Screening of
Betting on Zero
Skype interview with
Director Ted Braun
April 6th at 7:30pm
Hedge fund titan Bill Ackman is on a crusade to expose global
nutritional giant Herbalife as the largest pyramid scheme in history,
while Herbalife executives claim Ackman is a market manipulator out to
bankrupt them.
About Ted Braun
Writer-director Ted Braun’s critically acclaimed first feature film,
Darfur Now was nominated for best documentary of 2007 by the National
Board of Review and The Broadcast Critics Association, and went on to
win the NAACP Image Award for best documentary of the year. The film was
produced by the Academy Award(TM) winning producer of Crash, Cathy
Schulman, Academy Award(TM) nominee Don Cheadle, and three-time Academy
Award(TM) winning documentarian Mark Jonathan Harris. Warner Brothers
distributed Darfur Now worldwide and financed along with Participant
Media, which spearheaded a global social action campaign. For his work
writing and directing the film, the International Documentary
Association awarded Braun their 2007 Emerging Filmmaker of the Year.
He continues to work in non-fiction across documentary and scripted
forms. His new feature documentary Betting On Zero, explores the high
stakes battle between hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman and Herbalife and was
produced by Glen Zipper, producer of the Academy Award winning feature
documentary, Undefeated.
Prior to Darfur Now, Braun wrote and directed award winning short
form fictional films and documentaries for HBO, PBS, A&E and The
Discovery Channel on topics ranging from test pilots of aviation’s
golden age to the battle for the rights of the developmentally disabled.
Braun taught screenwriting at Amherst College (the first to do so)
before joining the faculty at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he’s
the Joseph Campbell Chair in Cinematic Ethics and recipient of the
University’s Phi Kappa Phi faculty recognition award. His students have
won or been nominated for some of the most prestigious cinema and
television prizes: Academy Awards, the Palme d’Or, Emmys, Sundance
Festival Awards, and European Media Prizes. He grew up in rural Vermont
and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.