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

Burt Lancaster

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

November 27, 2020 by Robert J. Avrech 7 Comments

“To my surprise, I discovered that I could act, and I liked it even better than boxing.”
—John Garfield (born Jacob Julius Garfinkle, 1913 – 1952)

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

December 20, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 7 Comments

“One of the advantages of having been poor is that you learn to appreciate good fortune and the value of a dollar, and poverty holds no fear for you because you know you’ve gone through it and you can do it again… But we were always a happy family and a religious one. And I’m trying to inculcate in my children the same sense of values, the same tone that my mother gave to me.”
—Debbie Reynolds (b. Mary Frances “Debbie” Reynolds 1932 – 2016)

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

December 6, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 10 Comments

“I’ve never had a dull moment in my life. I’ve always wanted to try something new. When I was a child, I wouldn’t wear what the other kids had. I won’t now. I had the first pantie girdle, the first broadtail suit, the first sack dress — from Givenchy. I was even the first Gloria. Everybody named their children after me. I can always tell how old Glorias are.”
—Gloria Swanson
Photo by Charles Sheldon, 1925

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

June 14, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. Let me expand a bit. I sense that you may feel that I am free of problems. Let me assure you that I have the same anxieties and insecurities as anyone… maybe more.”
—Cary Grant

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

May 24, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 5 Comments

Tuesday Weld was Stanley Kubrick’s first choice for *Lolita*, but she turned him down, later claiming “I didn’t have to play it. I was Lolita.”’

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

Sixteenth: August 25, 2019
“Torah Dedication in Memory of Ariel Chaim Avrech Z’L”

Blog Post | Audio: TBD

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)