DIRECTORS I’VE COLLABORATED WITH
Craig Gillespie
Barry Levinson
Elizabeth Banks
Milana Vayntrub
Ted Melfi
Roman Coppola
Marc Forster
Johan Renck
Spike Lee
Larry Charles
Guy Ritchie
Christopher Guest
Michael Gracie
Jeff Tremaine
Bryan Buckley
Jason Reitman
Lance Acord
Peter Berg
Eugenio Zanetti
Noam Murro
Duplass Brothers

There is literally nothing I haven’t edited in any realm or genre, at least twice. I love constructing ideas and distilling the vision of others. AI has unlocked possibilities I couldn’t have imagined a decade ago — collapsing the tedium, accelerating the work, and opening up new ways to bring creatives into closer conversation. I’ve become obsessed with pioneering what that looks like in practice.That should be evident by this digital journal. So I want to use this page to share more about who I am as a person.

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and always gravitated toward playing sports and making things — stories, drawings, arguments. I was a hockey player into college and played competitive golf in high school – growing up near the home of Jack Nicklaus, it was inescapable. I got involved with theater and loved the camaraderie of being on stage and backstage — acting, directing, writing. It gave me a fluency in narrative and in blocking. I continued this in Los Angeles when I joined the CAG Theatre Company, which spawned a lot of GenX Hollywood creative talent. As a fine arts major with minors in creative writing and philosophy at Hamilton College, I was introduced to non-linear editing when it was still in its infancy — including a semester at Ohio State’s film school that accelerated. I wrote my thesis on the work of filmmaker Jean Renoir, son of Pierre the famous Impressionist. Those four years in upstate New York were less about credentials and more about figuring out what I actually believed and wanted out of life. I arrived in Hollywood in 1992 with a dream that has remained a fixed point on the horizon ever since — to create and communicate through film.

Outside of work I love learning about ancient history — not as trivia but as a lens. The deeper you go into how civilizations understood time, cosmology, and the structure of reality, the more it rewires how you see everything else. It’s clear to me that the ancients were far more advanced than conventional history gives them credit. That perspective informs how I think about story, about meaning, about what lasts. When I travel for leisure, the bucket list is inadvertently visiting any ancient megalithic site, any continent. Live music is another constant. I’ve been to Coachella every year since 2010 and make it to Outside Lands and ACL whenever my schedule allows.

Family is another priority. My son recently graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in motion design and animation, and seeing him realize his talent and explore his interests is a dream come true.  My daughter attended the University of Oregon and graduated in the first class to offer a major in popular music composition — she is now a professional composer, musician, and recording artist under the names Amethyst, LttleDmns and Jo Avelin. I care about the world they’re inheriting, which is partly why I devote time to causes that use film as a force. Most recently, a piece on the poaching crisis that screened before the UN General Assembly, voiced by Sam Elliott for the cause Saving the Survivors.

In 2005 my then-wife and I opened a boutique hospitality venture called Puakea Ranch on the Big Island of Hawaii. For seven years I worked remotely, commuting between the mainland and the island where we raised our kids. It gave all of us a cultural perspective I never would have found otherwise. Since 2014 I’ve been fixed on the mainland, working between offices in LA, San Francisco, New York, and Austin – the last of which I established in 2010.

I live and work in Santa Monica. I ride an electric scooter because I love the adrenaline rush in my five-minute commute. I walk a lot. I spend considerable free time developing stories, generating in Weave, and building a personal AI practice that makes my life more productive and empowers me creatively. These days it’s hard to tear me away from the TV screen. I still have the same dream I had as a twelve-year-old — to make the kind of movies I want to see, and hopefully the kind of art that connects with people and makes the world a little better.