The Independent on Run for Your Life

For Inspiration, Judd Ehrlich Looked to the Subject of His New Film, Run for Your Life: A look at the crowd-pleasing Fred Lebow biography that premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival

While vampires made a big splash at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, a documentary about a son of Transylvania carved out a decidedly different niche for itself. Judd Ehrlich's heart-warming documentary Run for Your Life tells the story of Fred Lebow, the founder of the New York City Marathon, and the New York City Road Runners Club, one of the preeminent runners' organizations in the world. The doc has a lot going for it: great archival footage, a cool soundtrack, a large and fascinating supporting cast of talking heads, and at the center of it all, a main character who can't run well, yet makes marathoning his life's passion. Lebow is in many ways a dream subject: he beds women, garners celebrity, copes with scandal, invents sports marketing, wrestles with the demons of his past in war-torn Europe, and lives a life of such color and comedy that it could fill several films and a few books on the side. But faced with a bounty of material, filmmaker Judd Ehrlich had to make some tough choices. He talks about the film and its reception at Tribeca with The Independent's Mike Hofman.