You Had to Be There : Jacob Burns Film Center

SPECIAL EVENTS

Q&A with director Nick Davis and writer/producer Jane Mendelsohn

Wednesday, Sep. 23 2026, 7:00

Nick Davis is a New York writer and filmmaker. Among his films are Once Upon a Time in Queens about the 1986 New York Mets, for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, Ted Williams: “The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived” for PBS’ American Masters, and Jack: The Last Kennedy Film, for CBS. His recent film, This Ordinary Thing, a documentary about non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust, featuring a voice cast including Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, F. Murray Abraham, Carrie Coon, and Ellen Burstyn, was nominated for the Cinema for Peace Dove Documentary of the Year and is available online. His book about his grandfather and great-uncle, Competing With Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait, was shortlisted for the LA Times book prize as biography of the year in 2021. Last year, after years of collaborating informally, he and his wife the novelist Jane Mendelsohn formed their new production company, Series of Dreams. You Had To Be There is the company’s first film. He and Jane live downtown and have two daughters and a dog.
Jane Mendelsohn is a novelist, screenwriter, and producer, born and raised in New York City. A graduate of Yale, where she was a Connecticut Student Poet, she attended Yale Law School before leaving to pursue writing and began publishing book reviews in the Village Voice in 1990; her work has since appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Literary Hub, and the London Review of Books. Her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, was published by Knopf in 1996 to widespread acclaim, became a New York Times bestseller, was translated into numerous languages, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her subsequent novels include Innocence, which was adapted into a feature film, American Music, commissioned as a musical by the American Repertory Theater, and Burning Down the House. After years of working informally on each other’s projects, Mendelsohn and her husband, filmmaker Nick Davis, formed Series of Dreams in 2025. The company’s first films are YOU HAD TO BE THERE and This Ordinary Thing, featuring a voice cast including Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Carrie Coon, F. Murray Abraham, and Ellen Burstyn, and recently nominated for the Cinema for Peace Dove Documentary of the Year.