• Former CEO, Lumière Films, Inc., Hollywood (producers and financiers of such financially successful and award-winning motion pictures as
LEAVING LAS VEGAS [Academy Award Winner, starring Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue],
FRESH [Sundance Film Festival Winner, starring Samuel L. Jackson], and
TOUCH [starring Bridget Fonda, Gina Gershon and Christopher Walken, nominated for the Spirit Award as best independent film of the year].
Other films produced and financed by the Lumière group included
HAUNTED [starring Kate Beckinsale] and CYCLO [winner of the Golden Lion, the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival]).
• Member, American Philosophical Association (professional association of university professors of philosophy).
• Associate Member, Los Angeles County Bar Association (and its sections on Intellectual Property/Entertainment law & Real Property law)
• Distinguished Visiting Professor, Chapman University (taught advanced graduate courses on Motion Picture Production,
Project Development, and Legal & Business Aspects of the Entertainment Industry)
• Summa Cum Laude degrees, University of California, Berkeley
• Phi Beta Kappa (Alpha of California Chapter)
• Regents' Graduate Fellow, University of California, Berkeley (Egyptology)
• Graduate Program in Motion Picture Production, UCLA.
• Also studied at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (advanced Coptic studies, advanced seminars on 2nd-4th Century Gnosticism);
and at California State University, Los Angeles (law).
* Washington-Lee High School, Arlington,Virginia. Merit Scholar, Debate, German Honor Society, Latin Honor Society, Thespians (Drama Honor Society).
• Amateur artist, composer and bassoonist (basson français, Fagott, Kontrafagott)
• Former member and patron, Friends of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute
• Member American Composers Forum, Los Angeles Composers Forum
• Member, Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council; avid hiker and backcountry explorer
• Former member, Executive Council, American Film Export Association (AFEA, representing American film distributors and
producers in the international community)
• Former vice president in Los Angeles of the official trade association of the French motion picture industry
• Former Director of International Sales, Crown International Pictures
• Former Senior Staff Research Associate, Department of Psychology, UCLA.
Did pioneering research on stress factors and their impact on cognitive development in early childhood.
• Current or former member of numerous scholarly, cultural, environmental and professional associations, including The Sierra Club (Desert Peaks Section), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Curator's Circle), the Robinson Jeffers Associaton, The Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, The Friends of English (UCLA Department of English), The Goethe Society, The Mendocino County Historical Society, NANS, The Association for Study of Literature and Environment, The Academy of American Poets, The American Brugmansia & Datura Society, the Havergal Brian Society (UK), the Art Song Preservation Society of New York, and the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE, San Francisco Chapter).
• Former member, advisory board, Pacific Film Archive.
Co-founder, The Berkeley Film Festival.
Juror, Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
• Screenwriter and film producer; creative and business affairs executive.
• Related (directly, as a cousin, or by marriage) to a number of notable historical and artistic figures, including Lendall Pitts, John Marshall, Jack Custis, Thomas Marshall, Samuel Pitts, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, George Mason, J.E. Henning (composer, musicologist & instrument inventor), Meta Bischoff-Henning ("the finest American woman guitarist of the nineteenth century") and Heinz Bischoff (lutenist).
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