“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."—Louisa May Alcott
The King’s Necktie is a blog about politics and culture by Robert Edwards, a writer and filmmaker based in New York City, who is the author of Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm (2024), a handbook for how to confront the Trump administration and right wing authoritarianism in the US, published by OR Books.
An Army brat, Edwards was born in a US Army hospital in Germany and grew up on and around military installations across the US, attending ten schools in thirteen years, including a brief overlap with Barack Obama at Punahou School in Honolulu. (Shockingly omitted from all of Barack’s books.) He served for six and a half years as an infantry and military intelligence officer in the US Army, and was a captain in the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. His father, Robert H. Edwards, was a rifle company commander in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965, as memorialized in We Were Soldiers Once….and Young, by Lt. General (Ret.) Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway.
After leaving the service, Edwards worked as a telemarketer, a private eye, a nightclub doorman, and a sub-par guitar player in a rock band before earning an MA from the Graduate Program in Documentary Film at Stanford. As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed the feature films Land of the Blind (2006) starring Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland, and When I Live My Life Over Again (aka One More Time) (2016), starring Christopher Walken and Amber Heard. Edwards won a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Land of the Blind, and a Sloan Foundation / Sundance Grant along with producer Carol Polakoff for his adaptation of American Prometheus, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, a property that was subsequently adapted by Christopher Nolan as the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer.
His other screenwriting work includes scripts for directors such as Bennett Miller, Antoine Fuqua, and Mark Romanek, and uncredited rewrites on films ranging from Black Mass to Olympus Has Fallen. Among his screenplays are the Cuban Missile Crisis thriller “One Minute to Midnight,” based on the book by Washington Post correspondent Michael Dobbs, for producer John Davis and Fox; “Blackwater,” based on the award-winning book about the mercenary industry by Jeremy Scahill, for HBO; “Hello to All That,” based on war correspondent John Falk’s memoir of Sarajevo, for producer Scott Stuber and Universal; and “House of War,” an eleven-part miniseries about the Cold War based on the book by James Carroll, for Plan B and HBO. He currently teaches a course in screenwriting as an adjunct professor at NYU.
As a documentarian, Edwards works with his wife and partner, director/ cinematographer Ferne Pearlstein (winner of the 2004 Sundance Cinematography Prize for her work on Ramona Diaz’s Imelda). Edwards co-wrote, co-produced, and co-edited Pearlstein’s feature documentary Sumo East and West (2003), about Americans in that ancient Japanese sport, and co-wrote and co-produced her second feature, The Last Laugh (2016), about the Holocaust as the last taboo subject for humor, starring Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Alan Zweibel, Harry Shearer, Susie Essman, Gilbert Gottfried, Larry Charles, David Steinberg, Shalom Auslander, Etgar Keret, Renee Firestone, and many others. Both films had their world premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens series. Edwards’s own documentary short The Voice of the Prophet (2001) about the death of Vietnam veteran Rick Rescorla on 9/11, was shown at Sundance, Toronto, Human Rights Watch and numerous other festivals. In his earlier life as a film editor, Edwards edited Barry Levinson’s feature documentary for Showtime, Yesterday’s Tomorrows (1999), produced by Richard Berge, which was part of a traveling exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution; and David Belle’s Abandoned: The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants (2000) for PBS, which won a duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, among other projects. In 2023 he was story producer on XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture, directed by Pearlstein, for Trevor Noah’s Day Zero Productions and Time Studios for MSNBC’s Turning Point series. Most recently he produced and co-directed (with Justin Schein) the feature documentary Death & Taxes, about wealth inequality and the American Dream, featuring Paul Krugman, Matthew Desmond, Felicia Wong, Darrick Hamilton, Amy Hanauer, and Robert Reich, which premiered at DOC NYC in November 2024.
Edwards and Pearlstein live in Brooklyn with their daughter Eloise.
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For earlier posts by The King’s Necktie from 2017-20, go to https://thekingsnecktie.com/archive/
(And yes, we know the “necktie” quote is really from Jean Meslier.)
