There, he met Wilhelm Marckwald, an actor and former director of the Deutsches Theater Berlin and also a refugee.
[8] After graduating, he worked for Louis de Rochemont for eight years as a production manager, film editor, and as an assistant director.
[1] Writing the screenplay, Roemer drew on his own background as a Jew in Nazi Germany, where his family had everything taken away from them and his father and grandfather were unable to provide for the family[1] because of the Nazis' increasingly restrictive laws concerning the rights of Jews.
Over lunch one day, Roemer told him about the movie and Schiffer suggested he listen to some music he had from a new client, a small record label just starting out in Detroit, Michigan.
Roemer loved the music and acquired the rights from Motown owner Berry Gordy for $5,000.
[13][14] He then made two films for that network's American Playhouse series: Pilgrim, Farewell (1980) and Haunted (1984).
Writing in the New York Times, critic Wesley Morris called it "an American movie executed with a French film’s interpersonal insouciance.
"[16] In Screen Slate, A.S. Hamrah wrote that discovering a Roemer film as good as Nothing But a Man and The Plot Against Harry "is a cause for celebration, and something of a miracle.