Harvardwood Highlights

July 2012  |  Issue 90

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In this Issue:

*         Director's Notes

*         Message from Allison

*         Pencil Me In:

NY EVENTS

     - Harvardwood Jazz Series: ROMANTIC JAZZ FOR A SUMMER EVENING w/ Jill McCarron & Don Braden '85, Wed., July 11

LA EVENTS

     - Harvardwood Heads To...Kelley Nicole Celebrates Summer! Sat., July 14

     - HSIP Presents: The Assistant's Panel, Sun., July 15

LONDON EVENTS

     - PLAN AHEAD...Harvardwood and the Harvard Club of London present: House of Switzerland Olympic Event, Sat., Aug. 4

ONLINE EVENTS

*         Get a FREE copy of HARVARD EATERIES - one day only! (July 4th)

*         Submit for the 2012 Harvardwood Writers' Competition! (DEADLINE - July 31)

*         Changing your email address? How to update your account.

*         Special discount for dues-current Full Members and Friends of Harvardwood!

*         Join us on Facebook and Twitter

*         Industry Successes

*         Featured Member Posting: Director, Sponsorship Sales (Live Nation) - LA   

*         Member Profile: Lauren Greenfield '87                       

Director's Notes

-- Kelley

Message from Allison

Need a lawyer for cheap? I recently had the privilege of using the AMAZING services offered by the California Lawyers for the Arts (CLA) and I wanted to recommend them to all of you. I contacted CLA because I needed help reviewing a contract that I'd been asked to sign. Within a week I had an appointment with an experienced, established lawyer who had fully reviewed my contract and the company behind it. His help and advice was invaluable. Total cost: $35. Amazing.

Happy July and I look forward to seeing you at Kelley Nicole's show on July 14th at The Parlor Hollywood!

- Allison

Pencil Me In...

NY - Harvardwood Jazz Series: ROMANTIC JAZZ FOR A SUMMER EVENING w/ Jill McCarron & Don Braden '85, Wed., July 11

Enjoy Summer in New York at its most enchanting with pianist Jill McCarron, tenor sax Don Braden ‘85, and friends playing the incomparable melodies of George Gershwin and Cole Porter, along with Brazilian favorites and Braden's own irresistible originals.  THE NEW YORK TIMES called Don Braden '85 "Brilliant and assured!" …Bill Cosby called him "a nice person and a great musician," and hired him as co-music supervisor and composer for Cosby on CBS …Pianist and singer Jill McCarron, called "Masterful!" by ALL ABOUT JAZZ, has played in Europe, Japan, and South America …and won the Hennessy Jazz Search and the 13th Annual Great American Jazz Piano Competition…Together they'll be performing an intoxicating mix of old favorites and new discoveries in a musical evening filled with elegance, sophistication, and romance…To view full posting, please visit:  http://www.harvardwood.org/events/event_details.asp?id=237834

LA - CLA invites Harvardwood to...Copyright and Publishing Agreements for Musicians, Wed., July 11

No one concept in the music industry is as satisfying, confusing, and potentially income generating as songwriting and music publishing.  As the music industry continues to undergo once-in-a-lifetime changes, music publishing remains one of the most important means of making money over the long term.  This workshop will focus on the core elements of copyright law as it applies to sound recordings and musical compositions, the sources of income for both, and how to monetize them effectively.  We will discuss what copyright is and is not, how to protect your own copyrights, and how to go about using someone else’s copyright, including when you need to secure a license.  We will discuss not only the types of publishing agreements that exist, but the importance of timing relating to when to enter into one, and how to protect yourself when you do…To view full posting, please visit:  http://www.harvardwood.org/events/event_details.asp?id=243291

LA - Harvardwood Heads To...Kelley Nicole Celebrates Summer! Sat., July 14

LA - HSIP Presents: The Assistant's Panel, Sun., July 15

The Harvardwood Summer Internship Program is excited to present "The Assistant's Panel!"  Learn the ins and outs of being a Hollywood assistant and get answers to all of the questions you're too afraid to ask at work... Panelists include: Julia Anoschechkina, MGM Studios; Andrew Coles, Overbrook Entertainment; Jason Lazarchek, ARMY WIVES; Claire-Marie Murphy, Universal; and Sara Wright, WHITE COLLAR…Moderated by Amit Samuel, Director, HSIP…To view full posting, please visit: http://www.harvardwood.org/events/event_details.asp?id=238182

LONDON - Harvardwood Presents: Tour of the 2012 Olympic Landmarks, Sat., July 21

Two iconic designs for the 2012 Olympics won Design of the Year Awards.  See them and many new London Olympic landmarks at this special program on Saturday, July 21!  Our group will tour Bromley Station and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Highlights will include exterior views of the Olympic Stadium, Velodrome, BMX cycling course, the Aquatics Centre and public art installations…To view full posting, please visit: http://www.harvardwood.org/events/event_details.asp?id=230919

LONDON - Harvardwood and the Harvard Club of London present: House of Switzerland Olympic Event, Sat., Aug. 4

House of Switzerland, the official Swiss hospitality venue at the Olympic Games, has invited Harvardwood and the Harvard Club of London to a banquet and tour of its attractions.  It will enhance the Olympic spirit with a daily "Top Chef” competition.  You and your guests can be a judge!  We will savor a sumptuous banquet of Swiss cuisine. Then we will tour the House of Switzerland, where we can mingle with Swiss athletes and their own families. We will also have an opportunity to watch a live broadcast of interviews for Swiss viewers and performers from Switzerland…To view full posting, please visit:  http://www.harvardwood.org/events/event_details.asp?id=242117

ONLINE - CLA invites Harvardwood to...How to Register Your Music with the Copyright Office, Tues., July 24

This webinar will explain the basics of the registration process so that when completed, the attendee would be able to:  Understand copyright, copyright ownership, and copyright registration; Determine when and what to register; Use the electronic application system (eCO); Register a group of songs with one application; Register a song and a sound recording with one application; Sort out song authorship; Sort out song ownership; Determine if it is necessary to form a music publishing company; Determine what should be excluded from the claims on an application…To view full posting, please visit: http://www.harvardwood.org/events/event_details.asp?id=243292

Get a FREE copy of HARVARD EATERIES - one day only! (July 4th)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HARVARD EATERIES & WATERING HOLES is a light-hearted account of Harvard's favorite hangouts.  Anyone who has spent time at Harvard or in Cambridge will recognize the familiar names of many eating and drinking establishments.  However few know the fascinating (and often little-known) stories behind them.  For example Emile Durzi, who owns Algiers, has lived in many exotic places -- but never visited Algiers.  The owners of Grendel's Den went (with Professor Laurence Tribe) to the U.S. Supreme Court to obtain a liquor license.  That iconic German restaurant, The Wursthaus, was owned by an Italian immigrant…To view full posting, please visit:  http://www.harvardwood.org/news/94286/Get-a-FREE-copy-of-HARVARD-EATERIES---one-day-only.htm

Submit for the 2012 Harvardwood Writers' Competition! (DEADLINE - July 31)

Started in 2006, the Harvardwood Writers' Competition was created to give emerging Harvard writers the opportunity to gain industry exposure and to recognize superior work.  The contest includes these three categories: 1) Feature screenplays (90-120 pp., all genres); 2) Television pilots (30-min and 60-min, all genres);  3) One-act plays (40-min maximum, no minimum).  The deadline for submissions will be Tuesday, JULY 31.  Scripts will be evaluated by industry professionals, and winners in each category will be announced no later than September 1.  First-place writers will receive a cash award, free admission to the 2012-13 writers’ program, and a series of informational meetings with Harvardwood industry contacts, tailored to career trajectory and needs…For more information and to enter visit: http://www.harvardwood.org/?page=WritersCompetition

Changing your email address?  How to update your account.

For those in the class of 2012 changing your email addresses, you can update your account email at anytime by logging in and going to the "My Profile" menu on the right.  When you are there, click on "Manage Profile" then click on the "Edit Bio” icon.  Here you will see where you can make any necessary changes to your account, including updating your email address.  Please also provide us with an alternate email under the "Contact Information" section.  Harvardwood emails are more quickly received at non "post" addresses, so we recommend using your post address as the alternate.

Special discount for dues-current Full Members and Friends of Harvardwood!

Christian D'Andrea ‘94 produced and directed the new documentary reality series HURRICANE HUNTERS, which premiered June 11 at 9pm on The Weather Channel. The character-driven series explores the high-stakes world -- and personal dramas -- of the men and women of the Hurricane Hunters, the Air Force Reserve squadron that flies into the eyes of hurricanes to determine their path and strength.  It’s some of the world’s most extreme meteorology. People’s lives depend on what they discover.  http://www.weather.com/tv/tvshows/hurricane-hunters

Submitted by Rick Rosenthal - Whitewater Films unveils a unique distribution strategy for the launch of Matthew Lillard's directing debut - FAT KID RULES THE WORLD, utilizing a convergence of traditional distribution, social media and the internet, bringing together ARC ENTERTAINMENT, The Vans Warped Tour, Kickstarter and TUGG.  Check out TUGGTHEFATKID.com for more details.

Featured Member Posting - Director, Sponsorship Sales (Live Nation) - LA

This successful senior sponsorship sales professional will be responsible for creating and selling branded, high-impact music marketing programs across our Los Angeles market properties.  Responsibilities include: Create, package and sell solution-based music marketing for venues, concert series, festivals and other music-related properties in the market; Meet or exceed revenue and key account goals; Focus on developing and maintaining strong relationships with important decision makers at client marketing companies and their respective advertising agencies in a variety of business categories; Craft sales presentations that creatively and distinctly differentiate and communicate unique assets to targeted prospects; Educate / position Live Nation assets and marketing capabilities to the sponsor/ advertiser marketplace; demonstrate the branding values of live music to create unique marketing value with Live Nation's assets…To view full posting, please visit:  http://www.harvardwood.org/networking/opening.asp?id=129505

Member Profile: Lauren Greenfield, '87

Lauren Greenfield '87 picked up her first camera at her alternative elementary school, Area D, and continued to develop a passion for photography that grew over childhood and throughout high school.  From the beginning, she was drawn to photograph people and real situations, observing culture from her own unique perspective.  Still, says Lauren, "I never considered myself an artist.”  Then, over the course of her junior year at Harvard, an international honors program afforded her an opportunity to travel the world with a select group of students and faculty mentors for nine months, intensively studying film and anthropology both on screen and in the field, and interfacing with luminaries from museums and film institutes in each country.  This trip was "life-changing” according to Lauren.  "We watched many indigenous films, and we met with amazing directors.  It was on that trip that I realized my calling.  I wasn't sure if it would be sociology, film, photography, or anthropology, but looking at culture was my calling.  When I got back to Harvard, I switched my major from Social Studies to Visual Studies.  I soon realized that theory wasn't my medium, and I moved toward filmmaking and photography.  The work from that year has really influenced my photography.  I even met my husband, Frank Evers '87, in Vienna during that fateful trip.”

After Harvard, Lauren applied to several film schools, only to be rejected by all of them.  She spent a year after graduation on a Radcliffe fellowship, working on her first big documentary project, about the French aristocracy.  She waitressed in Cambridge and was a lab monitor in the Carpenter Center, so that she could have access to the darkrooms and to her teachers.  "I always figured I'd get a ‘real’ job, not be a professional photographer,” says Lauren.  "I figured I'd give myself this one year to do this photography project, and then I'd get serious about life."

Then came an opportunity that would steer the direction of her career.  Lauren was awarded the prestigious National Geographic Internship; over two hundred people apply for the position.  "It was only three months, but it was practical and was like graduate school.  I learned lighting and working with color, which is a more commercial way to work.  That was the experience that gave me a new respect for the journalistic and storytelling side of photography; the idea of the photographer as storyteller rather than just an illustrator of stories.  It also gave me mentors who are still my mentors.  I still wasn't sure if I could be a professional photographer, but at that point I did want to try.”

Lauren started working as a photojournalist, moving to London with her then fiancé, Frank, to do an internship with the Sunday Times.  In 1991, she moved back to her hometown of Los Angeles to collaborate with her Professor of Psychology mother Patricia on a piece for National Geographic about a village in Chiapas, Mexico.  "It was a turning point trip for me,” says Lauren, "because I learned what I did not want to do.  The story didn't ultimately run at Nat Geo, although it was republished a month ago.  But I didn't feel like the pictures were my own or reflected my point of view.  I realized that the pictures I wanted to take were ones that commented on society in some way.  I felt like all I could do in Mexico was document what I was seeing, but there wasn't any unique element of my voice, or my take on it, coming through.”  Around this time, Lauren read Bret Easton Ellis' LESS THAN ZERO.  "There was something about this jaded, cynical world that spoke to me, and that became my first project, photographing at the high school I went to (Crossroads, in Santa Monica) and then at other high schools, and then going younger, photographing younger kids around LA, who were growing up too fast.  FAST FORWARD was me finding my voice.  After that, it opened up a lot of doors.  Once you find that, then people can see that, and then you're hired to do what you want to do.  That opened up my career and my expression.”

What followed––in addition to numerous opportunities to work as a high-end commercial photographer––was artistic recognition.  Lauren quickly became known as a photographer with a distinct cultural & sociological voice.  Her acclaimed photographic documentary series, all of which were also published in book form and exhibited at major museums, are thematically cohesive, focusing on the identity issues of kids’ development, eating disorders, celebrity, and society’s relationship to money, beauty, aging, and fame.  THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES connects back to the study of consumerism, which is what FAST FORWARD and BEAUTY CULTure are about,” says Lauren.  "The new film is about wealth and status, and ties back into that and our culture's values around money, consumerism, and fame. FAST FORWARD came from my own experience in high school.  It was very ‘Hollywood’; there were a lot of wealthy kids, and I wasn't from that background.  I was an observer... With GIRL CULTURE, I drew on my own issues around popularity and body image and beauty; and BEAUTY CULTure is really about aging.  When I was 26, my dermatologist offered me Botox, and that launched my work on aging.  I did a book called THIN about eating disorders.  I'd never had an eating disorder, but had issues of my own around body image, like most women in our society.”

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES was introduced by Robert Redford at the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. Lauren won Best Director for the film, which chronicles the tale of a billionaire family in Orlando who wanted to build the biggest house in America, and whose fortunes were affected by the economic downturn.  "It’s an allegory about the overreaching of America; a sort of supersized foreclosure story,” says Lauren.  "This one story about one family embodies all the themes of what I'd been working with on this wealth project, as well as themes from BEAUTY CULTure and GIRL CULTURE, for the past ten years.”

Lauren remarks that making her first feature-length film was a challenge.  "Our journey was as crazy as the journey of building the house,” laughs Lauren.  "Our company, Evergreen Pictures, produced it, my husband Frank Evers was the exec producer, we always spent the money before we had it, and we finished three days before our premiere at Sundance.”

The film, which was bought by Magnolia Pictures and Bravo, opens in theatres July 20th and has been making the rounds at numerous festivals: London, Sundance, San Francisco Film Festival, Hot Docs in Toronto, and the Los Angeles Film Festival.  Lauren is also working on a new book to come out in the fall of 2013, with a working title of WEALTH: THE INFLUENCE OF AFFLUENCE.

In addition to her illustrious career, Lauren has an enviably stable and workable home life, despite extensive travel. "Gabriel is six, and Noah will be twelve in early July.  Frank is also from the class of ‘87.  We've been together for 25 years, since I was 20.  He produced BEAUTY CULTure and exec produced QUEEN OF VERSAILLES, and he started an artist management company called INSTITUTE, which reps me and twenty other photographers.  We do everything from the studio behind our house.  I'm so dedicated to work and so consumed by it that I feel like it would be a negative for most people, but because we came up together doing this, and work together, it's such a bond.  We don't take getting to do the work you love for granted at all.  When there's an opportunity, we both jump at it.  When I had Noah, I got a fax to go to China to photograph wealthy youth for TIME ASIA for ten days.  I pumped 400 ounces of milk and left Noah at ten weeks old with Frank and a full freezer.  Classic pattern of anxiety and over-achieving, because when I came back, there was still milk left.  It also created an amazing bond between Frank and Noah.” 

Lauren Greenfield has crafted a fully realized life, living it on her own terms and expressing her truest self through her provocative and insightful storytelling.  "Most people in our field need to make compromises to make a living, so I feel very lucky to have been able to do the work that's meaningful to me… It's such an unexpected gift to be able to work as an artist.”

The award-winning documentary THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES opens in theaters July 20th.  Visit the website for more information on screenings in select theaters this month.

Sara Melson is a singer/songwriter (Nettwerk Records) based in Los Angeles.

Be sure to add harvardwood@harvardwood.org to your address book to ensure receipt of all Harvardwood information.  All members of Harvardwood should receive a Weekly email each Monday and a monthly Highlights on the 1st or the 2nd of the month.  If you are not receiving some of these emails, let us know at harvardwood@harvardwood.org.

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