Robert Gordon

Emmy and Grammy Award winning filmmaker Robert Gordon is the producer/director of 8 feature documentaries and author of 6 books. He has focused on American popular culture-telling contemporary stories through historical music, art and politics. Gordon's documentary, Best of Enemies, won an Emmy in 2017 for Outstanding Historical Documentary. It's a film about the 1968 nationally televised debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, and how they augured the age of spectacle television. Other films as director/producer include William Eggleston's Stranded In Canton, and Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story. His Johnny Cash's America featured interviews with former Vice President Al Gore and US Senator Lamar Alexander, and with Snoop Dogg and Ozzy Osbourne. It's about the unifying forces in the life of Johnny Cash. In 2018, Gordon published Memphis Rent Party, an interconnected collection of profiles and magazine pieces about artists forging their own shadowy paths. It's something of a sequel to Gordon's first book, 1995's It Came From Memphis, which careens through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, riding shotgun with the weirdoes, winos, and midget wrestlers who were the forces that created rock and roll. Elvis was a marginal figure in that book, but Elvis' estate, Graceland, contracted Gordon for two books: The King on the Road, the first project to have access to Col. Parker's archives, and The Elvis Treasures. Gordon wrote the definitive biography of blues great Muddy Waters, Can't Be Satisfied, and his book Respect Yourself, about Stax Records-the home of Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding and the Staple Singers-was published to great acclaim in late 2013 and has been optioned in Hollywood.