THE WORLD OF FILM & TV
Participant Backgrounds
After earning his Ph.D. in Sociology at Brandeis while continuing to work with his legendary teacher at Harvard, Barrington Moore, Jim Ault got into documentary filmmaking out of field research among New Right groups in the 1980s. His award-winning film, Born Again, an intimate portrait of a Moral Majority church, was a national primetime special on PBS and played around the world. His book on that project, Spirit and Flesh (Knopf 2004), was named one of the five best nonfiction books of the year. He has gone on to produce, direct, shoot and edit, documentary films that aim, through intimate, character-driven storytelling, to bridge challenging differences in culture and worldview. Ault’s recently released African Christianity Rising documentary series exploring the sources and directions of Christianity’s explosive and totally unexpected growth in Africa has been praised by leading thinkers on the subject.
Marshall Goldberg began his professional life as a lawyer, first clerking for a U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco, then working as counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights and later as a litigator at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. In 1979 Goldberg moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at writing. For the next 24 years, he wrote or produced such shows as “Diff’rent Strokes,” “The Jeffersons,” “Paper Chase,” “Newhart,” “L.A. Law,” “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” and “Life Goes On,” along with numerous television movies, screenplays and an animated feature.
From 2003-2005 Goldberg inexplicably put aside his writing career to serve as General Counsel to the Writers Guild of America, West where he was responsible for all legal matters involving the Guild’s 11,000 members. Eventually he was named the Guild’s Deputy Executive Director.
After reprising his legal background for three years, Goldberg came to his senses and returned to writing. His novel The New Colossus was published in 2014. Currently he is an adjunct professor at Michigan Law School, where he teaches “Narrative Skills and the Law.” He is also working on a documentary on the criminal justice system, along with a sequel to The New Colossus.
Caroline Leaf has had a long career in animation starting when she was a student at Harvard University. Her films are known for their emotional content and graphic style, which derive from the innovative handcrafted animation techniques she uses: she animates with beach sand, with wet paint, and makes films without any
camera at all by etching images in the soft emulsion of exposed film. For 20 years she worked as an animator/director at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal.
Leaf has received many film awards and honors, has traveled widely giving workshops, and has taught at Harvard University, Konstfack in Sweden, and at the National Film and Television School in England.
Glenn Padnick has spent most of his career making sitcoms. Among the hits at Embassy Television were ‘Who’s the Boss”, “227”, and “Married...With Children”. In 1987, he was a founding partner of Castle Rock Entertainment. That company had only one TV hit but it was the biggest in TV history, Seinfeld. Padnick has had a lot of flops as well. He has had a lot of fun through it all.