan Kirsch, review of Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s.

New York Times Book Review, January 28, 1990, Henry Mayer, review of Voices of Freedom.