Founder

Henry S. Rosenthal is currently San Francisco's most prolific producer of independent films. He recently completed The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005), a feature-length film about the famous musician and cult figure. This film has been awarded the coveted "Best Director" award at Sundance 2005.

Rosenthal's long working relationship with legendary experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner resulted in the completion of LUKE (2004), a 22 minute work that premiered at the New York Film Festival. Rosenthal produced Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (2003) directed by Jamie Meltzer, broadcast nationally on PBS's Independent Lens series, released on DVD by Shout! Factory, and distributed by Sony.

He collaborated with San Francisco based media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, on her first feature-length film entitled Conceiving Ada starring Tilda Swinton, Karen Black and the late Timothy Leary. The film has won several awards and has been screened at over forty festivals including the Toronto, Sundance, Berlin, South by Southwest, and San Francisco International Film Festivals.

In 1996, he collaborated with director E. Elias Merhige (whose experimental feature, Begotten, he represents) on a pair of music videos for the shock-rock band Marilyn Manson. Also in 1996, he worked with German filmmaker Monika Treut. Together they completed production on a segment of a feature film project for the Danish government entitled Danish Girls Show Everything. Other projects include: executive producing an instructional video for the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group entitled Center of the Storm, producing "The Beast," a first film by Rhoderyc Charles Montgomery that was the only U.S. short invited into the Main Competition at Cannes 1995; line-producing Karen Shakhnazarov's American Daughter, the first Russian feature shot in the United States since the breakup of the Soviet Union; producing Mod Fuck Explosion, a post-Godardian, semiotic teenage freakout by writer/director Jon Moritsugu; and producing the second feature by Caveh Zahedi (whose previous feature, A Little Stiff, Rosenthal represents) called I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, which is unique as the first Iranian-American comedy and the first film to conclusively prove the existence of God.

Rosenthal's close collaboration with the fiercely independent Jon Jost (recipient of the Independent Feature Project's John Cassavettes Award for Lifetime Achievement) has resulted in producing credits for Rembrandt Laughing (1988); All the Vermeers in New York (winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for the Best Independent Film of 1991); Sure Fire (1990-1993), award winner at several major festivals; Frameup (1993; released as Jon Jost's Frameup by World Artists Home Video); The Bed You Sleep In (1993; premiered at Berlin and Sundance Film Festivals, 1993).

He is producing Bruce Conner's first feature-length film, The Soul Stirrers: By and By, a massive music documentary begun in 1983. Rosenthal also served as executive producer for Gregg Araki's breakthrough feature, The Living End.

Rosenthal has for the past seven years offered his production/consultation services to over 4,000 features, shorts, documentaries, industrials, music videos, commercials, and educational films and videos. He has also taught classes and lectured in producing independent films at San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley Extension, the California College of Arts and Crafts, De Anza College, City College, Academy of Art College, Film Arts Foundation, and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Since 1994, he has served on the board of directors of the Film Arts Foundation, the largest regional media arts organization in the country and is now completing another term as President. He is also an Advisory Board member of the San Francisco Cinematheque. Through these media arts organizations Henry works as an advocate for the independent filmmaker.

Rosenthal has been involved with media since the age of thirteen, when he organized the first Elvis Presley Film Festival for Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center in 1968. In 1975-76 he produced the Viacom cable television series Files: Things That Are Kept and Why and the Conceptual Video Minute. Since 1977 Henry has served as manager and drummer for CRIME, a legendary San Francisco-based proto-punk band. He was a founding member and composer with Other Music, an experimental music ensemble working in Just Intonation, that performed a myriad of concerts and released two LPs (which he co-produced). Rosenthal works from behind a desk that once belonged to James Brown, and boasts the world largest collections of souvenir pennants and two-headed calves.