Tom Thurman

Tom Thurman (born March 26, 1962) is an American filmmaker.

Since 1992, he has produced and directed 40 documentaries on art, film, music, sports and literary figures, including Nick Nolte, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Harry Crews, Jerry Wexler, Tod Browning, John Ford, Hunter S. Thompson and Sam Peckinpah. As a producer/writer for Kentucky Educational Television in Lexington, Thurman directed documentaries for the series Kentucky Muse, a showcase for artists with Kentucky roots. Programs in this series created by Thurman include In the Garden of Music (about musician Harry Pickens), Picture This (about photographer Julius Friedman) and Crossing Mulholland (about actor Harry Dean Stanton).

He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife Lynn Motley. They have two children.

Thurman was born in Christianburg, Kentucky, a small farming community in Shelby County. He received a bachelor's degree in 1984 from Centre College and a master's degree in English/Film Studies from the University of Kentucky in 1988. Thurman subsequently taught in the English departments at Tulane University and Berea College, and in 2012, 2017 and 2018 was a visiting lecturer in film studies at Centre College.

Thurman began his role as director with a documentary on the late Kentucky character actor Warren Oates in 1992. He has since produced and directed a string of feature-length independent documentaries that have aired on PBS and cable networks such as Starz, Encore and The Sundance Channel.

Those featured in Thurman's documentaries included Charlton Heston, James Coburn, Peter Fonda, Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, Ned Beatty, Monte Hellman, Millie Perkins, Thomas McGuane, Russell Chatham, James Dickey, Lawrence Tierney, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Solomon Burke, John Prine, Doug Sahm, Aretha Franklin, Oliver Stone, Stella Stevens, Benicio Del Toro, Billy Bob Thornton, Sean Penn, George McGovern, John Cusack, Jacqueline Bisset, and Johnny Depp. Frequent collaborators included songwriters Donnie Fritts and Kris Kristofferson, actor Harry Dean Stanton, writer Stanley Booth, and critics FX Feeney, David Thomson, Leonard Maltin and Elvis Mitchell. Thurman often works with writer Tom Marksbury, who teaches in the English department at the University of Kentucky.

After the Oates project, he worked on two documentaries that received limited distribution: Guilty as Charged (completed 1993, about writer Harry Crews), and Third Cowboy on the Right (completed 1996, about actor Ben Johnson). A work-in-progress print of Third Cowboy was screened at the 1996 Bergamo Film Meeting in Italy, which was attended by Thurman, Harry Carey Jr. and Ben Johnson. After the screening, Johnson was overheard telling the director "It's a lot better than I thought it would be." Johnson died of a heart attack in Arizona before seeing the completed version of the film, which received its European premiere at the Munich Film Festival and domestic premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

Thurman then shifted from film history to music as he embarked upon a project documenting the life and career of Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler. From New York City to New Orleans to Memphis and onto Muscle Shoals, he traced Wexler's work as one of the most influential, beloved and also feared figures in all of contemporary American music. In 1998, when Wexler was in Memphis receiving an award for his contributions to that city's musical heritage, Thurman asked Wexler what he wanted written on his tombstone. Wexler told the filmmaker, "Two words: More bass." This exchange was later printed in the August 15, 2008 New York Times obituary for Wexler, who died in Sarasota at age 91.