Zed Starkovich is a writer, editor, and filmmaker, whose career bridges union labor, independent art, and the fast-changing world of analogue and digital media. Born to hippie parents in Palo Alto, California, he studied film and physics at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts then spent the next decade in freelance film and commercial production working his way up as a PA, grip, electrician, location sound mixer, and assistant director while simultaneously working as an audio engineer, foley artist, editor, narrator, director, and producer of audiobooks alongside writers and actors like Joseph Heller and Tim Curry.
For over two decades he has worked as a union music editor with the Motion Picture Editors Guild and is a member of the Television Academy, shaping the music on more than 650 hours of film and television for major studios and networks including Disney, Warner Bros., Netflix, Universal, NBC, ABC, CBS, Apple, and Hulu. From The Muppet Show and The Twilight Zone, to Quantum Leap, Blindspot, Cowboy Bebop, and the forthcoming Scooby Doo: Origins, his experience covers Emmy nominated limited prestige series, network pilots, and independent features, including directing his own shorts and the feature La Cucina.
The through-line is long-term collaborations. He has spent more than a decade cutting music for four of Osgood Perkins's features, from The Blackcoat's Daughter through The Monkey and The Young People — films where music is an integral part of the storytelling instead of slapped on at the end. His work with Tim Robbins has run more than 20 years through documentaries and theater — including The Actors' Gang production of Orwell’s 1984, and co-editing the documentary 45 Seconds of Laughter, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. He is also the editor and co-producer of their forthcoming anti-war documentary Four Soldiers, built around interviews with Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer.
The same pattern holds on the TV production side over more than 20 years, including thirteen shows with Midnight Radio, the company run by Scott Rosenberg, Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Jeff Pinkner, and twelve with Berlanti Productions. In a freelance business where every season is a separate hire, those long-term relationships speak for themselves.
That hands-on experience with all levels of production molded his approach as a director and documentarian, enabling him to shift his focus away from Hollywood's glitz and glamour to turn the spotlight on everyday people whose stories rarely make it to the big screen.
Long before streaming and smartphones were standard, Starkovich was an outspoken advocate for the digital future of audio and video, testing new tools the moment they became available. Now that the digital future has arrived, he focuses on using accessible technology to make high-quality work on modest budgets and to share it as widely and as cheaply as possible.
He put that knowledge to work early with his own projects. After reading Jack Herer's groundbreaking book The Emperor Wears No Clothes in 1992, he spent the next several years exploring the research and political history behind it. When the internet arrived he saw a way to consolidate all that research in one place and make it available for everybody before it disappeared down the memory hole of history, so in 1998 he founded The HempFarm. After the 9/11 attacks inspired a brand new oil and the modern surveillance state he expanded the site from an online library into a resource for activists organized around a single argument: our forced dependence on expensive, toxic, and unnecessary foreign oil — and the war machine that enforces it — manufactures the inequality and fear it claims to solve. That system runs on the belief that there isn't enough food, clothing, shelter, or fuel for everyone to live peacefully. The facts and the history say otherwise, and hemp, a plant that yields food, fiber, fuel, paper, plastic, and medicine grown by local farmers, is one of the plainest demonstrations that the artificially high cost of living was always a choice.
His work on The HempFarm and its companion Substack, with its exploration of our collective history and the top-down politics that made the world what it is today, has continued for almost 30 years with the occasional essay and podcast examining everything from hemp as an ancient alternative to oil, austerity and the scarcity myth, and the propaganda that justifies war while we can't feed the poor.
Decades of research into the politics of fascism boiled down to one fundamental question: how can we actually make the world, and our place in it, better? "MyVote: How to Billionaire-Proof Democracy With Electronic Governance" is his answer. It argues that the tools for an accountable, transparent, participatory government already exist and already work in Estonia, Denmark, Singapore and over 20 other countries — the obstacles are political, not technical. He wrote, produced, edited, published, and narrated it himself across ebook, paperback, audiobook, and a ten-episode podcast, and continues the argument at his MyVote Substack.
Across film sets, edit bays, protest marches, and picket lines, Starkovich has focused on amplifying people who rarely get a microphone: workers, outsiders, and communities pushed to the margins. As a father and independent researcher, he continues to develop projects that mix hard-earned craft with social conscience, aiming to tell stories that change the way people see themselves, each other, our collective history, and our potential future.
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