Ira Wohl is an American documentary filmmaker.[1] He is most noted for his 1979 film Best Boy, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 52nd Academy Awards.[2]
Born and raised in New York City, Wohl attended Forest Hills High School.[3] He had his first job in film working as an apprentice editor on Orson Welles's unfinished film Don Quixote in Madrid, Spain He then made a number of short films, worked on the television series Big Blue Marble, worked with John Lennon on a music video, then made Best Boy.
Best Boy premiered at the 1979 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the festival's only prize-People's Choice Award before a separate People's Choice Award was instituted for the festival's documentary stream.[4] He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980.
Wohl later returned to school at the University of Southern California (USC)in the early 1990s, studying clinical social work He has been a psychotherapist for the students of the University of California, Los Angeles(UCLA) for more than twenty years.[3]
In 1997, he released the sequel film Best Man: 'Best Boy' and All of Us Twenty Years Later.[2] In 2006, he released another follow-up film, titled Best Sister.[3]