Tuesday, May 21st, 2019

Noon – 1:00 PM

Session II: Film-TV-Production Track - Guerin A, in Herscher Hall, Webcast

The DealMaking Process: From Feature Film, TV & OTT to Branded Content, Internet and Indie Film Making

Linda Benjamin, COO & Head of Business Affairs, Covert Media

Justin Hochberg, CEO, Just Entertainment

Darrell Miller, Chair, Entertainment Department, Fox Rothschild LLP

Efe Akbulut, Head of Analytics, BritBox (BBC and ITV Joint Venture)

John Alan Simon, Writer - Director - Producer, "“Radio Free Albemuth”, "The Getaway"

Melisse Lewis, Entertainment Attorney, Moderator

Darrell Miller, Chair, Entertainment Department, Fox Rothschild LLP: Darrell Miller, Chair of the Entertainment Department at Fox Rothschild LLP, has more than two decades of entertainment law deal-making experience, with an emphasis on the creation of multiple streams of income for clients with high brand equity through cross-promotion of film, television, music, theatre, multimedia and licensing opportunities. His clients range from Angela Bassett, Academy Award nominated Producer Reginald Hudlin, music mogul and actor Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, TD Jakes Enterprises, Blair Underwood’s BU Apparel Collection, British celebrity Caroline Stanbury, to reality TV super star NeNe Leakes, naming a few. Miller was been honored as a top dealmaker in Variety’s Legal Impact Report as well as Hollywood Reporter’s annual Power Lawyers list.

His first book titled, “The 16th Minute of Fame:  An Insider’s Guide for

Maintaining Success Beyond 15 Minutes of Fame”, was recently nominated for a NAACP Image Award. His is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and frequent speaker on the business of entertainment.

Linda Benjamin, COO & Head of Business Affairs, Covert Media: Before joining independent feature production, financing, and distribution company Covert Media as COO and Head of Business Affairs, Linda was the Executive Vice President of Business Affairs at Relativity Media for six years where she was a critical contributor to some of Relativity’s most significant and complex film and television deals, including its groundbreaking ventures in China and India, output partnerships, expansive music library, and international co-productions. Linda joined Relativity in 2008 and in her time with the company was involved with films such asLimitless, The Fighter, Act of Valor, Dear John, and the long-running TV series “Catfish” based on the movie of the same name. Prior to Relativity, Linda was Head of Business Affairs & Operations for Intermedia US where she oversaw sales, business affairs, and film financing for the studio working on high level projects including Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, The Aviator, The Quiet American and The Hunting Party. Benjamin's accomplishments include: designing brand expansion while maintaining strong cost controls for an iconic children’s brand; closing of over $1 Billion in entertainment transactions; incubating and leading an acclaimed web-based social benefit enterprise, and launching branding, restructuring, and growth initiatives.

Justin Hochberg is the founder of Just Entertainment Inc. a Television and new media studio focusing on branded entertainment and reality TV with projects at half a dozen US networks and working with fortune 500 brands and digital agencies. Over the course of Hochberg's career he created and sold over 40 TV series and completed more than $112 million in product integration deals with broadcast and cable networks and over 150 of the world's leading brands including P&G, the NFL, Pepsi, Sports Illustrated, Royal Caribbean, Marquis Jet, Staples, DirecTV, Planet Hollywood Resorts, Fosters, Las Vegas Convention Visitors Bureau, Dick Clark's “Rockin New Years Eve”, Skype, Ask.com, Camping World, , Deutsch Advertising, NYC 2012, the N.Y.P.D., and Tony Winner “Kinky Boots”. Hochberg made TV headlines recently for guiding four different cable networks into reality programming for their first time, brokering over 20 different branding deals on them. Among them USA Network's first reality series, “The Moment”, hosted by Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner and TNT's "The Great  Escape", an action-packed program Hochberg created and produced with Hollywood greats Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Bertram van Munster. In addition, this past summer he launched “Race to the Scene,” a movie themed competition series for the Reelz Channel hosted by Dolph Lundgren, which Hochberg engineered the sale of to a dozen countries before its US premiere, followed by CNBC's new #1 rated show, “The Profit”. Hochberg was recently nominated for the Critic's Choice Award for Best Reality Series and Real Screen's Best Documentary, and has been recognized as Hollywood Reporter's “50 Most Powerful Reality Producers”. Prior to entering the television industry, Hochberg served as Microsoft Corporation's Director of Business Development for Interactive TV, before becoming the company's Head of Business Development for its Digital Media TV efforts.

Efe Akbulut, Head of Analytics, BritBox: Efe Akbulut joined BBC in late 2018 as the Head of Analytics for BritBox, a joint venture between BBC Studios and ITV. Efe’s unique experience in straddling big data in the world of entertainment was immediately impactful in creating a dashboard that deftly integrated martech with subscriber data. Efe’s plays an integral role in informing BritBox’s KPI’s by evaluating business drivers and providing editorial and biz dev teams with data driven insights. Prior to joining the BBC, Efe was a Senior Analyst for iHeartMedia. Efe worked on initiatives such as the optimization of iHeartRadio’s special events, live activations, and television specials. During Efe’s tenure with the company, he worked on projects with Calvin Harris, Meghan Trainor, and Grammy-winner Wyclef Jean. Efe worked closely with the team that managed the album release campaigns of Wyclef’s comeback album Carnival III, including activations with global DJs, Sony Music, and YouTube Studios. Efe has been nominated for the Top 5 Grammy U Nominee for Innovation Pitch Contest for creating a multimedia business pitch that aimed to solve the increasing market competition among U.S. music festivals.  Efe’s creative chops were lauded when he worked in advertising industry as a creator, copywriter, and strategist in Turkey for global brands such as Unilever and PepsiCo. The Advertising Age publication in Efe’s home country of Turkey, MediaCat named him ‘a show businessman to watch.’ Efe earned an MS in Integrated Marketing at NYU and a BS in Industrial Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. He is an expert in Tableau, SQL, SPSS and Advance Analytics skills such as regression models and modeling structures.

John Alan Simon: Simon’s directorial feature film debut – “Radio Free Albemuth” - which he adapted from the novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (“Blade Runner,””Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly”) was distributed in a limited theatrical major ten-city U.S. release. and selected to screen at the prestigious Indie Night Series at Lincoln Center Film Society in New York. “Radio Free Albemuth” recently began its exclusive SVOD two-year run on Netflix. From Variety: “Engrossing adaptation" "Well-performed." “"Consistently absorbing." “Operates successfully as a study of enlightenment and a straight-ahead conspiracy thriller.” Simon also served as post-production supervisor on the film. Simon also developed and produced the Roger Donaldson-directed version of "The Getaway," starring Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger and Philip Seymour Hoffman for Largo Entertainment, financed by JVC corporation, which was theatrically wide-released nationally by Universal Pictures. As president of Discovery Productions, Simon has been involved with the production, financing, sales, and marketing of more than a hundred independent features including the original version of "The Wicker Man" (starring Edward Woodward); "The Haunting of Julia" (with Mia Farrow and Tom Conti); "Basket Case," and "Out of the Blue" (starring and directed by Dennis Hopper), which was screened in fall 2009 at the Cinematheque Francaise as the opening night gala film in a month-long Dennis Hopper retrospective. Discovery is actively developing film rights to other novels by science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick in partnership with Rosenbloom Entertainment, and also works by award winning sci-fi writers Lucius Shepard and Ian Watson. Also on Discovery’s schedule is the English-language film version of Jim Thompson's "Pop.1280" (from which Bertrand Tavernier’s Academy Award nominated film, "Coup de Torchon," was also adapted) with Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”) set to direct and partner in production. Simon’s next film as a director will be the noir thriller “Nothing More than Murder”, which he adapted from the novel by Jim Thompson (“The Grifters,” “The Getaway,” “The Killer Inside Me”). As president and co-founder of Film-Rep with distribution/production executive David Blake, (former president of Cinema Shares), Simon served as sales consultant and strategic adviser to a wide array of producers and distribution/film services companies, including Roger Corman/New World Pictures, United Artists Theatres, Introvision, UK based Home Video Holdings, and Japanese based post-production/vfx company Lightshade Productions. Prior to his entry in the film industry, Simon was a journalist and film critic as staff writer for the New Orleans Times Picayune and later editor-in-chief of New Orleans magazine. He has also written film and music reviews and feature articles for various publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times, and Downbeat Magazine, on which he was a contributing editor. During this period, Simon also taught courses in film and writing at Tulane University, Loyola University, and the University of Illinois. More recently, he taught a course on micro-budget filmmaking at UCLA extension. In recent years, he produced and moderated annual seminars for the American Film Market, on such topics as British filmmaking tax-incentives and new strategies for U.S. theatrical distribution. Also for the British Academy of Film & Television Arts, Los Angeles, he has moderated seminars and screening Q&A’s with directors Danny Boyle, Darren Aronofsky, Julian Schnabel and evening-length career spanning sessions with directors Jason Reitman, actor-director Ben Affleck. David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and earlier this year with Sir Ridley Scott. Simon graduated from Harvard College with honors in History & Literature and served as an editor of the Harvard Crimson. He received his Master Degree in the U. of Illinois Writer’s Workshop program and designed and taught undergraduate courses on Film and Rhetoric and the discipline of futurology. As a directing member of Classical Theatre Lab he staged its critically acclaimed coproduction of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband as Victorian noir” and Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. Simon was elected and served on the Board of Directors of the British Academy of Film & Television Arts, Los Angeles. He is also a long-time member of the Writer’s Guild of America-West.

Melisse Lewis, Entertainment Attorney, business and talent consultant.  Melisse's career spans the creative, business and legal fields of the entertainment and tech industries.  She represents content creators, distributors and talent in digital and traditional media.  Clients include corporations, content creators, influencers and entities involved in film, broadcast and cable television, mobile and online content, software licensing, games, theatre, music, and fine arts.  She also handles transactional work for numerous reality, non-fiction and fiction projects.  Melisse also oversees and advises on venture capital transactions, distribution platform launches, company reorganizations and business organization.   She has practiced in-house at New Line Cinema, Tribune Company, NBC, Discovery Communications, and the Federal Communications Commission, as well as the New York City boutique entertainment law firm Cowan, Abrahams, DeBaets & Sheppard.  Prior to becoming an attorney, Melisse directed and produced international and domestic film, television, and music video projects.  She is also a YouTube Studios’ certified content creator and the founding Executive Director of Seminars & Panels for the D.C. Independent Film Festival.