About
 I was born in Los Angeles, the son of a screenwriter. My mother was a clinician at a psychoanalytically oriented nursery school. As a boy, I listened to my father talk about his story problems. For years I was his sounding board, in essence, a silent collaborator yet to develop my own voice.
My mother, a counterpoint intellectually, was immersed in the tangible world of troubled children. My parents were both driven and uneasy with one another. I was defined initially by a sense of jeopardy, intuitively feeling the need to navigate between polar opposites.
It was a foregone conclusion that I would have a career in film and I began at Warner Brothers in the story department, analyzing and developing material for television. Ultimately, I left Hollywood to work with George Stevens Jr. in Washington producing documentary films, then to Talent Associates in New York where I developed feature properties with David Susskind. Thereafter, I agreed to come to Chicago to chair a nascent film department at Columbia College, building over time one of the premier production centers in the country.
For me, the essence of creativity has always lived in a sustaining curiousity about people -- their confusions, aspirations, fears. Ultimately, I moved away from storytelling that is fictional to an exploration of the psyche that is intimate and immediate. I became absorbed in the reality of personal drama.
Moving from film to therapy felt like an inevitable transition.
Filmmaking lives in an ambivalence that can be visualized and insinuated. Therapy is about finding the “through line” and interpreting the sustaining conflict in individual lives.
Filmmaking and therapy are both about finding the dramatic arc in the human experience.
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