HBO Max, the new direct to consumer offering from WarnerMedia, has entered into a two year first-look overall deal with showrunner and executive producer Sam Dean (Love Is Blind).
In addition to Dean’s future assignments as showrunner for HBO MAX projects, her deal includes first-look rights on all her owned or controlled concepts for her unscripted programming for all platforms. She recently wrapped production as showrunner for the upcoming HBO Max unscripted series 12 Dates of Christmas, which will debut later this year.
“Sam is an outstanding unscripted storyteller and a top-tier showrunner,” said Jennifer O’Connell, executive VP of original non-fiction and kids programming. “After working with Sam on our reality rom-com, 12 Dates of Christmas, it was clear that her ability to tell stories with heart, humor, and a wink to the audience made her a perfect fit for HBO Max.”
Dean stated, “I am really looking forward to working with HBO Max; it’s a new and ambitious platform with an unlimited appetite to create fresh and innovative content, yet it also brings with it Warner Media’s history of excellence that has continually kept them at the forefront of creativity and storytelling. It’s a great time to get involved as an unscripted producer. I feel blessed to be joining an incredibly strong and talented team, who I admire greatly and have loved collaborating with on 12 Dates of Christmas.”
Dean has produced on internationally renowned formats and franchises across a variety of unscripted genres, including social experiments, dating and competition formats. Just prior to joining HBO Max, Dean was an EP at Kinetic Content, where she specialized in show running new formats, such as Netflix’s breakout hit Love Is Blind, ABC’s The Taste and multiple series of Married and First Sight and various spin-off shows within that franchise.
Dean is represented by Alex Davis, Esq. from TheHollywoodLawyer.com
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More