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

Jan Steen

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

January 3, 2020 by Robert J. Avrech 9 Comments

“I know that if I were not a movie star, I wouldn’t get asked out much. I don’t pretend that I’m the life of the party. I never kid myself that I got into pictures on my looks either. I was the first of an era of more or less homely guys in the movies. ”
—Gary Cooper

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

June 16, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech 7 Comments

“I really don’t remember much about Cleopatra. There were a lot of other things going on.”
—Elizabeth Taylor

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

January 13, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech 11 Comments

Letter from Jennifer Jones to husband David Selznick, March 1959
Dearest:
Hope you are well and the deal goes but most of all that you miss me a little. Betty Bogart [Lauren Bacall] came through from Klosters on her way to London with her two children in hand and she told me I was pushing my luck. That you are a very attractive guy and in her words there are plenty of dames in wait for an attractive guy. I said I was less concerned since she had left California but I realized the danger, only I had to continue this work [psychoanalysis] with Dr. Meier. Her reply was, if you can take it, exactly as follows. “F— the Doctor, go home and get yourself l— and you won’t need doctors or diets. Greatest thing in the world for the complexion.”

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

January 6, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

“We had been asked to stay in Los Angeles by Mr. and Mrs. Jack Warner… the Warners threw us a star-scattered party. It was a bit of an orgy, none the worse for that and we enjoyed ourselves hugely. I started in a fine pink brocade Molyneux dress, but Mr. David Selznick told me that my breasts were too flattened and that people were complaining about them, and could I change? So I went back to the old Central European’s peasant dress and took a new lease of deep-bosomed life.”
—From Lady Diana Cooper’s Autobiography
Photo by Emil Otto (‘E.O.’) Hoppe, 1916

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

October 28, 2016 by Robert J. Avrech 6 Comments

“The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete, but so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man - that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under “M” for mankind—in the Twilight Zone.” —Rod Serling, “The Obsolete Man”, The Twilight Zone — “The chancellor, the late chancellor, was only partly correct. He was obsolete, but so is the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under “M” for mankind—in the Twilight Zone.”
—Rod Serling, “The Obsolete Man”, The Twilight Zone

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)