The Ashtray
November 15, 2010. Spencer Trask Lecture
Errol Morris is a director and filmmaker. His film “The Fog of War” about Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara won the 2003 Academy Award for best documentary feature. Other films have won the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, the Golden Horse (Taiwan International Film Festival), the Grand Jury Prize (Sundance Film  Festival) and have appeared on many ten best lists. They have been honored by the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles film critics. Roger Ebert called Morris’s first feature, “Gates of Heaven,” one of the 10 Best Films of All Time. A survey in 1988 by the Washington Post picked “The Thin Blue Line” as the best film of the year. In his 2008 film “Standard Operating Procedure” Morris examined the incidents of abuse of suspected terrorists at Abu Ghraib. His latest film, “Tabloid,” was released in 2010 and is about a former Miss Wyoming who kidnapped a Mormon missionary in England in the late 1970s. His Princeton talk is about an event that occurred while he was a graduate student as Princeton University.