Renowned photographer and director, Mario Sorrenti, grew up with the actor Jerry Dean in the West Village of New York in the 1970’s.

Writer Kurt Brunghardt worked with Jerry Dean over the last decade to write the story of his extraordinary, peripatetic and manic life. This culminated in the one-man play, My Father’s A Cop, which Jerry performed to packed houses in the black box theatre Under St. Mark’s in 2014.

Producer Sarah Teale first met Jerry in the Psych Emergency Room of New York’s Bellevue Hospital in 1998 where she was filming a documentary, Bellevue: Inside Out, for HBO. Jerry was an inmate and became an unwitting star of the film.

Together they have come together to expand the play into a documentary that will push the boundaries of the form, combining first person memoir (in the form of dramatic monologues shot on a darkened sound stage); photos; stock footage; filmed interviews with the all the major players and confrontation scenes, where the past confronts the present busting the one man show into new territory.

The interviewees will include Jerry’s father, Joe Dean; actors Mickey Rourke and Michael Rapaport; producer Bruce Rubenstein and CAA super agent Fred Specktor; the women including Victoria Sellers and Heidi Fleiss and models Manon Von Gerkhan and Katie Fischer; numerous friends who have loved and feared Jerry in equal measure for years and finally Miss Jones, the social worker in the Sing Sing Prison Psychiatric Ward who was finally able to reach him.

Stock footage will include never before scenes from the HBO documentary Bellevue: Inside Out; scenes from Greenwich Village, graffiti on trains, and transvestites at the piers in the 1970s and ‘80s, and clips from the many movies that Jerry has appeared in. Photos will include Jerry’s modeling shots, celebrity screenings and his boxing matches with Mickey Rourke.