Bicoastal Partizan has signed director Dominic Murphy…. Ritts/Hayden, Los Angeles, has added director Daniel Kleinman for stateside representation….Stephanie Apt, former director of broadcast production at J. Walter Thompson, New York, has been named managing director for the soon-to-be-launched New York office of London-based post house Final Cut….Homestead Editorial, New York, has added editor Chris Hellman to its stable. Hellman was previously with Crew Cuts, New York….Director Gary Lankford has departed New York-based Creative Film Management International and has formed his own New York-shop, Lankford Films, in association with bicoastal and Toronto-based Johnson/Burnett Productions. Lankford continues to maintain his longtime Houston-based production house, Times 3 Productions, for Texas projects….Composer Byron Brizuela has been named creative director for the new Latin division of Los Angeles-based music and sound design house Groove Addicts….Charlie Willis has launched design/consulting firm Actual Reality, Atlanta. Willis has worked in numerous shops in Atlanta including Cinetron, Crawford Post Production, DESIGNefx and Magick Lantern….Karen Constine has been appointed director of the California Film Commission by Gov. Gray Davis (D-CA). Constine assumes a post that had been vacant for nearly a year, following the departure of Patti Stolkin Archuletta, an appointee of former Gov. Pete Wilson (R-CA). Constine has a political/public affairs background and formerly served as an aide to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick (D-Woodland Hills)….
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