Barry Avrich

Barry Michael Avrich ( ; born May 9, 1963) is a Canadian film director, film producer, author, marketing executive, and arts philanthropist. Avrich's film career has included critically acclaimed films about the entertainment business including The Last Mogul about film producer Lew Wasserman, Glitter Palace about the Motion Picture Country Home (2005), and Guilty Pleasure about the Vanity Fair columnist and author Dominick Dunne (2004) and Made You Look about the largest art fraud in America, 2020.

In addition, Avrich produced the Gemini-nominated television special Caesar and Cleopatra (2009) with Christopher Plummer. Avrich also produced Canada's Sports Hall of Fame Awards (2015), as well as the Canadian Screen Awards (2015-2017) and the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2015-current).

Besides films, Avrich has authored three books and one play as well as supporting many leading cultural institutions including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Stratford Festival of Canada. Avrich was awarded The Horatio Alger Award in 2025.

In 2016, Avrich published his memoir, Moguls, Monsters and Madmen. In 2025, Avrich published, the Devil Wears Rothko.

Early life Avrich was born into a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, the son of Irving Avrich, a garment industry executive, and Faye Avrich, a housewife. His parents immersed him in the arts as a child. In school, Avrich produced talent shows and started experimenting with films. While attending Vanier College, he gravitated to the film program and while there, he produced many films. In 1980, he moved to Toronto where he continued to study film, art and theatre at both Ryerson Polytechnical Institute and the University of Toronto. While in school, Avrich started Rent-A-Fan Club, a company that offered "celebrity status" to people as a novelty by using his fellow acting students to create fan clubs. Soon after graduating, Avrich made two short films that would get him noticed: The King of Yorkville (1985) was a satirical parody of the 1980s dating scene that was picked up by local television stations in Canada, and The Madness of Method (1995), featuring M. Emmet Walsh, won a Gold Medal at the Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Films. Avrich has directed and produced many acclaimed documentaries and television specials. His focus is generally on the entertainment industry and television specials, including the music special, Bowfire for PBS (2008), One x One Gala (2007) for CTV and Caesar and Cleopatra (2009) for Bravo and CTV. Other films have chronicled defense attorney Edward Greenspan and the Rolling Stones promoter Michael Cohl, Winston Churchill, and David Steinberg. His 2010 film Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project was sold to IFC's Sundance Now channel in February 2011.

In 2017, Avrich announced plans for a docuseries on American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; however, he decided to scrap the project after Epstein's suicide in August, 2019, claiming the topic to be "too distasteful". In 2018, Avrich directed and produced The Reckoning, the first "#metoo documentary on Harvey Weinstein, which premiered at Hot Docs Film Festival and was sold to CBC and Hulu. In 2018, Avrich produced and directed an acclaimed and award-winning documentary, Prosecuting Evil, on Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz, which was sold to Netflix. In 2019, Avrich directed and produced Off The Record, a biography of Grammy award-winning producer and composer David Foster, for Crave and Netflix, which premiered at TIFF. In 2020, Avrich produced Made You Look, a documentary about the infamous Knoedler Gallery art fraud scandal which was sold to Netflix.

In 2021, Avrich directed and produced Oscar Peterson: Black + White, a docu-concert on jazz icon Oscar Peterson that had its world premiere at TIFF on September 12, 2021. In 2022, Avrich began production on three new documentaries: Without Precedent (on Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella), Sacrilege (narrated by Brian Cox), and The Palm Beach Diaries.

The Last Mogul (2005) is probably Avrich's best known film to date. The Variety critic Robert Koehler said of the documentary about Lew Wasserman that it "draws a full and balanced measure of the man, from his stratospheric rise to a remarkably humbling fall, and includes as thorough a study of the super-agent-turned-mogul's shady ties with organized crime as any feature docu could hope to muster."

In 2026, it was reported that Avrich will direct Shadow Man: Inside the Secret World of Larry Gagosian, a documentary examining the career and influence of art dealer Larry Gagosian and the operations of the global Gagosian gallery network.

Awards In April 2022, Avrich’s film received 4 Canadian Screen Awards including Best Documentary Program for Oscar Peterson: Black + White.

When accepting the award online during the COVID-19 pandemic, his remarks ended with the following statement: including the Black Screen Office, whose statement called out Avrich's "supreme disrespect of our history" that "cleverly weaponizes the non-Black community" Reelworld Film Festival, whose statement called out Avrich's words as "reflective of a past system that we are working to change"; and, without naming Avrich, the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television that is responsible for the Canadian Screen Awards. Avrich apologized the next day and said that he had misspoke and that of course, it matters who tells stories."

The ultimate disinvitation, according to Deadline, came over the legal clearance and identification of footage of the attack that was filmed by Hamas.

The producers countered that only was the festival indemnified as the festival was covered in the production’s errors and omission policy, Hamas footage was designated as “fair use”. After massive outrage and push back, the festival later reinvited the film to be shown as an official selection. Cameron Bailey, the festival's CEO, said that it's "unequivocally false" the film was being censored. The film went on to win the Peoples Choice Award.

Business Avrich began a marketing career in 1985 at Borden Advertising where he worked on national campaigns for the Canadian original production of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon. While at Echo, Avrich and his staff developed award-winning international campaigns for such clients such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Rolling Stones, American Express, Sprint and for Broadway productions such as Ragtime, Show Boat, Fosse, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Canadian productions of The Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Les Misérables. Avrich left Echo in 2005 after it was sold to a UK-based marketing firm and he started a boutique advertising agency.

Filmography

The King of Yorkville, 1987 The Madness of Method, 1996 Unforgettable: 100 years Remembered, 1998 Glitter Palace, 2002 Guilty Pleasure, 2002 A Criminal Mind, 2005 Satisfaction, 2006 City Lights, 2002 The Madness of King Richard, 2003 The Last Mogul, 2005 One x One Gala, 2007 Bowfire, 2008 Citizen Cohl, 2008 The Ultimate Jew, 2009 Caesar and Cleopatra, 2009 Amerika Idol, 2009 Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Story, 2010 The Tempest, 2010 An Unlikely Obsession: Churchill and the Jews, 2011 Show Stopper: The Theatrical Life of Garth Drabinsky, 2012 Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story, 2013 Quality Balls The David Steinberg Story, 2013 Red Alert, 2014 King Lear, 2015 Antony and Cleopatra, 2015 King John, 2015 Women Who Act, 2015 The Man Who Shot Hollywood, 2015 (short) The Taming of the Shrew, 2016 Canadian Screen Awards, 2016 (television) Hamlet, 2016 The Scotia Giller Prize Broadcast, 2016 (television) Macbeth, 2016 Blurred Lines, 2017 Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz, 2018 David Foster: Off the Record, 2019 Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, 2020 Howie Mandel: But, Enough About Me, 2020 Reversal of Fortune: The Unraveling of Turkey's Democracy, 2020 Othello, 2020 Merry Wives of Windsor, 2020 Oscar Peterson: Black + White, 2021 The Talented Mr. Rosenberg, 2021 Sacrilege, 2022 Three Tall Women, 2022 Free Up!, 2022 Without Precedent: The Supreme Life of Rosalie Abella, 2023 The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, 2025 This Above All: The Theatrical Life of Antoni Cimolino, 2026 Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been, 2026