User:Stphone/Michel Shane

Michel Shane (born October 8, 1955) is a film producer and co-founder of Hand Picked Films. He is best known for producing I, Robot and Catch Me If You Can.

Personal life
Shane was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the son of Sheldon Gerald Shane, an industrial psychologist and psycho-therapist, and Vivien Ray (Shane), a Belgian World War II refugee who moved to New York at the age of nine. He also has a younger brother, Reid Shane, who is also a film producer. Shane now lives in Los Angeles, California, and is currently married with three daughters.

Since his father is Canadian, and his mother American, Shane has dual Canadian-American citizenship.

Career
Shane got his first taste of the movie business in high school when he directed and produced a video short of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." Then, at age 17, he picked up a job as a page with CFCF, a local television network, followed by an internship at Columbia Pictures Television. In 1980, after graduating with a degree in Communication and Marketing from McGill University, he moved to Lansing, Michigan, to seek a degree in Entertainment Law at Cooley Law School. After two years, however, he left Cooley to enter the newly developing video industry.

In 1982, in an effort to study the emerging market, Shane attended a conference on the future of video in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he was mistaken as an industry expert by a local news affiliate. With this small break, he was able to develop connections and start MKS, an independent video distribution company, which at the beginning sold "How To" videos from the trunk of his car. Two years later, Shane turned MKS into the Prolusion Group with the help of a few business partners, and began to travel internationally purchasing new titles at film festivals he attended.

Leaving Prolusion in 1987, Shane began working in television distribution on his own, and started consulting work in Hollywood. During the next several years he produced “Return to the Titanic Live” and “Dracula Live From Transylvania” for television networks in Canada, and acquired the rights to the book, “Catch Me If You Can.”

In 2005, Shane founded Hand Picked Films, an independent film and television production company, with business partner Anthony Romano. Romano is in charge of television production, and Shane film production. Based out of both Los Angeles and Montreal, Hand Picked has established itself as an international production company, recently producing films in Brazil, Italy, Croatia, India, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Shane also teaches film finance and production classes at UCLA and is a touring lecturer on independent film financing. He is a motivational speaker too.

Film

 * A Christmas Story at the Vatican (1991) (producer)
 * Rennie's Landing (2001) (producer)
 * Catch Me If You Can (2002) (executive producer)
 * Northfork (2003) (executive producer)
 * I, Robot (2004) (executive producer)
 * Statistics (2006) (executive producer)
 * Hounddog (2007) (executive producer)
 * Badland (2007) (executive producer)
 * Buff Enough (2009) (producer and executive producer)
 * Not Another Not Another Movie (2009) (executive producer)
 * Blood: A Butcher's Tale (2009) (executive producer)
 * Vivaldi (2010) (producer)
 * Silver Cord (2010) (producer)
 * Buddha (2010) (executive producer)
 * A Girl and a Gun (2010) (executive producer)
 * Who Is Brad Lenz? (2010) (producer)
 * Butterflies & Lightning (2011) (producer)
 * Cradlewood (2011) (producer)

TV

 * Return to the Titanic Live (1988) (producer)
 * Dracula Live From Transylvania (1989) (producer)
 * Dr. 90210 (2007) (actor)