Bradford Auerbach ’82
Principal
Amherst Partners, San Diego
Auerbach’s involvement in the entertainment industry dates to 1989, when he worked at Walt Disney Home Video and arranged the company’s first copyright protection deal. Auerbach spent five years at Hewlett-Packard in strategic business development, negotiating and managing accounts with Disney, Warner Bros., NBA, Sesame Workshop, Marvel Entertainment, and others. As executive vice president of Epic Rights, a global branding and marketing firm, he established partnerships with intellectual properties, including KISS, Aerosmith, John Lennon, and more. Auerbach founded and currently heads Amherst Partners, a consulting firm with clients ranging from start-ups to Hewlett-Packard.
Christopher L. Brown ’98
Founder and Managing Member
Brown & Rosen LLC, Boston
A BC Law adjunct professor of entertainment law, Brown’s entertainment practice focuses on R&B, Gospel, and Pop music artists, including Yolanda Adams, Fred Hammond, Bobby Brown, New Edition, and Day 26. He has negotiated music deals with Sony Music, Universal, Warner Bros., Rondor Music Publishing, RCA, and others, and television deals with BET, VH1, Lifetime, and Oxygen. Brown is counsel for Holly Carter, creator of the reality TV show Preachers of Los Angeles, and has represented talent on Making the Band, Love and Hip-Hop, and R&B Divas. He negotiated the book deal for Bobby Brown’s memoirs, and is Brown’s lead counsel in the investigation of the death of his daughter, Bobbi Kristina.
Glenn “GG” Gulino ’89
Founder and Owner
g2 entertainment LLC, New York
g2 entertainment is Gulino’s celebrity and corporate consulting firm, which he started in 2004 after a decade with the famed talent agency, William Morris. His company handles commercial endorsements, branding, and personal appearance matters for top-name talent like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jean Claude Van Damme, Zac Brown Band, and Elle Macpherson, as well as talent procurement and sponsorship guidance to Fortune 100 companies. As a Vice President at William Morris, Gulino specialized in celebrity marketing, and founded and was Worldwide Head of Licensing and Merchandising. He’s a member of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York and lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
Susan Kantrowitz ’80
Vice President and General Counsel
WGBH, Boston
Kantrowitz came to WGBH, a Public Broadcasting affiliate, in 1981 as a project lawyer, where she worked on the first season of Frontline, the Peabody, Pulitzer, and Emmy award-winning news documentary series. She oversees the production contracting process for WGBH programs, including Masterpiece Theatre and NOVA. Her first project, the thirteen-part, award-winning, television documentary series Vietnam: A Television History (1983), taught her the value of what lay on the cutting-room floor, and she supervised the establishment of WGBH’s media library, which now includes Open Vault, WGBH’s digitization project. It provides online access to source material, videos, and other content from WGBH’s television and radio shows.
James M. Kennedy ’84
Senior Vice President, Business Strategy and Chief Legal Counsel
Pixar, Emeryville
As a member of Pixar’s senior leadership team and chief legal counsel, Kennedy oversees the company’s legal and business affairs and works closely with his counterparts at Walt Disney Studios. He brings to Pixar more than twenty-five years of experience in entertainment law. He has held executive legal and business affairs positions at the California-based entertainment software company THQ, Inc., at Electronic Arts, Inc., Mindscape, Inc., and at Lucasfilm, Lucas Digital, and LucasArts Entertainment Company. A recognized expert in his field, Kennedy has been a law school lecturer and adjunct professor, and speaks frequently at entertainment industry events.
Lisa B. Margolis ’78
Senior Vice President, Business & Legal Affairs and Chief Music Counsel, Music Division
Warner Bros. Pictures, Burbank
Now in a coveted position in the entertainment law field, Margolis began as a freelance photographer. Her iconic photo of Rod Stewart graces the cover of his 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story, and her work has been published in Billboard, Rolling Stone, New York Daily News, Creem, Crawdaddy, and Zoo World. At Warner Bros, Margolis has brought her legal expertise to projects involving gold and platinum soundtrack albums, including City of Angels, The Bodyguard, Singles, Space Jam, A Walk to Remember, The Great Gatsby, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She serves on the board of directors for the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation.
John Mazzone ’85
Owner
JamSpot, Somerville and Wakefield
Mazzone founded JamSpot, the Boston area’s one-stop source for music rehearsal, recording, programs, and gear rental, in 2003. The idea came to him when he was living in Tokyo in the 1990s—“I played in a band with a bunch of other ex-pats,” he recalls. He realized that, unlike people who play golf or tennis, folks like him had no place to go to play music recreationally. Now with two locations (Somerville and Wakefield), JamSpot has served more than 10,000 musicians, including The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones and the J. Geils Band, and is considered a well-established part of Boston’s music scene.
Matt McGinnis ’91
Associate General Counsel, Corporate Transactions
The Walt Disney Company, Burbank
Disney originally hired McGinnis in 1996 to help develop three new location-based entertainment businesses. Since then, McGinnis has advised on Disney’s acquisitions of Marvel Entertainment and several cable networks, and in the purchases and subsequent sales of its broadcast radio businesses. He has created joint ventures in Russia, India, Brazil, Spain, and Korea for Disney’s television and film businesses, and has acquired multiple game developers and online properties to grow the company’s interactive division. McGinnis currently oversees the legal group that handles acquisitions, joint ventures, divestitures, and financings for Disney corporate and its ESPN, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, ABC, and Walt Disney Studios divisions.
Mathew S. Rosengart ’87
Shareholder, Entertainment & Media Litigator
Greenberg Traurig LLP, Los Angeles
A former federal prosecutor and law clerk for Justice David Souter on the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Rosengart is a celebrated entertainment law litigator, honored for two years in a row (2014 and 2015) by Variety Magazine (a top fifty “game changing” lawyer) and Hollywood Reporter (among the industry’s top 100 entertainment lawyers). He has also been recognized as one of California’s Top 100 Trial Lawyers. His recent high-profile, national cases include a multi-million dollar breach-of-contract lawsuit for the former talent managers of actor Julianna Margulies, and his successful defense of an Academy Award-nominated writer/director in a case involving Margaret, a film starring Matt Damon, and his representation of plaintiff Sean Penn in a $10 million defamation lawsuit.
Kenneth Samuel ’93
Senior Vice President, Program Standards
NBCUniversal, Universal City
Throughout his NBCUniversal career, Samuel served in creative, legal, and standards roles and collaborated with the producers of award-winning shows, including The Voice, The Tonight Show, Will & Grace, and The West Wing. Samuel took the helm of NBC’s West Coast Program Standards team in 2004, after working in NBC Programming, NBC Enterprises, and NBC International. He was a program executive for the final season of Seinfeld and for many NBC Specials, including the Golden Globe Awards and Emmy Awards. His standards team is responsible for creating and implementing content policies and guidelines for scripted and unscripted NBC entertainment programs.
Rhona Silverbush ’92
Acting and Shakespeare Coach and Lecturer
New York
Silverbush, who writes frequently about the theater, is co-author with Sami Plotkin of Speak the Speech: Shakespeare’s Monologues Illuminated, praised by Sir Derek Jacobi as “A fabulous book, gloriously packed with information.” Based in New York City, she coaches actors and students preparing for auditions, and offers theater courses and reading groups. Silverbush represented asylum seekers before returning to Shakespeare. “Teaching Shakespeare isn’t as significant as what I did in the law, but I think that there’s a through-line,” she says. “My interest in helping asylum seekers comes from the same place as my desire to understand the human experience, and Shakespeare explained that better than anyone.”
Stephen Wilson ’86
President and CEO
Fresno Philharmonic, Fresno
Wilson joined Fresno’s professional symphony orchestra in 2012 as its executive director, following twelve years in the same role at the Binghamton Philharmonic in Upstate New York. In the spirit of bringing outstanding musical experience to the community, Wilson has initiated partnerships between the philharmonic and the Fresno Art Museum, the Fresno Dance Collective, and Fresno State University. He serves on the boards of several Central San Joaquin Valley cultural organizations. For his work expanding the philharmonic’s educational programming to reach more than 11,000 students, Wilson was recently awarded the Yale School of Music’s Distinguished Music Educator Award.
Patric M. Verrone ’84
Television Writer, Attorney
Los Angeles
A three-time Emmy Award winner, Verrone has written for such legendary television shows as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, Pinky and the Brain, Rugrats, and Futurama. Time magazine named him a finalist in 2008 for the 100 Most Influential People in the World for leading the Writers Guild of America, West, through a 100-day strike that won writers their first contract covering the internet. A frequent commenter on entertainment law, Verrone has testified before the Federal Communications Commission, the US Senate Commerce Committee, and the California state legislature.
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