Who Am I?

The Story of My Life (according to my Amazon bio)

My whole life I have been surrounded by stories.

My family is filled with raconteurs, so the dinner table was a whirlwind of cross-conversations, jokes, debates, and of course, stories in the form of family legends.

Then there were the books. I always had a book on me.

I read before bed. I read in the car. I read at the table.

When I was in first grade my teacher, Mrs. Friedman let me skip certain lessons so I could finish Mark Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper."

In sixth grade, I had to do a report on the Hindenburg. Instead, I wrote a short story about a stowaway brother and sister who had to escape the infamous crashing dirigible; a kind of precursor to James Cameron's Titanic.

I was about eight when my mom and I read my first Roald Dahl.

I was ten when my best friend and I spent part of our summer reading CS Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia."

I was eleven when my uncle gave me Edgar Allen Poe's "Tales of Mystery and the Imagination." The first story he read me was The Tell Tale Heart. I still have that book.

The theme of my Bar Mitzvah was comic books. Spidey and Batman were my favorites.

The night I spent in a NYC jail I read Stephen King's "Misery."

On an all-night train from Germany to Amsterdam guarding against thieves, I stayed awake reading Leon Uris's "Exodus."

Then there were the movies. TV and Broadway too. But my first love was the movies.

I was one when I saw Star Wars from the backseat of my parent's station wagon (white with wood side paneling in case you're wondering).

HBO debut just before I was born. It was channel 6 in my house. R-rated movies premiered at 10pm. Then later it was 8pm. I still get chills when I think about the HBO premiere intro, the cityscape flyover before soaring up into the sky! Da da dum da dum dadada daaa...

When my school did an exchange program with France and Julien came to stay with me, I got in a heap of trouble the night I told my parents I would not watch "Nightmare on Elm Street" on HBO, then did exactly that while they were out. It was a perfect crime. I changed the channel on my parent's tv back to what it had been, I smoothed the bedspread so it didn't look like we'd been there watching anything, and I swore Julien to secrecy. Apparently, that vow did not hold when he had nightmares. So when Julien woke my parents up sobbing because of the nightmares he was having, my father, woke me up screaming, promising me nightmares of my own if I didn't let Julien stay in my room that night.

My entire family are movie buffs. My childhood often felt like I'd wandered into the audience at a movie trivia game show, like a strange inversion of Hollywood squares, with my family members taking turns playing the center square. My father and uncle recounting movies like Mr. Sardonicus,

or House on Haunted Hill by William Castle, and of course Psycho. Rankings of the best Twilight Zone episodes or the funniest comedies were staples at my family holiday dinners. As were discussions of the books everyone was reading. The time while waiting for a table at a restaurant that my uncle acted out the opening scene of "Night of the Living Dead" for me and my sister, which no doubt played into my life-long love of zombies and later, in my Hollywood career, putting The Walking Dead on television.

Yes, I admit it. I work in Hollywood.

I got my start at FX Network on shows like The Shield, Nip/Tuck, and Rescue Me. I also met my future wife there. So not a bad deal.

As an executive at AMC I found and produced Breaking Bad, and later The Walking Dead. Then, as a producer for Legendary Entertainment, I launched their first efforts into television, after which I staked out on my own with my company, Elice Island Entertainment which I still run today, as both a producer and screenwriter. I've sold projects to Starz, Showtime, Paramount Network, USA, Universal Television, AMC, and Blumhouse. In 2014 I produced the six-hour $40 million dollar mini-series TUT, starring Ben Kingsley and Avan Jogia, which aired on Paramount TV (fka Spike) on July 19, 2015.

Yes, Hollywood is like what you've heard, at times, even more unbelievable. If you can believe that. But hey, "There's no business like show business, and there's no people like show people," as the great Ethel Merman sang.

And if I could sing, I'd be over at Soundcloud. I can't. But I can write. Which is what I've always loved to do. Just as I've always loved stories. So I am here, a word nerd fording the digital Amazon river. A miner in the ink mines. A worker in the fiction factory. Thanks for coming along on the journey with me.