Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Movie Posters

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

April 5, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 5 Comments

On watching the *Psycho* shower scene for the first time: “When I saw it, and I saw it cut together, and I saw the boom, boom, and the music and everything, I absolutely went… I just was crazy. I really screamed. I never take a shower. I cannot take a shower. ‘Cause it never dawned on me until that moment how vulnerable and defenseless one is. It never entered my head until I saw that.” —Janet Leigh

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

March 29, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 11 Comments

“I did my best. God did the rest.”
—Hattie McDaniel

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

March 8, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 11 Comments

“Often a director, in a weepy scene, would ask me to visualize my mother dying so that I might cry easily. I couldn’t do it. The only way I could bring the tears was to think about something horrible happening to me.”
—Norma Shearer

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

March 1, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 9 Comments

“I was lazy. I would have been a hell of a lot better actress had I taken it more seriously. I never had the proper respect for acting. Quite often, I learned my lines on the way to the studio.”
—Ava Gardner

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

February 22, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

Yul Brynner, 1949
“I am just a nice, clean-cut Mongolian boy.”
In fact, Yul Brenner (b. Yuliy Borisovich Briner, 1920 – 1985) was born in the city of Vladivostok in the Far Eastern Republic, a puppet state controlled by Soviet Russia before being merged into the wider USSR two years later. He enjoyed telling tall tales and exaggerating his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born “Taidje Khan” of part-Mongol parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality of Swiss-German, Russian, and partial Buryat ancestry. Wikipedia

I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.

Annual Ariel Avrech
Memorial Lectures
Young Israel of Century City

NOTE: Click on video titles inside the thumbnail images, below, to open that video in YouTube

Fifteenth: June 10, 2018
Jackie Danicki: “Confessions of a Convert: A Humbling, Joyful Journey to Judaism.”

Blog Post | Audio: (94 MB)

Fourteenth: June 11, 2017
Daniel Greenfield: “Fighting Anti-Semitism and Defending Israel in the Age of BDS.”

Blog Post | Audio: (100 MB)

Thirteenth: May 22, 2016Ben Shapiro: “How You Can Save Israel”

Blog Post | Audio: (70 MB)

Twelfth: June 7, 2015
Larry Elder: “The New Black Anti-Semitism”

Blog Post | Audio: (100 MB)

Eleventh: June 8, 2014
Michael Medved: “Shifting Alliances: Why Liberals No Longer Reliably Support Israel — And Conservatives Do.”

Blog Post | Audio: (97MB)

Tenth: June 9, 2013
David Horowitz: “The War Against Judaism on the University Campus.”

Blog Post | Audio: (16MB)

Ninth: June 3, 2012
Joel B. Pollak: “The Mainstream Media’s Betrayal of Israel.”

Blog Post | Audio: (15MB)

Eighth: June 5, 2011
Yossi Klein Halevi: “What is Expected of a Survivor People: Lessons My Father Taught Me.”

Blog Post | Audio: (18MB)

Seventh: June 13, 2010
Dennis Prager: “Happiness is a Mitzvah, Not an Emotion.”

Blog Post | Audio: (80MB)

Sixth: June 21, 2009
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky: “Conformity in Jewish Life: Vice, Virtue or Affectation?”

Blog Post | Audio: (64MB)

Fifth: June 15, 2008
Rabbi Dr. Gil S. Perl: “What Was the Rosh Yeshiva Reading: Intellectual Openness in 19th Century Lithuania.”

Blog Post | Audio: (70MB)