Industry veterans David Mitchell and Tomer DeVito have founded creative collective Wild Gift, a production company working across all formats with a highly curated talent roster. Mitchell will serve as Wild Gift managing director, running the company’s day-to-day business, with DeVito as a collaborating EP.
A producer at Ridley Scott’s RSA Films for over two decades, Mitchell most recently served as the company’s managing director. He’s collaborated with many A-list directors, artists and celebrities over the years, producing high-profile global campaigns, commercials and branded content. His work includes Jake Scott’s “Gentleman’s Wager” films for Johnnie Walker and Nike’s Emmy-winning commercial “Awake,” along with Tony Scott’s iconic “Beat The Devil” for BMW Films starring Clive Owen, Gary Oldman and James Brown. DeVito has a storied production background as well, coming up the ranks at RSA Films before founding independent creative boutique Native Content in 2010, where he also remains as managing director, managing the company’s day to day business.
Mitchell and DeVito saw founding Wild Gift as an opportunity to push one another to do what they hadn’t yet done in their collective experience. Their mission is to foster a diverse, tightly knit creative community of genuinely good people with direct access to leadership. Wild Gift’s eclectic roster so far includes award-winning film, television, commercial and music video directors Tobias Granstrรถm, Tomas Skoging, Michael Mann, Tate Taylor, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Ewan McGregor, Duncan Jones, Kaz Firpo, DJ Caruso, รcean Vashti Jude and Arielle Pytka.
“Our focus is on filmmakers who are not only great at their jobs, but also collaborative and passionate in their approach,” Mitchell said. “Our roster so far is a clear reflection of that, and we’ll have even more exciting news to share soon.”
“Wild Gift will genuinely be a partner to our clients,” DeVito added. “We will always deliver at a very high level creatively and collaborate to solve any challenges, like an extension of an agency’s own in-house production team.”
“As an MD at RSA over the last three years, helping to run their busy global business shifted my focus away from what I love most, which is producing,” Mitchell said. “Wild Gift lets me get back to working closely with talent while getting my hands dirty once again with the crew in production. Not to sound all kumbaya … but if there’s a team effort with no rigid hierarchy, you bring everyone along and they work hard and give you blood. You walk away with a fantastic product, and everyone has a good time doing it.”
Wild Gift is represented by Pop-Arts on the West Coast, The House of Representatives in the Midwest and MilkToast on the East Coast.
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