Born November 3, 1959, Hal Hartley operates his own production company,
True Fiction Pictures out of New York City. The third child of four, Hartley was born into a Catholic
blue collar family (his father was an iron worker) that resided in
Lindenhurst,
Long Island.
In the late 70's Hartley's creative bent led him to attend the
Massachusetts College of Art in
Boston. A class in film ignited an interest in the moving image and he began experimenting with the
celluloid medium. A year later he left art school only to work part time in a department store. In his spare time he began making a series of short films shot on
Super-8. Based on his submission of these films he was granted admission to the film school at the
State University of New York at Purchase.
Upon graduating with honors from
SUNY-Purchase in 1984, Hartley obtained work as an ironworker with his father and brother. After a time he found odd production assistant
jobs that ended up leaving him too drained to work on his own projects. In an attempt to make time and energy for his own work, Hartley took a job at
Action Productions. There he answered phones and ran errands for the
public service announcement company.
Action Productions' president,
Jerome Brownstein, recognized talent in Hartley early on and took him under his wing. While at Action, Hartley completed two short films, "
Dogs" and "
The Cartographer's Girlfriend", both demonstrating his talent to make films on a
shoestring with borrowed cameras and outdated film stock.
Not long after Hartley applied for a bank loan for a home computer and was approved. He was able to convince his brother and a cousin to to apply and soon he managed to had raise twenty-three thousand dollars for his first
feature film, "
The Unbelievable Truth", which he planned to shoot in
sixteen millimeter. Brownstein stepped in and told Hal that he would raise enough so that the film could be shot in thirty-five millimeter once Hal submitted a realistic
budget proposal. Hartley pulled together his budget and Brownstein, true to his word, put together an investment of over fifty thousand dollars, putting the total budget for "The Unbelievable Truth" at around seventy-five grand.
In order to work within his means, Hartley convinced many of his SUNY-Purchase friends to act as
cast and crew. In addition, he convinced his father and other Lindenhurst relatives to 'donate' their homes as locations. The shoot lasted a mere eleven and a half days. After completeion, Hartley's next obstacle was finding a distributor. Prospects were bleak for about nine months until "The Unbelievable Truth" went on to become a smash hit at the 1989
Toronto Film Festival. A bidding war ensued between distributors and in the end,
Miramax won the rights. 1990 saw the comercial release of "The Unbelievable Truth" and the rest is, as they say, history.