Max Morgan-Witts
Max Morgan-Witts (born 27 September 1931) is a British producer, director and author of Canadian origin.
Morgan-Witts was a Director/Producer at Granada TV. He directed television shows for Granada, including: 50 episodes of The Army Game, at the time Britain's highest-rated television programme. Afterwards Morgan-Witts directed 15 of the earliest episodes of Coronation Street, which followed The Army Game as Britain's top-rated TV show.
After Granada TV, Morgan-Witts moved to BBC TV, where he was responsible for documentary programmes. These included 14 one-hour episodes of the The British Empire, a historical documentary series. It was filmed in 40 countries and at the time was the most expensive and ambitious documentary series the BBC had made. He was editor and executive producer of Tomorrow's World, a live, weekly, popular science programme. He was Director and Producer of many one-hour film documentaries made for peak time viewing on BBC One, most of which he wrote himself but for one of which he hired Gordon Thomas. This was the beginning of their writing partnership.
Morgan-Witts wrote 10 non-fiction books with Thomas, four of which were made into feature films, including Enola Gay: The Men, the Mission, the Atomic Bomb, which was first a four-hour NBC special and then re-cut as a feature. Another was Voyage of the Damned, a highly rated feature film which is frequently repeated on TV worldwide.
Morgan-Witts has been awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award and is a Knight of Mark Twain.
Now retired, Morgan-Witts and his wife, Pauline, live in London. They have two adult children, Paul and Michele, and four grandchildren.
His books are:
- The Day their World Ended by Gordon Thomas & Max Morgan-Witts, a factual novel about the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902 and the basis for the 1980 movie When Time Ran Out starring Paul Newman)
- The San Francisco Earthquake
- Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle
- Voyage of the Damned
- Guernica: The Crucible of World War II
- Ruin from the Air: The Enola Gay's Atomic Mission to Hiroshima
- The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929
- Anatomy of an epidemic
- Pontiff
- Averting Armageddon: Papal Policies in the Pursuit of Peace
External links
- Max Morgan-Witts at the Internet Movie Database
- Futerman, Rose & Associates Literary Agents
- Edgar Award Best Fact Crime
- New York Times
- Three Dot blog
- University California, Berkeley, The Books of the Century: 1970-1979