Mark Kitchell – Director/Producer

Mark Kitchell is best known for Berkeley in the Sixties, which won the Audience Award at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, and won other top honors. The film has become a well-loved classic, one of the defining documentaries about the protest movements that shook America during the 1960s. In the twenty years since that film he has worked in non-fiction television, made films for hire, taught at UC Santa Cruz, done freelance production and developed A Fierce Green Fire. He went to NYU film school, where he made The Godfather Comes to Sixth St., a cinema verite look at his neighborhood caught up in filming The Godfather II – for which he received another (student) Academy Award nomination.

Ken Schneider – Editor

Ken Schneider has many distinguished documentaries to his credit: Have You Heard From Johannesburg?; Sowing the Seeds of Justice; Orozco: Man of Fire; Freedom Machines; Ralph Ellison: An American Journey; The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It; Born in the USA; Regret to Inform; School Colors; Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin; and many more. With his wife Marcia Jarmel he produced and directed Speaking in Tongues and now they are at work on Ballz about baseball, Cuba and family ties past and present.

Veronica Selver & Jon Beckhardt
Editors, Rough-Cut Phase

Veronica Selver, a veteran, and Jon Beckhardt, a newcomer, co-edited the rough-cut. Selver directed the seminal film about gays in America, Word Is Out. She also made KPFA on the Air and edited great documentaries: On Company Business; You Got to Move; Coming Out Under Fire; Blacks and Jews; and Berkeley in the Sixties. Beckhardt is a graduate of Oberlin. He worked as animator on Mark Kitchell’s previous project, Integral Consciousness. A Fierce Green Fire was his first big editing assignment.

Vicente Franco’s credits include: The Storm That Swept Mexico; Waiting to Inhale; The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers; Speaking In Tongues; The Judge and the General; California and the American Dream; Thirst; and Freedom on My Mind. He also produced and directed three films with Gail Dolgin: Cuba Va; Daughter From Danang; and The Summer of Love for American Experience.

James Gowdey
Assistant Editor

Tamara Alexa
Associate Producer / Outreach Coordinator

Alyssa Martin, Betsy Bayha
Archivists

Consulting Editor: Gary Weimberg

Assistant Editor: James Gowdey

Archival Researchers: Betsy Bayha, Alyssa Martin, Lynn Adler, Jessica Berman-Bogdan

Additional Archival Research: James Gowdey, Celia Kitchell, Michael Dolan, Matthew Lesny

Associate Producers: Tamara Badgley-Horowitz, Craig Phillips

Original music for the film:

- George Michalski and Dave Denny for the theme song A Fierce Green Fire and The Party’s Over (lyrics by Mark Kitchell)

- Sonya Kitchell for the closing ballad A Fierce Green Fire

- Garth Stevenson scored twenty cues throughout the film

- Randall Wallace stepped in to help with scoring in the rush to Sundance

Post-production:

- Zoetrope Aubry Productions did online editing, graphic design, mastering archival material and digital conversion to HD – Kim Aubry, Ri Crawford and Mike Fleming

- Gary Coates did color finishing

- Berkeley Sound Artists did sound editing and mixing – Dan Olmsted, Patti Tauscher and Chase Keehn