Burning Greed

Burning Greed is an hour-long documentary that tells the story of a group of Bostonians who banded together to stand up for their rights when a seemingly never-ending series of fires started attacking their community in the early 1970s.

I wrote the screenplay for the documentary and led the film’s six interview sessions.

To visit Burning Greed’s Facebook page, click here.

Production background

In 2012 I was approached by Sonia Weinhaus of Boston’s Live Lobster Group, a small production company that focuses on documentary filmmaking, to put a script together for an hour-long documentary, which is to this day their biggest project to date.

The documentary would be called Burning Greed and it would follow the lives of regular citizens who became community activists after a seemingly uncontrollable and never ending spate of arsons began attacking their small street in Boston. The production team generously provided a wealth of articles and other supporting documents to be used as research, which I paired with additional research of my own, including an interview with a veteran insurance examiner who’d worked on numerous fire damage cases.

After putting a few drafts of the script together in early 2013, I flew out to Boston to interview the documentary’s six interview subjects, who ranged from residents of the street and activists, to the former Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts who led a set of court cases that were pivotal to the story.

Interviewing attorney and former Arson Strike Force investigator Jim Brady

Once filming was done, I worked with Sonia on another, more complete draft of the screenplay that was able to utilize the words of the interview subjects and play up the strengths of their sound bites.

The documentary was completed in late 2014 and it was shown to two sneak preview audiences, one in Boston in 2014 and another in Chicago.

A portion of the crowd during the Q and A session that followed the Chicago preview screening

The film’s premiere took place on January 21, 2016 at the Capitol Theater in Arlington, Massachusetts. At the moment production crew members are searching for distributors and submitting the documentary to a variety of festivals.