"When Jews Were Funny" Director Alan Zweig

Alan Zweig began his professional career as a cab driver, which he did for 16 years, putting himself through film school and occasionally getting a gig in the transportation department of the film industry where he got to drive Big Bird and Peter Fonda among others. Somewhere in there he taught himself to write and got a couple of jobs in 

episodic television. He also acted in some friends’ films. And occasionally he got to make a film himself. He decided to try his hand at documentary film when he saw what his friend’s hi-8 camera could do and thought it might be fun to make a film by himself. The result of that exploration was a film called Vinyl which premiered at Hot Docs 

in the year 2000 and earned him a permanent place in the pantheon of late bloomers. In the last 20 years he’s made nine more feature documentaries, which often dealt with autobiographical themes as well 

as people on the margins of society.