Meet the Film Scouts

Mayra Langdon Riesman is a multimedia producer with extensive experience in Hollywood motion pictures and the European community. She is the creator, publisher, and producer of Film Scouts and the founder of Webcast Multimedia, Inc, Film Scouts' parent company. She lives in New York. She recently read "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku, and is busy exploring parallel universes - well, if she doesn't get lost she expects to be back in time for Cannes.

Liza Bear has been a contributing editor in film at Bomb Magazine since 1987. Her reviews and interviews have recently been published in Newsday, The New York Times, Ms Magazine, Variety, and the Village Voice. Liza is also a short story writer and a filmmaker, and has taught directing at NYU and Columbia University graduate film schools.

Storm Bear is an independent filmmaker living in his native North Carolina. In fact, he grew up just a few miles from Andy Griffith's boyhood front yard. Currently he serves as the President of the North Carolina Independent Filmmakers Association, chat host for the NC Independent Film Chat on AOL, and is preping several scripts for production.

Henri Behar co-wrote "Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival" (William Morrow) in 1992, and has written about entertainment for Premiere magazine, French Vogue, and the French daily Le Monde.

Robert M. Bilder, Ph.D. is Chief of Neuropsychology at the Hillside Hospital division of Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is engaged in research, clinical training, and diagnostic consultation. His research focuses on brain structure and function, and applies novel techniques using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

James Byerley was born and raised in Houston, Texas. All the major Hollywood blockbusters opened there, and Jim saw them all. As a teenager, Jim also discovered foreign imports. He had to drag his little brother to see "Jules And Jim," "The Conformist," etc., because his friends wouldn't go to a movie they had to read. Jim earned a B.A. in English from the University of Houston and a law degree from the University of Missouri. In 1970, Jim moved to New York and worked briefly in the real estate business before joining Time/HBO/Cinemax. In 1979, he created HBO's Film Evaluation Department which screens and evaluates virtually every movie ever made.

Kathleen Carroll was premiere film critic for The New York Daily News for over two decades and has taught contemporary cinema at St. John's University and Marymount Manhattan College.

Michael Gebert is the author of "The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards," containing complete listings of over 20 major awards since 1920, released by St. Martin's Press in February.

Emmett Gray studied literature and physics at Harvard, has lived in Peru, Brazil, and Mali, and currently spends most of his time, when not windsurfing, in front one or more LED monitors. He is a generalist and a consultant with experience in the areas of text, graphics, multimedia, scripting, and Web site design. He is an amateur linguist, loves music, photography, and table tennis, won't go to meetings or parties, doesn't have a telephone at home, and enjoys life with his two cats, "one-many" and "too-many" He wrote the popular "CopyDrop" software package, a useful tool for quickly, safely, and efficiently backing up (i.e. duplicating) media and other files.

Gill Holland is a former lawyer who worked briefly at October Films before representing the French film industry and the Cannes Film Festival for two and a half years at the French Film Office. More recently, he is producer of Morgan J. Freeman's "Hurricane", co-producer on Galt Niederhoffer's "Myth America", and co-producer with Jean-Luc Godard on rob Tregenza's "Springfield".

Philipp Hoschka has spent most of his youth in dark movie theatres. These days, his main job is doing research in computer science. He currently works at Tim Berners-Lee's WWW consortium. He is responsible for standardising the integration of audio and video into the Web. He was born in Germany, and now lives in Antibes on the French Riviera. Formerly, Philipp was a member of the networking research group at INRIA. This group is one of the leading research groups world-wide in the area of video and audio transmission over the Internet. Philipp holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Nice and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Harlan Jacobson covered the entertainment industries for seven years for Variety, edited Film Comment for eight and regularly covers film festivals for major news media. Jacobson currently writes for USA Today and oversees the Talk Cinema (800-551-9221/ harlan@talkcinema.com) lecture series on new films at Lincoln Center in New York, The Ritz in Philadelphia, and at Cineplex Odeon's Wisconsin 6 in Washington, DC.

Karen Jaehne (in memoriam, d. 1999) is a seasoned hand at festivals. - you've seen her work in magazines ranging from Cineaste and Interview to The New York Times and The New York Post. She worked for the Berlin Festival through the 70's, was a Variety stringer in the 80's, produced some movies in the 90's, and is now living in Manhattan and wearing black.

Joe Leydon, formerly the film critic of the Houston Post and entertainment staff writer for the Dallas Morning News, is currently a regional correspondent and film critic for Variety and film critic for KPRC-TV (NBC affiliate). He is also a correspondent for Texas Entertainment News, a syndicated TV series, and film critic and essayist for the weekly newspapers The Houston Press, San Antonio Current, and FW Weekly. He has taught courses on Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, and 1930s cinema at Rice University.

Matthew Mandell is a multimedia producer and website developer in his own right, and has committed himself to the success of the Filmscouts initiative. An aspiring screenwriter as well, he is in the process of packaging a number of scripts for production. As a freelance writer, he has written for such publications as ComputerWorld, The New York Observer and Technology Access Report.

R. J. Millard is a Producer Services/Marketing Assistant for the Utah Film Commission and the Associate Media Director for the Sundance Film Festival. He has worked for Warner Bros. publicity and the Utah Short Film and Video Festival. He is currently producing a short film.

James Monaco, widely respected expert on electronic publishing, film, and the entertainment industry, is President of UNET and Founder of Baseline and its subsidiary, New York Zoetrope. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Interactive Services Association and is past Chairman of the Videotext Marketing Consortium.

Glenn Myrent is the co-author of an award-winning biography of the founder of the Cinemathèque Française, "Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema." He has published film-related articles in The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Film History, the French Review and other publications. He teaches film courses for SMU-in-Paris and has lectured at many of America's top universities and cultural centers. When he's not staring through the viewfinder of his Hi-8 camera, he's at the movies or mountain climbing.

Lisa Nesselson reviews for Variety from Paris, where she has been the Paris Free Voice film critic since 1987. In addition to originating the filmgoing chapters in Time Out Paris and Paris Inside Out guidebooks, Lisa has translated biographies of Clint Eastwood, Simone de Beauvoir and Henri Langlois from French to English. She covers film for France Today and completed the annual Run-Up the Empire State Building from 1983-87.

Marcia Pally is the film critic for Penthouse magazine, and writes and speaks frequently on first amendment rights issues.

Jeremy M. Posner has been intrigued with the various performing arts since at a relatively young age he was taken to see films in some of the decaying (now extinct) New York movie palaces. In the world of theatre, he still designs sound for productions in New York every now and then, including many with the 52nd Street Project. However, the only time he can be found performing is at shul, where he can often be found leading Kabalat Shabbat.

Leslie Rigoulot started pasting her movie ticket stubs into her scrapbook at the age of eleven, noting the title, cast, and her opinion of the movie. Things haven't changed too much over the years. Leslie is still noting her opinion of movies, but now more publicly as host of Paragon Cable's Movie Talk, Pay-Per-View Out-Takes, and Reviews, Interviews, and What's News. What she doesn't see in theaters, she catches on video. But film festivals are her favorite! You just don't know whom you will meet or what hot new film you will see.

Eleanor Ringel has been the film critic for the Atlanta Journal - Constitution since 1978 and a film commentator for WXIA in Atlanta since 1983.

Richard Schwartz, Film Scouts' resident college slacker and faux hipster, counts among his guilty pleasures the emotional vibrancy of Van Gogh, the soulful yearning of Van Morrison and the wheelbarrow kick of Van Damme. A freelance journalist and former editor of The Badger Herald, Schwartz studies history and political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is an unapologetic defender of the so-called "MTV Generation," his brethren-in-arms. When asked, "What is it with today's college students - is it ignorance or apathy?" Schwartz replied, "Frankly, I don't know and I don't care."

Robin J. Schwartz is a freelance writer who specializes in the arts. In the nearly-twenty years (eek!) she's been a journalist, her byline has appeared in such publications as Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Playbill, Rolling Stone, Elle and Interview. She also writes promotional material for corporate clients such as the A&E Television Networks, Columbia Records, American Express and BMG Direct.

David Sterritt has been a film critic at The Christian Science Monitor for the past 25 years and has written film criticism for Film Comment, American Film and Variety. His book "The Films of Alfred Hitchcock" was published in 1993.