I went to another lecture tonight at the JCC, it was by Gary David Goldberg, who grew up in Brooklyn and ended up by chance working in the entertainment industry. He wrote and created Family Ties, Brooklyn Bridge and Spin City. He had some interesting stories, and he showed some clips from his shows including some hilarious scenes from Brooklyn Bridge. As Wikipedia says, "Brooklyn Bridge is about a Jewish American family living in Brooklyn in the 1950s. The show's premise was partially based on the childhood of executive producer Gary David Goldberg of Family Ties fame." Pretty cool stuff. The clips were absolutely hilarious, and showed a lot of humour and cultural Jewish heritage, everyone in the audience loved it. It was funny.
He talked about how he tried to talk his long time buddy Steven Spielberg out of making "ET" because he thought it was one of Steven's uncommon "bad ideas" and he wanted to "save Steven and perhaps America from this movie" - haha. He said that he's been wrong many times but this was one of the most famous times he was wrong.
Another thing I thought was really interesting was that he was so successful as the creator of Family Ties that he got Paramount to write into his contract that he wanted a child care center on the Paramount lot. This started a trend so that now most major studios have child care centers... amazing!!
Anyway it was a super interesting talk, and funny to hear that now he lives in Vermont, has no phone, no TV, no internet, no cell phone... and is basically on purpose, completely cut off from communications and the general TV and entertainment world. Pretty impressive, and it was really cool to just hear his stories.
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