The Beginning

Riveting River Productions, Inc. began almost twenty years ago with a vision by Ben Thum, an award-winning radio and television producer and former KFI Los Angeles talk show host. Ben sought a way to pay tribute to the best and brightest comedians by examining the reasons behind the extraordinary success of Jews in comedy. He was inspired by a Time Magazine article that noted while Jewish people comprise only 2% of the population, 80% of America’s humorists happen to be Jewish. Ben (pictured above with Jerry Stiller and Carl Reiner) began traveling the country interviewing some of the greatest comedy minds. His mission to document these comedy geniuses before they passed resulted in developing an impressive collection of original footage.

The next step was to decide what to do with a library of interviews. The company made plans to create a feature-length documentary called A Gift for Laughter—using a mixture of the original interviews combined with archival clips featuring great comedy routines of the past. A Gift for Laughter was to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish contribution to American comedy. Initial plans to produce the docu-comedy (a meld between a documentary and a comedy) were put on hold as Ben saw a need to grow the company and bring in the marketing, legal, and financial experts critical to its success. Riveting River had reached a point where it was ready to move forward with accomplishing Ben’s original vision to make A Gift for Laughter a reality.

In the Meantime

A decade ago, Ben attached Roger Margulies to the project—an Art Director of the Collaborative, an award-winning national communications firm, creating graphics and campaigns informing and bringing people together. Roger and Ben worked with the Collaborative to develop a comedy project that, different from the documentary vision, would be a one-hour television series focused on when America invented modern comedy. Just as Mad Men tells of the birth of advertising using real events and fictional characters, Seriously Funny combines actual events with fictional characters to tell the story of American comedy’s genesis.

Riveting River enlisted Neal Gabler to write a screenplay for Seriously Funny to do justice to such an essential part of American culture. Neal was the perfect candidate for the task-based upon his national acclaim as the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and other best sellers on entertainment. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Playboy, Newsweek, and Vogue. He has been the recipient of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Time Magazine’s nonfiction book of the year, USA Today’s biography of the year, a National Book Critics Circle nomination, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many more accolades. Neal didn’t disappoint. Seriously Funny is a poignant, compelling, and of course, funny screenplay ready for production.

Script Read
Seriously Funny script walk-through in front of a packed audience. (from left to right)
Patrick McEvoy, Community Actor
Bob Sarlatte: Actor, radio and TV personality
Maggie Velasquez, Community Actor
Ross DeHovitz, Community Actor
Dina Jacobson, Community Actor
Ken Abrams, Community Actor
Ilona Pollak, Community Actor
Jace Pollak, Community Actor
Billie Harris, Community Actor
Ben Thum, Riveting River Producer

Getting to Today

While working on A Gift for Laughter and Seriously Funny, other irons were in the fire. Ben and Roger’s team of dedicated workers saw firsthand the challenges of breaking into the entertainment world as newcomers and outsiders. Opening doors and finding open minds and ears is not an easy task in Tinseltown. As connections were made and different approaches were tried, Riveting River found it could use its ever-increasing experience to help others. They sought out writers from across the country who had created terrific screenplays yet weren’t privy to proper approaches and reliable contacts in Hollywood. That is when the Riveting River portfolio began to grow into what it is today. From movies to television shows and from comedies to dramas, the current diversity of offerings reinforces the opportunities for the company’s success and those in its folds.

Riveting River also discovered the need to work with the script submitters to take their writing to the highest level possible through a series of reviews (coverage) and rewrites. Once the scripts have achieved a desired state of perfection, the Riveting River team creates support materials (a.k.a. bible) and shops the project to one of its independent studio partners. Together the parties seek to attach actors, a director, and others to the offering before taking it to the biggest studios, networks, and streaming services for approval and green-lighting. A screenwriter can consider Riveting River to be a reliable and valuable partner throughout this long and arduous process of seeing their dream become a reality.