Peter Lang is a graduate of Harvard who got seduced away from architecture by some rewinds and a flatbed he discovered in a basement one night. Since then, when he's not too busy being a director, he might be taking photographs (see some here) or wishing he were playing guitar.

Since his moderately auspicious beginning with an extremely short short film about a Ducati 750, followed closely by his senior thesis film The Model, (which was given a summa cum laude — that's the way they do it at Harvard) written by his co-conspirator there, Chris Gerolmo (writer of Mississippi Burning and pilot of the Ducati 750), Peter has spent way too much time immersing himself in the process and meaning of film (and various other upstart 2-dimensional representations of 3-dimensional reality). Alfred Guzzetti, Ben Lifson, and Dusan Makavejev were some of his early mentors, and work continues on the building whose foundation they so expertly laid.

Before having anything to do with a commercial production company, let alone becoming the head of this one, Peter was a photographer, painter, and documentary filmmaker with some history in the pursuit of architecture (and Le Corbusier in particular) and a penchant for playing his Les Paul gold-top in any one of a number of East and West coast bands (this, when he should have been reading another monograph about arms-control in a nuclear age). He brings these disparate interests and experience to all of his work in film — he believes this is a medium that wants renaissance abilities — and it shows.

A lack of belief in pigeonholing notions ( — those damned elusive pigeonholes) is evident in all the work that comes out of Pictures in a Row, not just Peter's. Peter thinks of directors as more complex beings than the people implied by the images bruited around in the trades, and he wanted a company that not only was fun to come to every day, but believed in what directors, writers, editors — filmmakers do — and a company that believed there might be a collegiality among them, and acted like it. A place where Francis Ford Coppola's brotherhood of winemakers metaphor might have a chance of being realized [in a speech once at the Spirit awards Coppola asked why it was that if winemakers can do it (the brotherly thing), then why can't filmmakers — a good question — and the answer often has more to do with other people's expectations of what a filmmaker is and how to handle the beast, than an unwillingness on the part of the filmmaker].

So. Peter wanted to make Pictures in a Row a place where people make and talk about film — where Godard and Renoir matter and Jean Luc isn't an interior designer. Of course it's a tricky business, all this, but there is art in the business and that's that.

Peter has written (a screenplay, or two), makes music, shoots pictures, talks, draws, and is no slouch with a screwdriver. There are some pictures in the fire (that is, feature projects — every once in a while the floor opens up, revealing a hole of infinite depth with fires dimly visible below; the room gets hot, flames shoot out, and a well-spoken gentleman in a dark suit appears holding a contract) and Gounod is in regular rotation. And Peter agrees with William S. Gilbert 'that Death whene'er he call, must call too soon.'