Bill Sherwood

Born in Washington, DC, Sherwood was raised in the Battle Creek, MI area and proved to be something of a child prodigy in music. He began piano lessons at age 5 and added the violin to his repertoire at age 10. Upon graduating from the Interlochen Arts Academy, he won a scholarship to Juilliard's School of Music. Sherwood moved to NYC in 1970 and spent two years studying composition with Elliot Carter before dropping out, claiming that he was "fed up with the limitations of avant-garde music." While attending Hunter College, he switch majors from English to film and made his first two shorts. Graduate work at USC followed, but Sherwood found the curriculum limiting and dropped out. He returned East and held a variety of jobs while constantly writing. Sherwood served as assistant to Jill Godmilow an unfinished documentary profile of Elliot Carter, cut movie trailer and saw his 12-minute short "Variations on a Sentence by Proust" aired on PBS' "Independent Focus" in 1982. While working in the finance department at CBS News, Sherwood wrote two screenplays; one was even optioned but was never produced. Frustrated, he wrote the script for "Parting Glances" in a two month burst of creativity in December 1983 and January 1984. Teaming with Arthur Silverman and Yoram Mandel, he formed a limited partnership to raise he necessary $300,000 to produce the film. Working with a non-union actors, including future indie stalwart Steve Buscemi, Sherwood began work on the film, but ran out of money with one week of production left. John Pierson in his book "Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes" (New York: Hyperion/Miramax Books, 1995) details how he came to be involved in the film's distribution, including its first screening at the 1985 Independent Features Film Market (IFFM) where Cinecom bought the film for release. The film, shared a jury prize at the 1986 US Film Festival (the precursor to the Sundance Film Festival) and went on to earn respectable reviews. Many praised the assured camerawork and use of both classical and contemporary music on its soundtrack. It was marred slightly by Sherwood's use of fantasy sequences and the unpolished quality of the leads. Most reviews, however, praised Buscemi, who had the showiest role as a musician coping with AIDS. (The film also marked the debut of Sherwood's CBS co-worker and future TV star Kathy Kinney.)Despite his modest success, Sherwood never made another film. He spent the next four years writing various projects that never got produced (including a remake of 1941's "Ball of Fire") and teaching filmmaking at SUNY, Purchase. Sherwood succumbed to complications from AIDS in February 1990.