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

Morris Louis

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

May 12, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech 4 Comments

Fortunately, before I was due to make a final commitment to the Actor’s Studio, I was invited to sit and watch eight classes there. As I studied Lee Strasberg and his approach to his hapless students, I was appalled. One student was instructed by Strasberg to pretend to be a dog and lick the floor beneath his paws. He complied… I quickly concluded that the Actor’s Studio approach was not for me. I much preferred the Bette Davis school of acting. She was kept waiting one day to do her scene at the Studio while another actor interminably discussed his motivations for taking off his shoe, his mood, his emotions. In the end, an exasperated Bette burst out, “Just drop it on the floor. It’s only a goddamn shoe!”
—Shirley Jones, A Memoir

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

September 30, 2016 by Robert J. Avrech 10 Comments

Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) “Had I known of the actual horrors of Nazi concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator. I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race. The English office at United Artists were against my making an anti-Hitler film - until the war had started.” -Chaplin, quoted in My Life in Pictures (1974) — Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940)
“Had I known of the actual horrors of Nazi concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator. I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race. The English office at United Artists were against my making an anti-Hitler film — until the war had started.”
—Chaplin, quoted in My Life in Pictures (1974)

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

December 25, 2015 by Robert J. Avrech 16 Comments

“It is impossible to get anything made or accomplished without stepping on some toes; enemies are inevitable when one is a doer.” —Norma Schearer — “It is impossible to get anything made or accomplished without stepping on some toes; enemies are inevitable when one is a doer.”
—Norma Schearer

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

December 4, 2015 by Robert J. Avrech 13 Comments

“I adore not being me. I'm not very good at being me. That's why I adore acting so much.” ―Deborah Kerr — “I adore not being me. I’m not very good at being me. That’s why I adore acting so much.”
―Deborah Kerr

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

November 27, 2015 by Robert J. Avrech 16 Comments

“I wasn’t a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie” —Veronica Lake — “I wasn’t a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie”
—Veronica Lake

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)