Robert Lieberman

Robert Lieberman was the director of D3: The Mighty Ducks, the third edition of one of Disney's more successful franchises. He started his feature career back in 1982 directing Jon Voight in Table For Five, fresh off Voight's Best Actor Oscar for Coming Home and over the intervening almost twenty years directed seven additional films including, Fire in the Sky, All I Want For Christmas (starring Thora Birch, Leslie Nielsen and Lauren Bacall), The Tortured for Twisted Pictures (The SAW series), The Stranger, and now Breakaway, which was a Gala presentation at the 2011 Toronto Independent Film Festival. For over three decades, Lieberman was one of the busiest and most successful directors in film and television. He won 29 Clio Awards and became the first recipient of the Directors Guild of America's Best Commercial Director award in 1980. He won the DGA award again in 1996 and got nominated a total of four times. His more than 1,000 commercials included spots for AT&T, Budweiser, Burger King, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Merrill Lynch, Hallmark, Sprint and literally hundreds more A-list companies, even directing Yao Ming in an Oreo commercial in Shanghai. Lieberman began directing dramatic television in the early 1980s, and amassed numerous credits including multiple episodes of Dexter, Brothers & Sisters, Eureka, Shark, Haven, multiple episodes of Republic of Doyle and Lost Girl, The X-Files, thirty-something, Gabriel's Fire (which he also executive produced and which garnered three Emmys), Harts of the West, The Young Riders (ran three seasons), Tom Clancy's Netforce with Kris Kristofferson (which he also wrote), Once and Again, Strong Medicine (ran for six seasons), the telefilm Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, and the miniseries Titanic, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and George C. Scott for CBS. For TNT, he directed the original movie Second String (his second outing with Voight), and for SyFy he directed two mini-series: Earthsea with Isabella Rossellini and Danny Glover, and The Final Days of Planet Earth starring Daryl Hannah. He served as executive producer of USA Network's long-running hit The Dead Zone (ran seven seasons) and also directed many of the episodes. Of the nineteen pilots that Lieberman directed, sixteen sold through to series, one of the most successful records in television history. Lieberman co-created and executive produced the daytime talk show Marilu and the Fox reality show The Casino, which he co-developed with Mark Burnett Productions. A graduate of the University at Buffalo with a B.A. in film, Lieberman was the recipient of numerous awards from the Chicago Film Festival to the San Francisco Film Festival, many Andys, Addys, Mobius Awards, Commercial of The Year from the industry magazine Ad Age; Gold and Silver Lions for commercials at the Cannes Festival; as well as two DGA Director of the Year in commercials. The father of four, Lieberman lived with his wife in Los Angeles and Toronto.