PRODUCTION BIOS
Robert Halmi, Jr. (Executive Producer) - Emmy® Award winner Robert Halmi Jr. currently serves as President of RHI Entertainment, LLC (formerly Hallmark Entertainment, LLC). His career as a film producer began in 1980 with Wilson's Reward, which garnered numerous awards, including a gold medal at the Houston Film Festival. He has produced more than 100 movies and miniseries for television, including Dreamkeeper, Dinotopia, Arabian Nights, The 10th Kingdom, Cleopatra, Alice in Wonderland, The Baby Dance and Lonesome Dove, which earned seven Emmy® Awards and a Golden Globe for Best Miniseries. Recent Halmi, Jr. “event” productions include Earthsea, Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, King Solomon’s Mines, La Femme Musketeer, Frankenstein, Frederick Forsyth’s Icon, Supernova, Mysterious Island and The Poseidon Adventure.
In 1984, at age 26, Halmi Jr. became President of RHI Entertainment Inc.(RHI) a publicly traded entertainment company founded by his father. In 1994, RHI was sold to Hallmark Cards Inc. and Halmi Jr. became President and CEO of Hallmark Entertainment, the successor to RHI. For over the past decade, Hallmark Entertainment has remained the largest supplier of movies and miniseries in the television industry, garnering more Emmy nominations for television movies than any other production company in the history of television. Under Halmi Jr’s guidance, Hallmark Entertainment has produced over 2,000 hours of television programming. These shows have received 431 Emmy® nominations and garnered 103 Emmy® Awards.
From 1994-2005, Hallmark Entertainment provided four of the top five highest rated miniseries and movies made for television, including 2004’s highest rated original movie, Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Hallmark Entertainment productions have also topped the ratings charts of the major basic cable networks, Earthsea for SciFi Channel (their highest rated miniseries in 2005), Meet the Santas for Hallmark Channel (highest rated in the history of the network), and recently Lifetime television with Human Trafficking, the highest rated miniseries on basic cable for 2005.
In 1995, Halmi Jr. was instrumental in forming Crown Media Holdings, Inc., which owns and operates pay television channels across the globe dedicated to high quality, broad appeal, entertainment programming. In 2000, Crown Media went public on the Nasdaq® stock exchange. To date, Crown Media has launched channels in more than 122 countries and in 25 languages.
In January 2006, Halmi Jr. along with members of senior management and affiliates Kelso & Company, a private investment firm, acquired all the ownership interest in Hallmark Entertainment, LLC (a wholly owned subsidiary of Hallmark Cards) and re-launched the company as RHI Entertainment, LLC.
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LARRY LEVINSON (Executive Producer) – Larry Levinson has extensive credits as an executive producer, including the four-hour "Johnson County War" and blockbuster miniseries, "Larry McMurtry's Streets of Laredo" and "Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk." His Hallmark Channel productions include "The Last Cowboy," “Straight From the Heart,” “Love Comes Softly,” “Audrey’s Rain,” "The King and Queen of Moonlight Bay,” “Hard Ground,” “Mystery Woman,” “A Time to Remember,” “Just Desserts,” “A Place Called Home,” “The Long Shot (Believe in Courage),” “King Solomon’s Mines,” “La Femme Musketeer,” “The Trail to Hope Rose,” “The Hollywood Mom’s Mystery,” “Murder Without Conviction,” “Wedding Daze,” “Frankenstein,” “Love’s Enduring Promise,” “Out of the Woods,” “Thicker Than Water,” “Single Santa Seeks Mrs. Claus,” “A Boyfriend for Christmas,” “Jane Doe,” “Mystery Woman,” and “McBride.” He also executive produced “Mark Twain’s Roughing It,” “Everything That Rises” with Dennis Quaid, “Rough Riders” with Tom Berenger, and a series of “Hard Time” telefilms starring Burt Reynolds as detective Logan McQueen. Previously, Levinson was supervising producer for the Kenny Rogers’ telefilms, “MacShayne: The Final Roll of the Dice” and “MacShayne: Winner Takes All.”
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DAVID S. CASS, SR. (Director) – A former stuntman, David S. Cass, Sr. has a Hollywood career that has spanned 30 years of acting, writing, producing and directing. He helmed the telefilms “Gentle Ben” and its sequel, “Night of the Wolf,” “Hard Time: The Premonition,” “Straight from the Heart,” “Life on Liberty Street,” “The Trail to Hope Rose” and “Thicker than Water.” His prior work includes several motion pictures for television as a second unit director, including “Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo,” “Larry McMurtry’s Dead Man’s Walk,” “Everything That Rises,” and the miniseries “Attila.” Cass wrote the made-for-TV movies “Gambler V: Playing for Keeps,” “Hard Ground” and “Hard Time,” which he also produced.
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DAN FITZSIMONS (Writer) – Dan Fitzsimons was a staff assistant on the feature films “Coyote Ugly” and “Gone in Sixty Seconds.” “Desolation Canyon” is his first screenplay to be produced for television.
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