Born
in New York and raised in Glen Cove, on the north shore of Long
Island, Martin Torgoff is the son of basketball
star Irving Torgoff, a two time All-American at LIU and NBA
player with the Washington Capitols and Baltimore Bullets—
the player credited by Red Auerbach as being the first "sixth
man" in basketball. Martin grew up playing sports before
he was swept up in the turbulence of the late 1960s as a high
school student. By the time he attended the State University
of New York at Cortland, where he received BAs in both History
and French in 1974, his interests had turned to writing, music,
photography, and film. He also attended the University of Neuchatel,
Switzerland, earning a Diplome in the Seminaire
du Francais Modern.
In 1975, at the age of twenty-two, Torgoff became an Associate
Editor at Grosset & Dunlap Publishers in New York. He specialized
in illustrated books about the arts, entertainment, and American
popular culture, with assignments that included The
Woody Guthrie Songbook, now considered a definitive
collection of Guthrie's music and art.
In 1978, Torgoff left book publishing to begin his career as
a writer. Two years later he published a best-selling book about
Elvis Presley and his family, Elvis: We Love You
Tender (Delacorte/Dell, 1980). Penthouse
called the book "the best and truest look at the most famous
man of the 20th Century"; Robert Hillburn of the Los Angeles
Times wrote, "nothing has ever told his story as compellingly—or
as compassionately—as this book." Torgoff began writing
for many national magazines and his stories on such diverse
personalities as Jack Nicholson, Yoko Ono, Mel Gibson, Jeremy
Irons, Joan Didion, and Don King began appearing on the cover
of Andy Warhol's Interview, where he became a Contributing
Editor.
In the early 1980s, Torgoff's interests turned to film and television,
and he began writing, directing and producing long-form pieces
about musical and pop cultural subjects that have appeared on
CBS, HBO/Cinemax, public television, and other cable channels.
Working through production companies in New York and Los Angeles,
his projects included performance, documentary and conceptual
pieces for artists like Billy Joel and John Mellencamp. Many
of his assignments tended to be difficult challenges, like
In My Time, singer Teddy Pendergrass's comeback piece in
the wake of the car accident that had disabled him, and Stevie
Wonder's anti-apartheid video, It's Wrong. Over the
years, his work has spanned the entire spectrum of musical culture,
including such diverse artists as Phillip Glass, Ravi Shankar,
Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, the Highwaymen, and Aerosmith.
In 1986, Torgoff published American Fool: The Roots
and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp
(St. Martin's Press), which was awarded the Deems Taylor Prize
by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
for its excellence.
In 1987, he wrote Elvis '56, a critically
acclaimed hour-long film about that single meteoric year in
Presley's life. Produced and directed by the Academy Award winning
documentary team of Alan and Susan Raymond, the film was nominated
as Best Documentary at the US Film Festival. Tom Shales of the
Washington Post lauded the piece as not only the best
film ever made about Elvis, but also "one of the best ever
produced on a rock and roll figure"; Rolling Stone,
in its review, was particularly generous with its praise for
the writing of the film--"hats off to Martin Torgoff's script."
The film has since been singled out by artists like Bob Dylan
and Paul McCartney as one of their personal favorites as well.
The following year, Torgoff wrote Non Stop
for singer Julio Iglesias, an hour-long television special filmed
in Asia and Australia for worldwide syndication. In 1988, he
was hired by Prince to write an authorized musical documentary
which was slated to become his first television special. In
1991, The Making of Pump (CBS Video
Enterprises), a feature-length documentary that Torgoff wrote
and directed for Aerosmith, became a multi-platinum selling
home video.
In 1992, Torgoff began Can't Find My Way Home: America
in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000, a major work
of non fiction about the American experience of illicit substances
during the entire postwar era that would consume the next twelve
years of his life. During that time, Torgoff served as a Field
Producer for the authorized feature film on the Woodstock Festival
of 1994 directed by Barbara Koppel, shooting all of the artist
interviews for the film, and then produced special events and
designed and implemented national media campaigns for projects
like the launch of Grateful Dead Wear, the apparel line based
on the thirty year history of the band which also raised money
for the special scholarship fund that sent homeless children
to Camp Winnarainbow, the circus and performing arts camp founded
and run by Wavy Gravy. From 1999-2001, he worked as a producer
in New York for CNN Worldbeat, which covered the international
music scene. With the publication of Can't Find
My Way Home by Simon & Schuster in May of 2004,
Torgoff has turned his attention to speaking engagements and
new book and television projects. He served as Writer/Consulting
Producer and a major on-camera commentator for a four hour documentary
series based on his most recent book called "The
Drug Years" produced by Perry Films and VH1
in association with the Sundance Channel. first broadcast in
June of 2006 to remendous response; the show has since been
seen by over 100 million people. Since then Torgoff has been
working on two additional series, both for VH1,again as Writer/Consulting
Producer: Sex: The Revolution, a four-hour
piece about the sexual revolution in America, in which he will
also appear as a narrator, slated for broadcast in the summer
of 2008; and Lords of the Revolution,
a seven hour series about the individuals and groups behind
the cultural and political upheavals of the 60s and 70s, also
scheduled for 2008. Episodes in production so far include Andy
Warhol, Timothy Leary, and the Black Panthers.
