Marc Smerling

Smerling's production company, truth.media, produced "A Wilderness of Error" for FX Networks with Errol Morris and "Mind Over Murder" for HBO, which was nominated for Independent Spirit and Gotham Awards. It produced top charting podcasts for Sony Music, FX Networks, Apple Originals and USG Audio, a division of Universal Group. In podcasts, Smerling made "Operation: Tradebom" for Apple Originals, which won a Gold Medal at the Signal Awards as well as an LA Press Club Award. He made the "Crooked City" Series, the first season of which, about Youngstown, Ohio, is in development as a scripted series at FX. The podcast "Firebug" was made into a scripted series called "Smoke" for AppleTV, starring Taron Egerton and with Dennis Lehane as the showrunner.

https://time.com/7288961/smoke-true-story-apple/

https://deadline.com/2020/07/marc-smerling-sony-music-entertainment-podcast-deal-1202975498/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/arts/television/wilderness-of-error-errol-morris-jeffrey-macdonald.html

Smerling joined Gimlet Media during the rise of podcasting. Smerling produced, "Crimetown," one of the company's most successful podcasts with tens of millions of listeners worldwide. It's first season about Providence, Rhode Island landed on many 2017 top ten lists, including The New York Times and Atlantic Monthly. Interview Magazine said it was an "ambitious, anthropological epic." Other podcasts Smerling produced included "The Ballad Of Billy Balls," ranked No. 2 on Atlantic Monthly's top 100 podcasts of 2019 and "The RFK Tapes" produced from newly released investigative files and suspect and witness interviews in the investigation of Sirhan Sirhan for the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. For his collective contributions to the podcast industry, iHeartRadio named Smerling its 2019 Podcast Innovator of the Year.

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/crimetown

Smerling opened Hit The Ground Running Llc with his childhood friend, Andrew Jarecki and together they made their first feature documentary, the landmark "Capturing the Friedmans," which was nominated for an Academy Award and won 18 major international prizes including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the New York Film Critics Circle Non-Fiction Film Award. They also produced the Sundance darling "Catfish," which they developed into "CatfishTV," which ran on MTV for 9 seasons. Smerling co-wrote the feature film "All Good Things" which starred Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst. And he produced and shot "The Jinx - The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst," a six-part series for HBO, which received a Peabody and six Primetime Emmys nominations - including Best Cinematography for Smerling - and won for Outstanding Nonfiction Series.

https://variety.com/2015/tv/spotlight/the-jinx-andrew-jarecki-mark-smerling-robert-durst-hbo-1201514

Smerling's first production company focused on music videos, live concert DVDs and television commercials for advertising agencies. Notorious Pictures produced some of the most popular music videos of the '90s, concert films, and documentaries for artists as diverse as Kool G Rap, Coolio, Avril Lavigne, The Fugees, Destiny's Child, Collective Soul, Marilyn Manson, Billy Cyrus, The Dixie Chicks and many more. The company also produced television commercials for agencies like TBWA/Chiat/Day for Infiniti Automobiles and DDB for Super Eight Motels among others. It was also where "Capturing The Friedmans" was produced and edited.

In 1991, Berlusconi Networks was looking to establish a news bureau in New York City. They tapped Il Giornale New York Correspondent Sylvia Kramer to produce news packages and she hired Marc Smerling as her producer. Together they produced segments for RTI in italy as well as longer segments for news magazine shows. Over a two year period, they partnered with the BBC at Rockefeller Center to access News feeds and satellite deliver systems, added editors, shooters, and eventually other correspondents as the bureau grew.

After seeing a short documentary made at the University Of Southern California's School of Anthropology , "Gang Cops" in a screening for the 1989 Academy Awards, NBC Anchor Tom Brokaw and his partner Wayne Ewing hired Marc Smerling as an associate producer on their production of the NBC Special "Gangs, Cops & Drugs" about the intersection of Los Angeles County Sheriff C.R.A.S.H. Units and gangs in South Central Los Angeles. In 1989, Smerling was hired onto Brokaw's next project, "The New Hollywood," and helped to secure interviews with Robert Deniro and Robert Redford.