Emmy Award winning filmmaker, Allan Holzman, has enjoyed success in feature
and documentary films as both director and editor. Under the tutelage of
renowned producer Roger Corman, Allan honed his directing and editing skills on
groundbreaking independent movies, recently re-released on Blu-ray from Shout
Factory, Battle Beyond The Stars, and his directing debut, Forbidden World (aka
Mutant), winner of the Paris International Film Festival of Science Fiction and
Fantasy.
After helming three action films, Out Of Control, Grunt! The Wrestling Movie and
Programmed To Kill, Allan moved into the suspense genre with Deborah Harry
on Showtime’s highest rated movie, Intimate Stranger.
Allan’s first adventure into documentaries as editor received the Governor’s
Emmy Award for Special Achievement for the Ted Turner six-hour mini-series
The Native Americans. Allan won two Emmy Awards as director and editor of
Steven Spielberg's Survivors Of The Holocaust. The film was also honored with a
Peabody Award for best documentary.
Two of Allan’s award winning documentary director/editor efforts, Old Man River
(based on a one woman play) and Sounds Of Memphis (produced by the
Recording Academy) earned an American Cinema Editors Eddie Award and a
nomination. He received a third ACE Eddie nomination with Apollo 11 for which
he was also second unit director.
Allan created multi-screen presentations for Universal Theme Park with Twister
and Hercules and Xena, E3 with Sony’s Play Station, AT&T’s introduction of the
internet at Epcot, and 20 th Century Fox’s Titanic Tour with James Cameron.
He created documentaries for Walt Disney’s Platinum Blu-ray releases of The
Lion King, Cinderella, Pocahontas, Aladdin, Lady and the Tramp, including the
featurettes: Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and Alan Menken, Renaissance Man.
His feature documentary editing credits include: Dare To Be Different, celebrating
the birth and development of New Wave music, Refusnik, chronicling the Jewish
emigration movement from the U.S.S.R., Trek Nation, celebrating the legacy of
Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, the political animal thriller The Paw
Project, and the soon to be released Picasso’s Christ and World Rights Human
Wrongs.
The independent feature documentaries Allan produced, directed and edited
include: My Marilyn, an subjective journey into the life of Marilyn Monroe, C-C-
CUT, Autobiography of a Stuttering Director, Sheldon Leonard’s Wonderful Life,
based on Television’s legendary producer, Imagining Worlds, featuring two-time
Academy Award Production Designer Rick Carter (Avatar, Lincoln, Jurassic

Park), the four part Art of Directing series starring Steven Spielberg, Alfred
Hitchcock, Frank Capra, David Lean, John Huston and François Truffaut and the
created the evergreen American Cinema Editors’ Invisible Art, Visible Artists
series, featuring the Academy Award Nominees, from which he has made eight
documentaries focusing on the creative process of the feature film editor.
Throughout his career, Allan had made films about human rights and
preservation of culture, including Beautiful Resistance, and Beyond The Mesas,
two half hour documentaries confronting the damaging effects of the Indian
Boarding School experience, featuring the Hopi people and leading Southwest
Native American contemporary artists, Gullah, honoring the descendants of the
original slaves who have never left their land, and From the Hood to the Hill, the
legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the boulevard that bares his name in
Washington, D.C.
His educational documentaries include: The Professor, an immersive study of
Berkeley’s renowned Landscape Architect’s teachings, Editing 24, a day in the
life of a television dramatic series editor, Joseph G. Sheehan’s Message to a
Stutterer and No Words to Say, following a group of stutterers in therapy.
Allan’s book Celluloid Wars, based on his daily journal during his Roger Corman
years, as editor and director, will be published by PULP 2.0 in early 2019.
A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Allan graduated Bennington College and The
American Film Institute and served on the Board of Directors of American
Cinema Editors for seven years. He has taught film editing as USC School of
Cinematic Arts for past twelve years.