Michael Galinsky

Michael Galinsky (born 1969) is an American filmmaker, cinematographer, photographer, and musician who has produced and directed a number of documentaries, several of them in collaboration with his now-wife, Suki Hawley.

With their partner David Beilinson, they run a production and distribution company called Rumur.

Galinsky is a native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he was born in 1969.

In his youth he enjoyed basketball, biking, reading, and eventually found interest in photography.

His twin brother is the noted social psychologist, Adam Galinsky.

He attended New York University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in religious studies.

“I was interested in photography,” he later told an interviewer, “but felt odd about going to art school, so I went to a college that had a lot of photography classes and took 1 a year” while pursuing religious studies major.

“So I basically minored in photo....I ended up auditing a film production class after college for a few weeks.

At the time I was working as a production assistant on films”.

After graduating from college, he was “working as a PA and basic all-around grunt” and “was also doing some photo work and wanted to make films.” When he met Hawley at a party, she was a film-school student, and he “talked her into dropping out so that [they] could make a film instead.

[He] knew that no one else would give [him] the chance to shoot.”

Galinsky has been making films with Suki Hawley since 1994.

Their first two films, Half-Cocked (1994) and Radiation (1999), were narrative features.

He has worked as a cinematographer, cameraman, or director of photography on all of the above films, as well as on Half-Cocked (1994), Texas Gold (2005), August in the Empire State (2006), Lucky Lake (2006), and Repeat Attenders (2014).

He received a writing credit on Half-Cocked (1994), Radiation (1999), and Knives in My Throat: The Year I Survived While My Mind Tried to Kill Me (2005).

He was also credited with sound and sound design on Code 33 and as composer of the musical score for Half-Cocked.

Galinsky's and Hawley's films have been screen at scores of festivals around the world, including South by Southwest, Rotterdam, Toronto, Sundance, Slamdance, and the New York Underground Film Festival.

Galinsky has said that he considers it important for a filmmaker “to have a good understanding of how images get made because then you have a certain amount of control over how a project will look.” He also believes that “good filmmaking requires a combo of intuition and knowledge.

Without intuition, the film will lack heart and without at least some knowledge it won’t cut together.

At the same time, if the knowledge of craft overwhelms the intuition one ends up with something that looks and feels like a commercial.” He has cited the Maysles brothers and John Cassavetes as major influences.

As for his collaboration with Hawley, he has described them as having “very different – complementary strengths.

Suki is a very good editor and organizer of thoughts and I have a bunch of crazy ones.

She’s the one who really pulls things together.”

The Rumur team consists of Galinsky, Hawley, and Beilinson, who formerly worked at PBS and Miramax.

In addition to producing and distributing Galinsky and Hawley's films, Rumur has created music videos for such performers as Alana Newman and Jacob Miller.

Half-Cocked (1994) is a documentary-style fictional film that was written by Galinsky and Hawley, directed by Hawley, and filmed by Galinsky.

It featured the music of several rock groups, including Galinsky's own band, Sleepyhead, in which he played bass.

Galinsky has explained that he had taken classes in documentary photography and Hawley had “studied classic Hollywood film at Wesleyan,” and in Half-Cocked they “were trying to...kind of marry the two...to make a narrative film that had that kind of humor of Billy Wilder but that was also capturing something that wasn't going to be there.”

Although the film was not picked up for film festivals at the time, it was screened in rock clubs around the world and has since gained admiring attention in many quarters.

It has been described as a “cult indie music film.” Reviewer Mike Everleth called it “a right-on piece of genius” and “the definitive early ’90s indie rock film...a fictional story starring real life indie rock musicians, many playing either themselves or characters based on themselves.” A writer for the Austin Chronicle described Half-Cocked as a “tasty nugget of mid-Nineties apathy,” noting that “this isn't some preachy flick of finicky teens making it in the world” but, rather, “a time capsule full of heart and hope, and underneath all the drama, right there in grainy black and white, is the real documentary of coming of age in the transition time between angst and responsibility.”

Galinsky served as producer and director or co-director of Radiation (1999), Horns and Halos (2002), Code 33 (2005), Miami Manhunt (2008), Battle for Brooklyn (2011), and Who Took Johnny (2013).

Like Half-Cocked, Radiation (1999) is a fictional narrative shot in a documentary style.

Filmed in Madrid and Barcelona, it is about the mishaps of a Spanish music promoter named Unai.

The film was shown at over 40 festivals in the U.S. and abroad, including Sundance, New York Underground, and South by Southwest.

They were followed by the documentary Horns and Halos (2002), which they made in partnership with David Beilinson.

Soon after, they formed Rumur, a collaborative production studio.

Directed by Galinsky and Hawley, Horns and Halos (2002) is a documentary about “the intrigue surrounding the publication of the controversial book Fortunate Son, a biography of George W. Bush,” which its first publisher, St. Martin's Press, withdrew from sale “after controversy arose over a passage accusing Bush of being a convicted drug user”; the book was then re-published by a small publishing house, Soft Skull Press.

The film, which opened the 9th New York Underground Film Festival, was praised in the Underground Film Journal for “remaining amazingly unbiased towards the subject matter.” It is discussed in some detail in the book Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era by Douglas M. Kellner.

Rumur also made the 2005 Iraq War documentary Occupation: Dreamland, directed by Ian Olds and Garrett Scott.

On September 11, 2011, article, Galinsky recalled that on September 10, 2001, “my partners and I shot the final scene of our film, Horns and Halos,” and “stayed up late that night working with the footage.” The next morning, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, “the impact caused our cats to jump off the bed and our dog to sit up, which roused us.” After finding out what was happening, they walked to Fort Greene Park to “see it for real from the top of the hill.” Galinsky had “consciously not taken my camera that morning as I left the house” because he felt “that taking pictures would take me out of the moment, or that it would be exploitative in some way.” He then made his way to Downtown Brooklyn to donate blood.