Stegath Dorr

Dorr was born near Detroit. In Southeast Michigan he began his career as an extra in the 1985 HIV AIDS social commentary horror film The Carrier and found work as a gofer for the crew at age eleven alongside fellow Detroit native Bruce Campbell, employed on the same production as a sound editor. Dorr's father was a government scientist whose research shifted his family around the world, and Dorr was raised in Africa and Asia and the Middle East. During high school, he and later BBC cameraman Nick Wright made their first student film together. At age eighteen, Dorr briefly served in the USIS Branch of the American Embassy in Muscat under Suzie Shaeffer before returning to Michigan to attend a community college. In 1993, he enrolled in Central Michigan University to study journalism and film production. Dorr was employed as the staff film critic for the CM Life entertainment column from 1993 to 1994, his editor was Tom Root, later creator of Robot Chicken.[6] After leaving the United States in the late 1990s, Dorr was employed from 1999 to 2000 as a film reviewer for Gulf-based Apex Publishing. In Canada, Dorr was employed at the North Bay Center for the Performing Arts from 2002 to 2003 while completing a degree in Journalism and Economics at Canadore College. From 2003 to 2006, Dorr worked as a writer and co-producer of documentary films and commercials with Impact Films in Muscat, Oman.[7]

Dorr was based in Oman.[8] The Ann Arbor News reported that Dorr is working on the "first-ever Hollywood feature to be primarily shot in that country - a film called Brothers Till the End" and that "shooting is scheduled to begin in 2010."[9] Since 2006, Dorr has worked on several Gulf-based productions as a screenwriter, actor and production manager on several feature film projects, including Blood Desert, a political satire filmed around 2004-2005 which was screened at the Muscat Film Festival in 2006 to positive responses and later became available on pirate and bootleg DVD. The following year Dorr wrote, co-produced and appeared the film Pirate's Blood, under the screen name of James Wagnor.[2] Dorr developed a "revenge film" project entitled Razor to be set and shot in the Philippines. Dorr described Razor as a commercial project, but the production was subsequently canceled in preproduction. While his dream project "is a project I am planning on street children, which may or may not make money but will touch the hearts and minds of people.".[7] In late 2010, Dorr was reunited with Sunny Leone in the Philippines for a new horror film entitled Black Shama which commenced filming in December on location in Cebu and wrapped in June 2011. The film was later acquired by Australian producer and distributor John Klyza.