Joe Maggio
Directing
Biography
Joe Maggio is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is best known for his work on the films Virgil Bliss, Paper Covers Rock, Bitter Feast, and The Last Rites of Joe May. He is also one of the founding editors of the NYC-based literary and culture tabloid The Brooklyn Rail. Maggio was born in Buffalo, New York. He graduated with a BA from Rutgers University. Maggio's debut feature film, Virgil Bliss (2001), was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards, including The John Cassavetes Award. His second film, Milk and Honey (2003), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won a Special Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at the Atlanta Film Festival in 2003. His third film, Paper Covers Rock (IFC Films), premiered at South by Southwest in 2008. In 2010, Maggio's film, Bitter Feast, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. In 2011, his film, The Last Rites of Joe May, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and also nominated for Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival. His sixth feature film, Supermoto, premiered at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival. He is currently in post-production on the feature film Bliss (2023), which is the second installment of his Virgil Bliss trilogy. Maggio has collaborated with Vincent D'Onofrio on three radio plays, Man on the Ledge (2010), Ram King (2013), and Cannibals (2015), as part of the series Tales from Beyond the Pale, hosted by Larry Fessenden. He is currently working on a feature documentary, Gary from Omaha, about one man's hunt for a mythical creature in the wilds of Oregon's Blue Mountains. In 2020, Maggio joined the faculty of Emerson College where he teaches in the Visual Media Arts (VMA) Department.
Known For
A celebrity chef exacts revenge on a food blogger who torpedoes his career.
Bitter Feast
Now in his sixties, Joe is released from the hospital after a long battle with pneumonia and forced to confront the harsh reality of his legacy: everyone he knew had assumed he was dead, and life had gone on around him without missing a beat. Returning to his old neighborhood in Chicago's 'Patch' district, he finds his car gone, all his worldly possessions pawned by his landlord, and the apartment he's lived in his entire adult life rented out to a single mother and her eight-year-old daughter.
The Last Rites of Joe May
Fresh out of a long stretch in prison, Virgil Bliss (Clint Jordan) vows to go straight in this gritty, character-driven drama. But finding a job, a wife and a sense of purpose doesn't come easy when you're living in a halfway house surrounded by junkies and thugs. Things start to look up when Virgil falls for Ruby (Kirsten Russell), a prostitute and fellow lost soul, but her drug addiction stands in the way of his shot at a normal life.
Virgil Bliss
Over one night in New York City, lives of disparate strangers intersect by fate and circumstance.
Milk and Honey
A noir mostly set in a bathroom stall and stairwell. A private dick trapped in a tight spot. A narrator searching for a way out of the story.
Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller
Part 2 of the Virgil Bliss trilogy, Bliss picks up Virgil's story 20 years later in the deserts of Southern California where a fugitive Virgil scratches out a meager existence as an Oxy-addicted stable hand.
Bliss
Samantha is recovering from a suicide attempt and ready for a fresh start in life. She has to fight for the custody of her daughter.
Paper Covers Rock
A young woman wakes up alone in a motel room. Her boyfriend has ditched her, leaving her with a few dollars, a toothbrush, racing leathers, and a supermoto motorcycle. She's just learned that she's pregnant. Thus begins the wild and strange adventure of Ruby Pink, queen badass and heroine of SUPERMOTO.
Supermoto
An aloof cardiologist and a spirited artist accidentally get their folders swapped at a bus stop and both deal with the unexpectedly positive repercussions of having each other's stuff.
A Heart to Heart
Caesar Eats a Mouse is the world's first political snuff film inhabited solely by animals.
Caesar Eats a Mouse
Produced for Glass Eye Pix as part of their 2018 Creepy Christmas Film Festival, in which each short is inspired by a holiday-themed word. This film, the seventh in the series, is inspired by the word "presents."
Presence
A retired businessman hunts a mythical creature in the wilds of Oregon's Blue Mountains.