Feature filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld is no longer represented by bicoastal Coppos Films for spots….Director Branson Veal, most recently affiliated with cYclops productions, New York, has joined Ace Entertainment, Los Angeles, for commercials…. Bicoastal Partizan Entertainment has signed director Paul Fedor….Independent Artists, New York, has added director Julian Griffiths….Dallas-based director Craig McCord has Brand New Shoes….Bob Samuel, who exited his executive producer’s post at Coppos Films earlier this year, has moved into the strategic management and personal consulting business….Betty Meadows, formerly senior producer at Campbell-Ewald/West, Los Angeles, has been named executive producer at Hollywood-based editorial house Rye Films….Alana Rothlein, executive producer/partner at Coral Gables, Fla.-based Falcon Productions since ’86, has left the company. She has formed her own venture, Envision It Inc., Miami Beach, which will provide production services, management consulting and strategic marketing to production-related companies and ad agencies….Pat Cunningham, former vice chairman/chief creative officer worldwide at N.W. Ayer & Partners, New York, has joined BBDO Houston in the newly created position of executive creative director…. Mixer/sound designer Dave Leffel has left Chicago-based Skyview Studios and joined Chicago Recording Company….
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