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

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

November 1, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 5 Comments

*Silent star Mary Pickford and the great screenwriter Frances Marion.*

“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here… Selling your soul, I suppose? All you writers have such a bloody romantic attitude. You think you’re too good for the movies. Don’t you believe it. The movies are too good for you. We don’t need any romantic nineteenth-century whores. We need technicians.”
A wise and experienced film editor to a first time screenwriter.
—Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

October 4, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 7 Comments

Myrna Loy & William Powell in *The Thin Man*, 1934
She grinned at me. “You got types?”
“Only you, darling — lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.”
—Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (1929)

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

May 31, 2019 by Robert J. Avrech 3 Comments

James Stewart, early 1940′s
“The great thing about the movies is you’re giving people little, tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

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

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)