James Gutman was born in Philadelphia in 1946. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1968 and an M.A. from Harvard in 1970. In 1971 he served as production assistant and still photographer for the feature film Que Hacer filmed in Chile and distributed for Impact Films. The next year Gutman and David Halpern, Jr., a film reviewer and writer, directed and produced a series of short educational films for television and film festivals. In 1973 Gutman became director of the Film School at the Orson Welles Complex, Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he and Halpern, then the Film School's director of special projects, conceived the idea of a feature length documentary about director Nicholas Ray. The two later wrote the screenplay and under the auspices of their film company, October Films, Inc., produced the documentary, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: A portrait of Nicholas Ray(1974). Gutman's second film, Hollywood on Trial, concerned blacklisting in the film industry during the 1940's and 1950's.
Gutman also has written film journal articles and screenplays.
