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Born in Cuba, Agrelo came to the United States with her parents and three siblings at the age of 2 years old. Growing up in New York in a family that was culturally different than those of her peers shaped an early awareness of human themes, which she continues to explore through her work.
Prior to MAD HOT BALLROOM, Agrelo worked on dramatic shorts (recently SMASH THE KITTY), fund raising films, and has developed interactive museum installations. She continues her research and filming on a very personal project entitled US AND THEM. This film is a documentary feature about her divided family and their contrasting truths and political beliefs. It is being filmed in both the United States and Cuba.
Future projects include PECK, a feature film about a teenage boy and his journey for self-realization. PECK is scheduled to shoot in the spring of 2007.
MAD HOT BALLROOM allowed Agrelo to connect with an amazing group of talented Latino-American kids underscoring her own cultural pride as a Cuban American raised in New York City making a living as an artist. She lives with her boyfriend, filmmaker Brian David Cange and their two cats in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
After receiving his Juris Doctor from the UCLA School of Law, Norman Aladjem began his career in 1981 as an attorney practicing at the renowned entertainment law firm, Armstrong, Hirsch, Jackoway, Tyerman & Wertheimer.
In 1987 Aladjem founded Innovative Talent, Inc., a personal management and production company.
In 1992, Aladjem took a sabbatical from the entertainment industry to work on President Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. While working on the campaign, he met the Chief Executive Officer of the 1994 World Cup USA and joined the organization as Director of the World Cup USA Legacy Tour.
Aladjem headed back to Hollywood in 1995, joining Writers and Artists Agency as an agent, quickly rising to become Chairman and CEO of the company in 1999. Then in 2004, Mr. Aladjem sold Writers and Artists to Paradigm, where he is currently head of the international and independent film packaging and financing unit.
Established in 1993, Paradigm has quickly established itself as one of the most distinctive company in the talent and literary business. With offices in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville and Monterey, the agency represents clients across all entertainment categories.
Mr. Aladjem, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, now resides in Los Angeles with his wife and family.
Angela Allen is one of Britain’s film industry treasures, having worked on hundreds of films for the past half century. Angela started work at an artists agency, Filmrights. She trained as a script supervisor (known as Continuity) at the Korda studios and worked on the second unit of the Third Man. Romulus films hired her for Pandora and The Flying Dutchman, and as the youngest continuity working in England, she was chosen by Sam Spiegel to work for John Huston on The African Queen. She then worked on 13 more of his films including Moby Dick, The Misfits, The Man Who Would Be King, Night Of The Iguana. In Georgia, she worked with Huston on Wise Blood, and in Hollywood she worked on the television movie The Patricia Neal Story. She worked in New York for NBC, and for Ray Stark on his stage production of Funny Girl. In California she worked for Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin and as script supervisor on some TV shows for Universal. More recently she worked with John Frankenheimer and has been involved with Franco Zeffirelli on his films and stage work. Her list of credits includes Tea for Mussolini, The Dirty Dozen, Women in Love, Downhill Racer, Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet, among many others.
Since her feature film debut in Twentieth Century Fox's blockbuster "Battle for the Planet of the Apes," Colleen Camp has gone on to star and appear in over 100 major motion pictures and television productions, including “Funny Lady,” staring Barbara Streisand, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” “Wayne’s World” opposite Dana Carvey and Mike Myers, “Die Hard With A Vengeance” opposite Bruce Willis, “Coneheads” with Dan Aykroyd, Martin Scorcese’s “Naked in New York,” Rob Reiner’s “Rumor Has It,” “Factory Girl” with Sienna Miller and “Running with Scissors” with Annette Bening.
She has enjoyed a long career as a critically acclaimed actress and comedienne, and recently began to fulfill her goal as a producer with projects set up at Universal, Paramount, Bristol Bay, Icon, and Cruise/Wagner among other independent companies.
Colleen also co-controls several novels written by Robert Nathan with his stepson Jeffrey Byron, and is currently producing, in conjunction with Walden Media, the feature film "Parent Wars,” written by Cannes award-winning writer John Richards and acclaimed writer/director Charles Shyer.
Colleen wooed audiences with her chilling, yet humorous performance as Reese Witherspoon's controlling mother, Barbara Fick, in Paramount Pictures’ “Election,” directed by Alexander Payne, and continues to work with some of the most acclaimed actors, directors, and writers in the entertainment industry.
Roger L. Mayer was President and Chief Operating Officer of Turner Entertainment Co. from August 15, 1986, until his retirement on August 15, 2005. Before joining TEC, he was Senior Vice President – Administration for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. and president of MGM Laboratories, Inc.
Mayer was born in New York City in 1926, and received his education at the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York; at Yale University, where he received his B.A.; and at Yale Law School, where he received his L.L.B. and J.D.
He started in the motion picture industry in 1952 as a lawyer with Columbia Pictures, and later became a general studio executive at Columbia.
Mayer is First Vice Chairman of the Board of the Motion Picture and Television Fund and just finished serving eight years as Chairman of the Board. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and of several of its key committees. In 2005 he was the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award Oscar and an Emmy from ATAS as Executive Producer of the PBS Documentary “Judy Garland: By Myself.” He and his wife, Pauline, have been married for 53 years and have two children and two grandchildren.
Marni Nixon's career includes Opera, Chamber and Symphony, Oratorio soloist, Broadway, Off-Broadway, Film & Television. She is the singing voice of Deborah Kerr, Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn in the motion pictures and on the soundtracks of The King and I, An Affair to Remember, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady.
Formerly a frequent guest and side-kick for Liberace and Victor Borge, her television work includes Boomerang (children's show in rerun for 25 years, awarded 26 Emmy Awards and 4 personal Emmy's for Best Actress); The Mothers in-Law; Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; I've Got a Secret; and To Tell the Truth. Her film roles include Aunt Alice in I Think I Do and Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music.
Along with her four Emmys for Best Actress on Boomerang, Nixon was also awarded two Gold Records for songs for Mary Poppins and Mulan (voice of Gandma Fa). She was honored twice with a Classical Grammy nomination.
A much sought after judge of Metropolitan Opera Auditions, National Association of Teachers and Singing, etc., Miss Nixon presents Master Classes in Colleges and Universities and teaches privately throughout the USA. A complete list of her recordings and performances can be found at www.marninixon.com.
David Oppenheim grew up listening to the music of Johnny Mercer in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia. It was here that he first began to admire music, namely recordings of 30’s and 40’s big band radio, and the albums his parents played on the family record player – artists like Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, George Gershwin, Meredith Wilson, Henry Mancini, and of course, Johnny Mercer.
Introduced to musicals at a young age, David has collected and repaired old phonographs and player pianos for over 35 years. In the mid-90s, he joined a Savannah-based group called “The Friends of Johnny Mercer, Inc.” where he eventually became president. He currently acts as their historian/archivist, and supports their continued effort to provide college scholarships for young music talent. FJM helps to preserve the memory of Johnny Mercer by holding a free annual concert to the people of Savannah on Johnny Mercer’s birthday.
David continues to offer Johnny Mercer programs for senior citizen groups, civic organizations and school groups. And he continues to live in Savannah, where he is the 3rd-generation owner of a retail fabrics business started by his grandfather in 1943.
Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” followed the yellow brick road to find her way home and this celebrated movie classic guided Ray Ruggeri to the path of one of his lifelong passions -- movies.
A frequent escapist to the fantasy world that only movies can create, Ray has enjoyed a lifetime in the entertainment industry – studying voice, performing in musicals, and working behind the scenes as a director and producer.
Today, he is the founder and archivist of Cinemabilia, a collection of original, vintage movie posters, covering all film genres and spanning several decades. He is an avid collector, lecturer and well-respected international dealer of motion picture memorabilia. He has recently exhibited at several U.S. and international events including the Telluride International Film Festival, the Sedona International Film Festival and Cingles du Cinema near Paris.
Ray continues to lecture and give seminars at venues around the world. He loves to share his wealth of film knowledge whether he is educating the novice, would-be or seasoned collector.
As Humphrey Bogart said in “The Maltese Falcon,” Ruggeri feels the cinema is the actual “stuff dreams are made of” and that movie posters are the tangible pieces of these dreams.
Diana Saenger is the entertainment editor of the East County Gazette, film
critic for the La Jolla Light, The Del Mar Times, the Solana Beach Sun,
Carmel Valley Leader, senior writer for Script Magazine for 7 years, and
operates her own entertainment syndicate, Saenger Syndicate and online sites
www.reviewexpress.com and www.classicmovieguide.com. Diana was the classic
film webmaster for About.com for three years and regularly furnishes
entertainment pieces to www.reeltalk.com, www.rottentomatoes.com, Good Times
magazine and Hispanic Outlook magazine. She has sold more than 1,000 short
stories, articles or features to newspapers and magazines.
She has been a judge for several screenwriting competitions, had two of her
own place in national competitions, was a script reader for King Productions
and served as one of the press coordinators of the San Diego International
Film Festival in 1997.
An award winning journalist, Diana has won numerous awards with California
Media Professionals, San Diego Press Club and the National Federation of
Press Women twelve years in a row. She garnered six 2006 state media awards
and three national first place awards including Best Entertainment Website
(www.reviewexpress.com) - Best Writing For the Web -
(http://classicfilm.about.com) - and Editing a client's book.
Diana is past president of So. California Media Professionals, past
president of the San Diego Film Critic's Society and the author of Everyone
Wants My Job: the ABC's of Entertainment Writing, and The Vietnam War: Life
As A POW.
Charlie Tabesh is the Sr. Vice President of Programming and New Media of Turner Classic Movies, an Atlanta-based network lauded by the National Society of Film Critics for “the breadth and intelligence of its film programming and its commitment to film history.” He is responsible for creating several acclaimed festivals for TCM, including tributes to African-American independent filmmakers, women film pioneers, Bollywood films, classic documentaries, Race and Hollywood, 31 Days of Oscar, and Summer Under the Stars, which is consistently the highest-rated month on the network.
Under his direction Turner Classic Movies created an interactive and new media department, which, in 2002, launched the TCM database, the most comprehensive online classic movie database in the world. This database features content from the American Film Institute, imdb.com, Baseline, thousands of video clips (including originally-produced content, scenes from films, trailers, interstitials and promos), as well as material from studio archives (including scripts, story boards and interoffice memos).
Before coming to Turner Classic Movies, Mr. Tabesh worked as the director of Program Acquisitions for Starz Entertainment Group, and a Programming Coordinator of SportsChannel Los Angeles.
Born and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Willard began his career by spending a year at Chicago's famed Second City.
His film credits include Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, This Is Spinal Tap, Roxanne, The Wedding Planner, How High, American Pie 3, A Mighty Wind, and Anchorman. His television credits include recurring roles on Rosanne, Fernwood 2-Night, Ally McBeal, The Simpsons, and Mad About You. He has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno more than 50 times. His stage roles include off-Broadway performances in Little Murders, directed by Alan Arkin, and Arf, directed by Richard Benjamin. He starred in Wendy Wasserstein's Isn't It Romantic, and Elvis and Juliet, which was written by his wife Mary. He recently completed a sold-out run of his “one-man show,” Fred Willard: Alone at Last!” (actually a sketch show with a cast of 12).
Willard's improvisational performance as Buck Laughlin in Best in Show earned him the Boston Society of Film Critic’s Award for Best Supporting Actor, and an American Comedy Award for funniest performance by a supporting actor. His performance in Waiting for Guffman earned him an American Comedy Award nomination and a Screen Actor's Guild nomination for Funniest Supporting Actor. He is a three-time Emmy nominee for performances on Rosanne and Everybody Loves Raymond.
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