Curiosity alone can be enough to inspire a film. “About four years ago I read an article in the New York Times about this couple,” says Dan Klores, describing what drove him to create his recently released Crazy Love, a feature-length documentary about a bizarre and shocking romance that unfolds over six decades.

The Times article referred to the astonishing, obsessive on-and-off relationship of Burt and Linda Pugach, which shocked the nation when it turned violent during the summer of 1959. Their affair had begun two years earlier, when Burt Pugach, a 32-year-old married attorney in New York’s Bronx, fell in love with Linda Riss, a beautiful, single 20-year-old girl living in the same borough. The pair had an intense romance that led to a series of violent and psychologically complex actions. At the time, and in later years, the dynamics of their extraordinary and obsessive relationship were captured in newspaper headlines, magazine stories and TV interviews.

(Even though the circumstances of that relationship are a matter of public record, Crazy Love unfolds in a deeply shocking way. This article won’t spoil the film for those seeing it for the first time by revealing the details.)

Fascinated by their story, Klores decided to make a film about Burt and Linda. “After I read the New York Times article, I thought, ‘Oh, I remember that incident,’” Klores recalls. “I think I was about 9 or 10 when it happened. So I said, ‘Let me explore it.’”

The film, which took 15 months to shoot and post (not counting about nine months of research and preproduction), features lengthy, fascinating interviews with Burt, Linda and those around them. Cinematographer Wolfgang Held, who also operated the camera, captured everything using the Panasonic AJ-SDX900 DVCPRO Cinema camcorder, which is capable of 24p image capture of standard-definition video. One camera was used throughout, says Held, “except for the dance scenes, where we had two cameras.”

Crazy Love, on which Klores was director and producer, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last January and went on to win the Jury Prize at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. It was released in early June in New York and Los Angeles by Magnolia Pictures .

With mounds of material generated by the media circus that accompanied these events, capturing the strange story of Burt and Linda sounds easy, but it wasn’t. First of all, Klores had to enlist the cooperation of Burt, 79, and Linda, 68, in a film that examines their inner selves. Also, the very nature of the project demanded that he delve deeply into concepts such as love, jealousy, obsession, insanity, hope and forgiveness. (It’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that love triumphs in the end, but not without some irony and even a little banality.)

At first glance, Klores would seem an unlikely independent filmmaker. He is chairman and CEO of Dan Klores Communications, one of New York’s “power” public relations firms that enjoys broad and deep connections to the city’s establishment. Over the years he has gained experience in behind-the-scenes crisis management and image problem-solving for major corporate and public-service clients.

But he couldn’t resist the siren song of a career in entertainment. Ceding the management of his agency to Sean Cassidy, now president, who has continued to expand its work, Klores gradually branched out into production and founded Shoot the Moon Productions in 2005. He produced Paul Simon’s Broadway musical The Capeman and executive produced City by the Sea, a film released by Warner Bros. in September 2002 based on a story by Mike McAlary and starring Robert De Niro and Frances McDormand.

Later, Klores produced and directed The Boys of 2nd Street Park, a documentary that describes a generation in Brighton Beach, NY, through the eyes of six men, from their childhoods in the 1950s to the present. The film premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and aired on Showtime.

Other credits include NBC/Universal’s Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, another Sundance entry. Klores also directed Spike TV’s Viva Baseball, a look at the struggles, conflicts and achievements surrounding the Latino experience in the game.

When Klores approached the complex subject matter of Crazy Love, his initial thought was to use an amalgam of fiction and fact. “I had a different idea at first,” he says. “I wanted to make a hybrid of a feature and a documentary based on the concept of obsession. But as I got more and more into it, and as I met Burt and Linda, I decided to do it just as a doc.”

The first step was research, and lots of it. “In every film there’s a whole detective process,” says Klores. “I do a lot of reading—I don’t think there’s anything I haven’t read about Burt and Linda. I made the list of people I wanted to interview. One thing leads to another, and if you build a sense of trust with the people you’re interviewing, you learn who else you should interview and who has material. And sometimes you get lucky. [For example,] I got my hands on films that Burt produced—home movies from when he would take Linda on his private airplane rides.”

Klores’ research was thorough enough to justify the help of a private detective. “You just keep on plugging away,” he says. “I hired him to help me find some people. Some were dead, but at least I found out.”

Klores co-directed Crazy Love with Fisher Stevens, a personal friend and founding partner of independent production company GreeneStreet Films. Says Klores, “I was telling him about this story. I had never had a chance to work with him before, and he says he wants to be part of it.”

Stevens was involved in much of Crazy Love’s production. Filmmaking is the most collaborative of art forms, and Klores acknowledges that Stevens “does certain things better than I do, like setting up shots—especially ones like the singing scene in the end.”

Stevens is also the one who brought in Held, the DP. Klores had hoped to get Buddy Squires, a longtime collaborator of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, but Squires was busy. “Wolfgang turned out to be terrific,” says Klores. “Part of the fun of this business is meeting other talented people you want to work with in the future.”

Crazy Love uses a wide variety of footage. In addition to the material Held captured in SD with the Panasonic SDX900, the film makes use of archival footage from the ’50s, videotapes of old television broadcasts and old home movies filmed by Burt on 8mm.

The task of combining everything artistically fell to David Zieff, who was co-producer as well as editor on Crazy Love. Zieff, who first worked with Klores on Viva Baseball, says that the big challenge lay not in combining the disparate material but in making such a small amount of archival material seem substantial.

“Half the film takes place in a much earlier time,” he says, “and we really didn’t have as much material as it appears we do. Part of the success of this film is the use of that material. [Our collection] really amounted to just a minute and a half at best of that precious stuff.”

To illustrate how he wielded his magic, Zieff refers to events in Bill and Linda’s life together that are portrayed in the film: a plane ride, a picnic, a car trip and a few scenes of the couple dating. “All those things are doled out very carefully to feel like they’re more voluminous,” he explains. “I was careful to parse them out, to re-use them in slow motion and, in ways, to re-invent them, to give the sense that it is a lot of stuff.”

Like all good editors, Zieff realizes that cutting a film is part trickery. “The shenanigans we play, the games we play in editing,” he muses. “To some extent, we have to [create our own reality] when the material is limited. Much of the archival footage that you see in Crazy Love is actually stock footage.

“I’m not a big fan of re-creating,” he adds. “For example, if she says, ‘He picked me up at the office and took me to the theater,’ I wouldn’t want to see some guy—not Burt—getting a girl—not Linda—and escorting her out of a building. Instead, I was pretty consistently using point-of-view imagery: you see a car, you see through a windshield, it’s sitting at a stoplight—that kind of stuff, all primarily POV.”

Zieff elaborates: “As a for instance, Linda recounts a story where she and Burt take a drive to the beach, a boy pulls up next to them and says, ‘Hey, Linda,’ and Burt goes into a rage over that. It’s the first time we start to learn Burt has a dark side. I needed imagery, sticking with this POV thing, circa late ’50s, driving in Long Island. We got a training film for drivers from the period. It works very well. You throw a couple of effects in, add a honk, a car goes by, and you get the sense of it. You’re there, and you’re there through their eyes.”

There are more tricks. “With the early Burt, prior to the incident, there are really only about five photos of him from that period,” says Zieff. “They’re magnificent pictures. Him and his menacing mother, him as a student. A fair amount of the pre-incident imagery in the film actually comes from after his arrest, but I was careful to use only those photos where he didn’t have a beard. When he first starts to threaten her is when I start to use the photos where he has a beard.”

Zieff edited Crazy Love at PostWorks in New York on Avid Xpress Pro and Avid Media Composer Adrenaline systems. The process started in mid-February 2006, “and we had a finished picture lock about seven months later,” says Zieff. Then another couple of months were devoted to finishing at other facilities, including sound mixing at New York’s Sound One by Andy Kris and color correction and online work at Framerunner, also in New York.