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Ongoing
What Matters to Me & Why with Marty Kaplan
Wednesday, January 23, 2013 : 12:00pm to 12:50pm
University Park Campus
Ground Zero Performance Cafe
main hall
FREE
Join us for the first speaker of the spring series when What Matters to Me & Why welcomes Marty Kaplan, the Norman Lear Professor of Entertainment, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Kaplan's uncommonly broad career has also spanned government and politics, the entertainment industry and journalism.
In the Carter Administration, he served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Walter F. Mondale, and also as executive assistant to the U.S. Commissioner of Education, Ernest L. Boyer. As deputy campaign manager of Mondale’s presidential race, he directed the campaign’s speechwriting, issues, and research operations.
He worked at Walt Disney Studios for 12 years, both as vice president of production for live-action feature films, and as a screenwriter and producer. He has credits on The Distinguished Gentleman, starring Eddie Murphy, a political comedy which he wrote and executive produced; Noises Off, a farce directed by Peter Bogdanovich, which he adapted for the screen from Michael Frayn’s play; and the action-adventure MAX Q, produced for TV by Jerry Bruckheimer.
He was associate dean of the Annenberg School for 10 years and is the founding director of the School’s Norman Lear Center, whose mission is to study and shape the impact of media and entertainment on society. His Lear Center research includes the political coverage on U.S. local TV news broadcasts; the metrics of audience engagement with media; the impact of public health messages in entertainment storylines; best practices in and barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration; and the depiction of law and justice in popular culture.
He created and hosted So What Else Is News?, the nationally-syndicated Air America Radio program examining media politics and pop culture. On public radio, he has been a featured commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and on Marketplace. He has been a blogger on the home page of The Huffington Post since its inception, and he is a columnist for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
He graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in molecular biology, where he was president of the Harvard Lampoon. As a Marshall Scholar, he received a Master’s in English with First Class Honours from Cambridge University in England. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University.