Alex Wroten
Director
Alex Wroten is an Asheville-based, award-winning writer-director-composer with 20+ years of professional experience. His diverse portfolio of projects includes original films, musical scores and documentaries that have gained international acclaim.
Alex owns and operates Well Dang! Productions, serving as creator and producer on documentary and fiction shorts, features, and web series. The full-service production company’s films have been screened in festivals across the globe.
Equal parts storyteller and creative self-starter, Alex has written and directed dozens (and dozens) of features, shorts, and web series, and composed music for dozens of other projects over a 20 year film career. He is skilled in developing authentic, inventive narratives while driving budgets, removing roadblocks, managing talent and facilitating complex production schedules. Alex's most recent short film, "Endangered," featuring Cheri Oteri and Camryn Manheim was an official selection in over 40 film festivals.
As a composer, Alex’s expertise spans various styles, instruments, outboard gear and creative technology platforms. The New York Times called his “Mosaic” percussion duet, which was commissioned and performed by Meehan/Perkins Duo at Constellation Chicago in 2016, an “absorbing premiere” that “glistens as it seems to rotate, less developing than slowly revealing more of its secrets.”
Alex earned a Master’s in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College on a full scholarship, as well as a Bachelor’s in Music Composition from the University of South Carolina. He was also selected for a National Science Foundation grant-funded fellowship to compose music for USC NanoCenter, and earned multiple awards for his submissions to USC’s GotFilm? contest.
Currently splitting time between LA and Asheville, NC, Alex is married to long-time creative collaborator, Lindsay Wolfe-Wroten. Alex and Lindsay have two kids and live in Asheville.
Director’s Statement about Stargazer: Shawn Phillips
I had an epiphany in 2015 that went something like this: "Shawn Phillips! Duh!"
You see, I had first met Shawn in 1997 at a concert in Atlanta, GA. His presence and history was captivating. I was obsessed at the time with hippie-era rock-n-roll history, and here was a living, breathing embodiment of it. His stories were too wild to be true (yet they were), and he was too kind to be believed (yet he let me and my sister sit and grill him on all the "more famous people" he knew, without a lick of frustration).
So roughly 20 years later, when my wife (producer Lindsay Wolfe-Wroten) and I were batting around ideas for a documentary project, the epiphany finally hit after seeing Shawn's name onscreen in "Searching for Sugar Man."
"Shawn Phillips! Duh!"
It's taken a long time to get to this point, largely due to the complications of following the trail of a man who is so non-materialistic that he has definitely lost more photos and films of himself than we could ever seek to find later... and his questionable business decisions. But it's been a huge honor to be able to bring Shawn's story to others and fascinate them with this real human being who has lived his life like a fictional character.
As legendary record producer Bob Ezrin perfectly says in the documentary, Shawn is "larger than life... with a life most of us can only read about in books."