| Educated at Bennington College and the California Institute of the Arts Film School, BRUCE BERMAN (Executive Producer) graduated Magna Cum Laude from UCLA in 1975 with a major in history. He went on to graduate from Georgetown Law School 1978, and was admitted to the California Bar that same year.
Berman got his start in the motion picture business with Jack Valenti at the MPAA in Washington, D.C., working as his assistant while in law school. After graduating, he returned to Los Angeles and started working as Peter Gruber's assistant at Casablanca Filmworks in September of 1978. He went on to work as assistant to Sean Daniel and Joel Silver at Universal Pictures in July 1979, becoming a production Vice President at Universal in 1982.
In 1984, Berman came to Warner Bros. Pictures as a Production VP and was promoted to Senior VP of Production in 1988. He was appointed President of Theatrical Production in September 1989, and then President of Worldwide Theatrical Production in 1991, where he served through May, 1996. Under the aegis, Warner Bros. Pictures, produced and distributed the following: Presumed Innocent, Goodfellas, Robin Hood, Driving Miss Daisy, Batman Forever, Under Siege, Malcolm X, The Bodyguard, JFK, The Fugitive, Dave, Disclosure, The Pelican Brief, Outbreak, The Client, A Time to Kill and Twister.
In May of 1996, Berman started Plan B Entertainment, an independent motion picture production company at Warner Bros. Pictures.
Berman was appointed Chairman and CEO of Village Roadshow Pictures in February, 1998. Village Roadshow Pictures will make 60 theatrical features as a joint venture partner with Warner Bros. Pictures through 2007. The initial slate of films included Practical Magic, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman; Analyze This, starring Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal; The Matrix, starring Keanu Reaves and Laurence Fishburne; Deep Blue Sea, starring Samuel L. Jackson; Three Kings, starring George Clooney; Space Cowboys, starring Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones; Miss Congeniality, starring Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt; and Cats & Dogs.
Subsequent releases included Training Day, starring Academy Award-winning Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke; Ocean's Eleven, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts; Analyze That; Two Weeks Notice, starring Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant; The Matrix Reloaded; The Matrix Revolutions; Mystic River, starring Sean Penn and Tim Robbins; Ocean's Twelve; Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves; Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous and House of Wax. Up next is the film The Dukes of Hazzard, starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds and Willie Nelson. |
