BIO

I majored in broadcast at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, thinking I could direct documentaries and slide sideways across the film world. But my first job out of grad school was in print at The Waterbury Republican in Connecticut, a 90-minute drive northeast of my New York City home. I wrote long pieces - on the local flight school, a guard dog trainer, a female pro wrestler, the town’s firefighters, and many acclaimed writers and artists living in the Connecticut woods.

A National Endowment for the Humanities grant brought me to the University of Chicago to study aesthetics. That led to a general assignment reporting job at The Chicago Sun-Times. I learned speed, accuracy and breaking-news follow-up there, writing new ledes for multiple re-plates through each day's editions.

At that time, I began a decade of writing freelance book reviews for The New York Times as well as Fast Forward, a column on video releases. The Sun-Times also assigned theater and book reviews, along with pieces on international theater figures, among them the chatty French mime Marcel Marceau.

While film critic at The San Francisco Examiner, I reviewed hundreds of movies and interviewed a range of artists, including David Mamet, Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Cary Grant, Joan Didion, Keanu Reeves and Robert Altman. Altman invited me to collaborate on the screenplay for his French fashion film, Ready-to-Wear, which was released in 1994.

I moved to Los Angeles where I wrote film reviews for The Chicago Tribune while working on my novel, Funny Accent (published by St. Martin's Press in 2001). During those years I also served as managing partner of Airport Motel Assoc., a real estate firm, until closing down the partnership with the recent sale of its last major asset. Since then I've written more than 700 movie reviews for Common Sense Media and partnered with Parker Sorenson, a hospitality consulting firm, as senior vice president of content and strategy.