Producer, director and writer Richard C. Ledes was not named ”Richard” after his mother’s brother, who died a schizophrenic in a veterans psychiatric hospital after he either escaped or wandered off and was hit by a train. He was named after her father, a judge in Baltimore, who died of sadness a few months after his son, the schizophrenic, was hit by a train. Richard C. Ledes was not named after a schizophrenic.
Ledes’ film FRED WON’T MOVE OUT was named by the BFI (British Film Institute) as one of the 10 essential films of legendary actor Elliott Gould (MASH, THE LONG GOODBYE). Ledes’ film THE CALLER won Best NY Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival.
His first feature film A HOLE IN ONE, set in 1953, starring Michelle Williams, about a woman who wants a lobotomy, originated in a piece of performance art that Ledes based on the psychiatric records of his maternal uncle. He made A HOLE IN ONE after completing a doctorate in comparative literature at NYU. Much of his research for the film derived from the research he did for his dissertation; it was on the cultural traces of the rise of mental healthcare in the U.S. around treating veterans after WWII. During his research he volunteered at an outpatient center for severely mentally ill: assistant-directing their theater program and leading groups in which they read aloud the short stories of Poe, Melville and Hawthorne. This combination of a personal connection to a film’s theme with research into its broader significance remains an important dimension of his work.
His recently completed film ADIEU LACAN, starring David Patrick Kelly and Ismenia Mendes, is based on the play "Goodbye Doctor" and the novel "Lacan's Parrot" both by Betty Milan. ADIEU LACAN is the story of the struggle of a young woman to understand, through a psychoanalysis with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, why her own path to motherhood has reached an unbearable impasse.
He is currently in development on VIENNA 1913, based on a play by the same name written by the late renowned French psychoanalyst and playwright Alain Didier-Weill. In Vienna 1913, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing; anti-Semitism is on the rise and Europe is on the brink of WWI. Two young men from different social backgrounds, Hugo and Adolf, become friends. One, complaining of an irrational impulse towards a hatred of Jews, will undergo psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, while the other, a struggling artist obsessed with vegetarianism and German nationalism, will become Adolf Hitler.
Ledes is also the only translator of William Burroughs into English (Burroughs did a series of interviews in France that were published in French; the original recordings were lost; for a collection of the work of Burroughs published by Semiotexte, Ledes translated the French translations back into English).