‘THE WATSONS GO TO BIRMINGHAM’
PRODUCTION BIOS
JANET M. MORRISON (Executive Producer) - Janet Morrison began her career at “Guiding Light,” eventually creating and running the show’s digital department and serving as a line producer on the show as a whole. In 2006-2007, Morrison was nominated for a Daytime Emmy® Award for her work on the show’s 70th anniversary campaign, entitled ‘Finding Your Light.’ Since “Guiding Light,” Morrison has focused on branded entertainment, including extensive work for the People’s Choice Awards. Scripted credits include co-executive producer on “Truth Be Told,” “Field of Vision,” “Who Is Simon Miller?” and “Game Time: Tackling the Past.” Morrison executive producer on “Game of Your Life” and for Hallmark Channel, “Return to Nim’s Island” and “Space Warriors.” Morrison graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University with a degree in television, radio, film and minors in political science and management studies.
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JIM BECHTOLD (Executive Producer) – Jim Bechtold is the co-founder of Flashlight Entertainment and Front Porch Entertainment, where he served as President from 2007-2011. These companies started to support Walmart and P&G’s family programming and media initiatives.
Bechtold’s business experiences include top executive positions at Proctor & Gamble, where he was Vice President and General Manager of multiple including head of North America marketing, strategy and planning and business units such as baby, family and senior care in Asia.
Bechtold is co-founder of Crossroads Church in Cincinnati, one of the fastest growing churches in the U.S., with a weekly attendance of 18,000 plus. He was co-leader of the nationally acclaimed Strive K-12 Educational Reform initiative via the Knowledgeworks Foundation. These initiatives have raised over $100 million.
Jim Bechtold has a PhD in Leadership and Organizational Development and degrees in Business and Decision Science. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three children.
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TREVOR DRINKWATER (Executive Producer) - Prior to founding ARC Entertainment, Trevor Drinkwater had a successful career with large consumer products companies including Nestle Foods, Warner Brothers and Take 2 Interactive.
Drinkwater started carrying a bag as an entry-level sales representative at Nestle Foods and quickly progressed to become the youngest General Manager in the history of the company. At Nestle, Drinkwater was classically trained in the crafts of brand management, category management, retail strategies and operations.
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After Nestle, he joined Warner Brothers in the Home Entertainment division, which introduced him to entertainment products and content development. After a five year stint at Warner Brothers, Drinkwater joined Take 2 Interactive, a leading video game publisher, as COO, North America.
Drinkwater decided to become an entrepreneur in early 2004, which led him to Genius Products, Inc. He was named President and CEO of Genius in February 2005. Shortly thereafter, Genius Products completed a transaction with The Weinstein Company to become its exclusive home entertainment distributor in the United States. Subsequent to that, Drinkwater and his team secured distribution agreements with an impressive client base including WWE, Discovery Channel, Sesame Workshop, ESPN and Classic Media. The company experienced explosive growth in 2006 and 2007 and established itself as a premier retail-centric distributor with expertise in both brand building and retail programs.
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BRIAN WELLS (Executive Producer) - As Co-Founder of Flashlight Entertainment, Brian Wells oversees creative development focused on primetime television the whole family can enjoy together. After beginning his career in public affairs with Illinois Governor James R. Thompson, Brian spent nine years at Procter & Gamble, where he held senior positions in marketing as well as speechwriter for P&G senior officers. He has worked with companies such as Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Pepsi, ConAgra and FedEx to create family television movies for NBC, Fox and Hallmark Channel.
Outside of his work in entertainment, Wells has developed and led work to combat child trafficking and exploitation in South Asia and the U.S.
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PHILIP KLEINBART (Producer) — Philip Kleinbart is an independent producer who was previously a partner at Robert Greenwald Productions, where he served as producer, supervising producer or executive producer on over 50 telefilms and was responsible for all business and production aspects of the company’s films. He is currently a consultant for Walden Media.
Kleinbart has produced such telefilms as “Plain Truth,” starring Mariska Hargitay, “The Book of Ruth,” starring Christine Lahti, “Redeemer,” starring Matthew Modine, “Blonde,” starring Poppy Montgomery and Kirstie Alley, “Sharing the Secret,” starring Mare Winningham and Tim Matheson, “The Audrey Hepburn Story,” starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, “The Portrait,” starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall, “Our Sons,” starring Julie Andrews and Ann-Margret and “Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes,” starring Max von Sydow and Judd Nelson.
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NIKKI SILVER (Producer) — Nikki Silver is an Emmy® Award-winning producer and chief creator of ToniK Productions. Prior to forming ToniK with Tonya Lewis Lee, Silver was president of On Screen Entertainment. Her love for young adult literature prompted Silver to option and produce numerous award-winning books for television and film. ToniK Productions, in association with Jeff Bridges’ As Is production company, are producing “The Giver” for The Weinstein Company and Walden Media. Bridges and Silver will produce and Bridges will also star.
Silver produced the documentary “Teenage Witness,” which was narrated by Richard Gere and aired nationally on PBS in 2011, playing also at several film festivals. The documentary follows Heller, an 83-year-old Holocaust survivor, as she shares her unique story with inner-city teenagers. Silver also produced the American Masters film, “Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides,” on the life and family of Jeff Bridges.
Silver has worked with many networks on a variety of scripted and documentary programming. “Miracle’s Boys,” a live-action miniseries based on Jacqueline Woodson’s award-winning novel, premiered on The N (Teen Nick). Directed by Spike Lee, Ernest Dickerson, LeVar Burton and Bill Duke, the series chronicled the life of three orphaned teens struggling to keep their family together. “Reading Rainbow,” a multi–award winning children’s series on PBS for over 20 years, has won 24 Emmy® Awards in 20 years including Best Children’s Series for five consecutive years. “What’s Going On?” was a documentary series produced in association with the United Nations for Showtime Networks and hosted by top celebrity activists including Michael Douglas, Angelina Jolie, Richard Gere and Laurence Fishburne. “The Zack Files,” a 52-episode live-action teen comedy based on the book series of the same name aired on ABC Family.
Silver began her career in documentary television at Thirteen/WNET. Her interest in children’s television prompted her to join Lancit Media Entertainment in 1992, where she produced several television series including “The Puzzle Place,” “Backyard Safari” and “Outward Bound.”
Silver received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She grew up in New York City where she currently lives with her husband and three sons.
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TONYA LEWIS LEE (Producer and Writer) — Tonya Lewis Lee has been a creative presence in children’s literature and production for nearly 15 years. In 1998, Lewis Lee transitioned from a career as a corporate lawyer and began writing and working in production, founding her own production company, Madstone Company, Inc. Most recently, she partnered with Emmy® Award-winning producer Nikki Silver to form ToniK Productions. Lewis Lee has worked with Disney Television Animation, Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. At Nickelodeon, she produced programming that featured such artists as Savion Glover, Gregory Hines, Whoopi Goldberg and Queen Latifah. She also produced the documentary “I Sit Where I Want: The
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Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education” and the miniseries “Miracle’s Boys” for The N (Teen Nick), eventually working with TV Land to produce the series “That’s What I’m Talking About” hosted by Wayne Brady.
Lewis Lee is also the accomplished author of three children’s books published by Simon & Shuster: Please Baby Please, Please Puppy Please and Giant Steps to Change the World. She also co-authored the best-selling Hyperion novel Gotham Diaries.
For the past five years, Lewis Lee has served as the national spokesperson for the “A Healthy Baby Begins with You” campaign initiated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health to raise awareness about the infant mortality crisis in the United States. Additionally, she produced “Crisis in the Crib: Saving Our Nation’s Babies,” a documentary about the campaign and efforts to reduce infant mortality rates. In December 2009, through Madstone Company Inc., Lewis Lee launched HealthyYouNow.com, a website dedicated to supporting women on their journey to achieve an optimal lifestyle of health and wellness. Through women’s stories, tips from experts and the latest news, HealthyYouNow.com keeps women up to date on issues related to their health. Lewis Lee has also written for such magazines as Avenue, Gotham, O at Home and Glamour to which she contributed two campaign trail interviews with Michelle Obama in 2007 and 2008.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Virginia School of Law, Lewis Lee has received numerous awards for her literary, production and advocacy work.
Lewis Lee lives in New York City with her husband, director Spike Lee and their two children.
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KENNY LEON (Director) — Kenny Leon is one of the most well-respected, premiere directors on Broadway. His directorial credits span an incomparable range of work from classic theater to drama, comedy, opera, musicals, musical revues and film.
In October 2012, Leon brought together a stellar cast for the made-for-television remake of “Steel Magnolias,” airing on the Lifetime Television Network and starring Queen Latifah, Phylicia Rashad, Alfre Woodard, Condola Rashad and Jill Scott.
In 2011, Leon became the first African-American director to have concurrent shows on Broadway with The Mountaintop and Stick Fly. In The Mountaintop, written by Katori Hall, Samuel L. Jackson starred as Dr. Martin Luther King opposite Angela Bassett, who played a maid awed by the civil rights leader. Stick Fly, a dysfunctional-family comedy produced by Alicia Keys, featured Dule Hill, Mekhi Phifer and Condola Rashad.
In 2010, Leon directed the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Fences, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. The play was a huge critical and box-office success, earning 10
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Tony® Award nominations — including one for Best Director — the most ever for a play revival. Fences set box-office records and received the Tony® Award for Best Revival of a Play, Actor and Actress.
Leon’s additional Broadway credits include the Tony® Award-nominated plays Radio Golf (2007) and Gem of the Ocean (2004), both by August Wilson. He also directed Swimming Upstream, featuring women of New Orleans and the impact of Hurricane Katrina on their lives and city and Breaking the Silence, a United Nations event aimed at bringing awareness to child abduction across the globe.
In 2004, Leon made his Broadway debut with the 2004 Tony® Award-winning revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, starring Sean P. Diddy Combs, Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald. Leon received a Drama Desk Award nomination as Outstanding Director of a Play before reuniting the cast in 2008 to direct the television adaptation, which aired on ABC to 12.7 million viewers. Leon was nominated as Best Director by the DGA for this television version, which also received Emmy® and Golden Globe® Award nominations in addition to three NAACP Image Award wins.
Building on a career in regional theater (Arena Stage, Milwaukee Rep, Huntington Theatre, L.A.’s Center Theatre, The Public, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, among others), and after leading Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre for 11 years, Leon founded Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company in 2002. Based in Atlanta, the company is dedicated to diversity and the preservation of African-American classics.
Through True Colors, Leon produces the August Wilson Monologue Competition, an annual contest currently in eight major cities that provides workshops and training to hundreds of teenagers. Regional winners receive mentoring and coaching as well as free travel to and board in New York City, to participate in the Competition Finals at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway where they perform monologues from Wilson’s Century Cycle before a panel of judges. First, second and third place winners receive scholarships and all finalists receive hardbound book sets of Wilson’s plays.
Leon is currently prepping to direct several projects for Broadway including the hip hop musical Holler if You Hear Me, featuring the music of Tupac Shakur with The Gold Company producing.
Leon is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University and holds honorary doctorates from Roosevelt University and several other institutions. He has been a featured speaker for arts organizations, awards shows, corporate and political groups, churches and universities including Yale University, Northwestern University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Leon’s diverse body of projects in theater and film requires him to split time between Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York.
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CHRISTOPHER PAUL CURTIS (Author) — Born in Flint, Michigan, Christopher Paul Curtis spent his first 13 years after high school on the assembly line of Flint’s historic Fisher Body Plant #1. His job entailed hanging car doors and it left him with an aversion to getting into and out of large automobiles, particularly big Buicks.
Curtis’s writing and his dedication to it, has been greatly influenced by his family members. With grandfathers such as Earl “Lefty” Lewis, an African American Baseball League pitcher and 1930s bandleader Herman E. Curtis, Sr., of Herman Curtis and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression, Curtis was destined to become an entertainer.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963, a Newbery Honor and Coretta King Honor Award winning book, tells the story of 10-year-old Kenny and his family, the Weird Watsons of Flint, Michigan, and their unforgettable journey that leads them into one of the darkest moments in American history. It is by turns a hilarious, touching, and tragic story about civil rights and the impact of violence on one family.
Curtis’s novel Bud, Not Buddy focuses on 10-year-old Bud Caldwell, who hits the road in search of his father and his home. Times may be hard in 1936 Flint, Michigan, but orphaned Bud’s got a few things going for him: he believes his mother left a clue of who his father was — and nothing can stop Bud from trying to find him. It was the recipient of both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award.He is also the author of Bucking the Sarge, Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money, Mr. Chickee’s Messy Mission and The Mighty Miss Malone. Curtis resides with his family in Michigan.
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