His road to Big Buddha Baba began when he met Barb Groth while working as a senior writer/producer for Robert Abel’s Synapse Technologies on IBM’s landmark Columbus project. Years later, after constantly running into each other at their local Starbucks, Barb and Bill decided they had to work together again, if only to be able to write off their coffees.
In a previous incarnation as “W.T. Morgan” Bill wrote and directed two feature films, both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival – X: The Unheard Music and A Matter of Degrees.
After Columbus and its sequel, Evolution/Revolution, Bill co-wrote 500 Nations, an eight-hour documentary miniseries about the history of American Indians, hosted by Kevin Costner. The series aired on CBS, was nominated for Best Special of the Year by the National Television Critics Association, and spawned a CD-ROM for Microsoft (written/directed/produced by Bill), which a CNET poll ranked as the number two best CD-ROM of all time. In 2004 Bill wrote, directed and produced 500 Nations: The First Americans, a two-hour Discovery Channel special.
In between these projects, Bill found time to run a film production company with Michael Blake, Oscar winning author of Dances With Wolves; to serve as senior vice president of inscape, a Time Warner videogame company responsible for such graphically rich role-playing games as The Residents’ Bad Day on the Midway, Devo’s Adventures in the Smart Patrol, Drowned God, Assassin, and the worldwide hit artificial entity gizmo Creatures; to co-create Peter Buffett’s live multimedia shows Spirit (also a PBS special) and Spirit: The Seventh Fire; and to serve as chair of the board of directors of the Actors’ Gang theater company (co-founded by Tim Robbins).
For Big Buddha Baba, Bill has written DoubleTake, an introductory film for an exhibition of Paul Allen’s art collection at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and is currently working with BBB on projects for Walt Disney Imagineering and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.