NEW YORK, NY.- Marvin Chomsky, an Emmy Award-winning director renowned for his work on historical dramas, including the blockbuster miniseries Roots and Holocaust, died March 28 in Santa Monica, California. He was 92.
His son Eric confirmed the death, in hospice care in a retirement community.
Chomsky had been directing episodic television for many years when he was hired as one of the four directors of Roots, the groundbreaking 12-hour series based on Alex Haleys book tracing his familys origins from an African village to enslavement in the United States. Shown on eight consecutive nights in January 1977, it drew spectacular ratings and won nine Emmys.
Roots cinematographer Joseph Wilcots said in a Television Academy interview in 2007 that Chomsky was a brilliant director who always thought his shots out very clearly, in particular one in which Tom Harvey, the Black character played by Georg Stanford Brown, was whipped.
Louis Gossett Jr., who played enslaved musician Fiddler, told the syndicated columnist Cleveland Amory in 1977 that Chomsky and another director, John Erman, who were both white, were very sensitive and let each of us do what we thought was best for our particular role.
Chomsky was nominated for an Emmy for Roots but lost to David Greene, another Roots director. He won his first Emmy a year later for directing Holocaust (1978), a four-part series, starring Meryl Streep and Michael Moriarty, that focused on two families in Nazi Germany: one Jewish, the other headed by an SS officer.
Before filming a scene in which Moriarty, who played Erik Dorf, the SS officer, broke into tears, Chomsky showed him photographs of Nazi atrocities.
What you saw was Michael Moriartys response to those pictures, Moriarty told the Fort Lauderdale News shortly after the series premiered. The horror of what Dorf had done, the level of guilt it was very close.
Eric Chomsky said in an interview that his father had been traumatized by the experience of filming in Germany and Austria, which included directing one scene in the former gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp and another in which a large group of extras, portraying Jewish prisoners, were forced to strip naked and machine-gunned in a ravine.
One young cameraman, Chomsky said, did not believe that the scene could have been based on reality.
Mr. Marvin, you are making this up for the movie, Chomsky recalled the man telling him in a 2007 Directors Guild of America interview. This didnt really happen.
Chomsky called on a German crew member to attest to its veracity.
When Chomsky accepted the Emmy for Holocaust, he said he had mixed feelings about winning an honor for a series that depicted events that never should have happened at all.
But, he added, They did happen, and Im proud to have been able to tell that story to those who didnt know, like my sons David, Eric and Peter, and possibly to remind some of those who forgot.
Marvin Joseph Chomsky was born May 23, 1929, in the New York City borough of the Bronx and grew up in nearby Brooklyn. His father, Harry, and his mother, Gloria (Yarmuk) Chomsky, both immigrated from what is now Belarus and owned a candy store.
While Chomsky was attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, his deep voice brought him to the attention of an all-city radio workshop. That led to his appearing on a local radio station and, soon, working on a TV show for teenagers in the mediums early days.
He graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelors degree in speech in 1950 and earned a masters degree in drama at Stanford University a year later. Following his Army service, Chomsky spent the next decade as an art director and scenic designer for TV shows, including Captain Kangaroo, Arthur Godfrey Time and the anthology series Studio One.
While working as an art director on the series The Doctors and the Nurses in the early 1960s, Chomsky was asked by the shows executive producer, Herbert Brodkin, if he wanted to become a producer. Chomsky declined, saying hed rather be a director. He went on to direct three episodes of the show, followed by a long run of work on series such as The Wild Wild West, Star Trek, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O and Mannix.
After Roots and Holocaust, Chomsky won Emmys for directing Attica (1980), a TV movie about the bloody prison riot in upstate New York, and Inside the Third Reich (1982), a two-part film based on the autobiography of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitlers minister of armaments and war production.
He won his fourth Emmy as a producer of Peter the Great (1986), a miniseries about the Russian czar Peter I, starring Maximilian Schell, which Chomsky also co-directed with Lawrence Schiller.
His last credits include Strauss Dynasty (1991), a miniseries about the Austrian musical family, and Catherine the Great (1995), a TV movie starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.
In addition to his son Eric, Chomsky is survived by his other sons, Peter and David, and a granddaughter. He was separated from his second wife, Christa Baum-Chomsky. His marriage to Tobye Kaplan ended in divorce.
Eric Chomsky said his father had wanted the facts in his work to stand up to scrutiny: I worked with him on The Deliberate Stranger a 1986 miniseries about serial killer Ted Bundy and my whole job was to read the trial transcripts to make sure the script was accurate.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.