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

Photography, Signs

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

October 26, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 11 Comments

“I appeared with many leading men. But working with Cary Grant was different from working with other actors. He was much more fun! I think we were a successful team because we enjoyed working together tremendously, and that pleasure must have shown through onto the screen. I will always remember two compliments he made me. He said I had perfect timing in comedy and that I was the sweetest smelling actress he ever worked with.”
—Irene Dunne

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

March 9, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 4 Comments

“Until I came along all the leading men were handsome, but luckily they wrote a lot of stories about the fellow next door.”
—Gary Cooper

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

May 5, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech 8 Comments

“I was never beautiful like Miss Hayworth or Miss Lamarr. I was known as ‘the little brown wren’. Who’d want to get me at the end of the picture? I thought I was the plainest, most unattractive thing ever, and glamour was something I felt was far beyond my grasp. But—and isn’t it funny?—now when I look at my old movies I think I was the most gorgeous creature—simply divine!”
—Bette Davis, 1973

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)