- Max Morgan-Witts
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Max Morgan-Witts is a British producer, director and author of Canadian origin.
Morgan-Witts was a Director/Producer at Granada TV. He directed hundreds of popular television shows for Granada, including: 50 episodes of The Army Game, a forerunner of the American show Bilko and at the time Britain's highest-rated television programme. Afterwards Morgan-Witts directed 30 of the earliest episodes of Coronation Street, which followed The Army Game as Britain's top-rated TV show.
After his successes at Granada TV, Morgan-Witts moved to BBC TV, where he was responsible for many documentary programmes. This included 14 one-hour programmes titled 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 ever made. He was an editor and executive producer of Tomorrow's World, a hugely successful, live, weekly, popular science programme. He was Director and Producer of many one-hour film documentaries made for peak time viewing on BBC-1, 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 world-wide.
Morgan-Witts is a member of Society of Authors and has been awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award.
Now in partial retirement, Morgan-Witts has involved himself in the revival of the fortunes of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, the important London Arts & Crafts church.
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
Categories:- British television directors
- British non-fiction writers
- Edgar Award winners
- Living people
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