Gábor Beszterczey, Ph.D.
Abamedia
Web Site Producer
RED FILES
Gábor Beszterczey, Ph.D., is Abamedia's Director of European Business Development. In this capacity he represents the Russian State Film and Photo Archive outside of Russia, supervising the cataloguing, database and software creation of this project. Dr. Beszterczey was the producer/director for over half of the Fodor's films, and served as international producer for Made in Russia (CTC, Russia) and Yanks for Stalin (History Channel, USA)

He is an international journalist and has produced over 200 documentaries and series programs for Hungarian and international television. As the Western European Correspondent for Hungarian TV Channel 1, Dr. Beszterczey has produced projects in Western Europe, the United States and the Middle East.

With over 15 years of experience in international production, a Ph.D. in Sociology and a second Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations, Dr. Beszterczey is a valuable asset for contacts on the world political and media scene.

William Cran
InVision
Series Producer
RED FILES
Writer, Producer, Director
RED FILES: SECRET VICTORIES OF THE KGB
William Cran's career in television started at the BBC in 1969, where he worked for eight years, three of them at PANORAMA, the Corporation's flagship current affairs program. In 1976, he moved to Canada where he became senior producer for THE FIFTH ESTATE, CBC's top-rated public affairs program. In 1979 he began a lasting association with WGBH-TV in Boston.

Cran is a documentary filmmaker whose independent production company, InVision, has produced more than 50 television programs since 1980. He has won more than two dozen awards, including four national Emmys, two duPont-Columbia awards, and a Peabody award.

InVison's recent productions for PBS include FRONTLINE's lauded "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians" and "Ambush in Mogadishu" (which won the Edward R. Murrow Overseas Press Club Award), both telecast in 1998. Other FRONTLINE documentaries for PBS include "The Godfather of Cocaine" (1995), "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?" (1993), and the controversial and critically acclaimed "The Secret File on J. Edgar Hoover" (1993), which made headlines around the world. The eight-part series "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," which aired on PBS in 1993, won numerous awards and garnered national media attention.

Mr. Cran is currently working on FRONTLINE "Apocalypse!" (working title), a two-hour special to be telecast on PBS on Tuesday, November 22 (check local listings).

George Feifer
Writer
RED FILES Companion Book published by TV Books
George Feifer, a well-respected journalist and writer, has written the companion book for the RED FILES series.

Mr. Feifer graduated from Harvard College, and received a Russian Institute Certificate from Columbia University, with an exchange year at Moscow State University. After working as a news writer for CBS News and holding various roles on BBC radio and television, he has primarily concentrated on free-lance writing. His published books related to Russian topics include: Justice in Moscow, Message from Moscow, The Girl from Petrovka, Sozhenitsyn, and Moscow Farewell. His work Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb, was selected as a New York Times "Notable of 1992". He has additionally published articles, essays, and book reviews in major American, British, and European magazines.

Paul Foss
Composer
RED FILES
Under the banner of his company 'Sound to Picture', Paul Foss has been composing successful, award-winning music scores since 1988. An experienced composer with an international reputation, Paul has written sound tracks for several international documentary series and for numerous single programs. In 1998, he created the full music score for the WGBH four-part series "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians", and the BBC story of the Roman Empire's last, great conquest, "The Roman Way of War." Frontline/WGBH has recently released a soundtrack CD of the music included in "From Jesus to Christ."

Additionally, Mr. Foss composed the full musical score for the landmark PBS 8-part series on the oil industry, "The Prize - The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power". His score for the Learning Channel's "Flights of Courage" was nominated for an Emmy for Music Score. Other work includes creating music for CNN's daily programming covering the trial of O.J. Simpson in 1996, and numerous scores for other BBC, A&E, and PBS programs.

J. Mitchell Johnson
Abamedia
Series Producer
RED FILES
Drawing on more than two decades of filmmaking, RED FILES series producer, J. Mitchell Johnson - founder, president, and CEO of Abamedia - is an award-winning producer of documentary and current affairs programming for domestic and international television. Abamedia's reputation for unique access to Russian cultural, academic and governmental institutions stems, in part, from Mr. Johnson's pioneering efforts in US/Russian television programming, having produced the first U.S./Russian current affairs series, "Everybody's Talking," with ABC News for Ostankino/ORT Russia.

In 1996 Abamedia was invited by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to participate in a media partnership program in the former Soviet Union, which led to the creation of Abamedia's Archive Media Project (AMP): the official international trade representative of the Russian State Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk. Krasnogorsk is the major repository of historic documentary images of Russia and the former Soviet Union - many of which have never been seen by Western or Russian eyes.

Among Mr. Johnson's documentary productions for PBS are THE VAN CLBURN INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION; LILI, a docudrama on the life of pianist Lili Kraus; six film shorts on SESAME STREET (Children's Television Workshop) and the award-winning documentary on Philip Johnson's celebrated design, WATERGARDEN.

His work also extend to new media. Abamedia's Russian Archives Online (RAO) and World Archive Online (WAO) is a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) supported human heritage database project to be instantly accessible for self-customized levels of research via the Internet. A preview of RAO will be part of the RED FILES Web site at www.pbs.org.

Barbara Keys
Writer
RED FILES Web Site
Currently working toward her Ph.D. at Harvard University, Barbara Keys adds a wealth of historical knowledge to the RED FILES project. Her particular expertise lies in the following areas: Modern International History, Modern Russian History, Medieval Russian History and United States History since 1789.

She has served as a tutor for this History Department at Harvard University, teaching weekly seminars for junior honors candidates and sophomore history majors. She also led weekly discussion sections as a teaching fellow.

Barbara has been awarded numerous fellowships and awards: Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship, U.S. Department of Education, 1989-94; Phi Beta Kappa, 1987; Sarah Bradley Gamble Fellowship, Harvard University, 1994-95; Honors in Independent Study for Senior Thesis, Carlton College, 1987; Noyers Prize, Carlton College, 1986; and Mortar Board Freshman Prize, Carlton College, 1984.

Her published works include the following: "Victor Kravchenko." Censorhip: An International Encyclopedia (Fitzroy Dearborn, forthcoming); "James Jesus Angleton." American National Biography, John A. Garraty, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); "Russian Serfdom." The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, 2 vols., Junius P. Rodrigues, ed. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1997); and "Developing Students' Ideas Through Paper Proposals" (Co-author with Erika Dreifus) Harvard Writing Project Bulletin, Fall 1996, p. 10.

Phillip Knightley
Special correspondent for The Sunday Times for twenty years (1965-85) and one of the leaders of its Insight investigative team. He was twice named Journalist of the Year (1980 and 1988) in the British Press Awards--apart from John Pilger, the only journalist ever to have won it twice. He was also Granada Reporter of the Year (1980), Colour Magazine Writer of the Year (1982), holder of the Chef and Brewer Crime Writer's award (1983), and the Overseas Press Club of America award for the best book on foreign affairs in 1975 (The First Casualty)

His books include:
Philby, KGB Masterspy, Andre Deutsch and Knopf
The First Casualty (on war and propaganda), Andre Deutsch and Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich (Book of the Month Club main choice)
The Second Oldest Profession (on espionage), Andre Deutsch and W. W. Norton (Book of the Month Club Alternative choice)
An Affair of State (on the Profumo scandal), Cape
The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, Nelson
Lawrence of Arabia, Sidgwick & Jackson (children's book)
A Pearl of Days, Hamish Hamilton
Suffer the Children (on thalidomide), Andre Deutsch and Simon and Schuster
The Death of Venice (on attempts to save Venice), Deutsch and Praeger
The Rise and Fall of the House of Vestey, Little Brown

He has lectured on journalism, law, and war at the City University London, Manchester University, Queen Elizabeth College Oxford, Penn State, UCLA, the Inner Temple, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and at the RMA Sandhurst.

He presented the war reporting documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of "This Week"; a half-hour documentary on truth for schools' television; has reviewed the papers for BBC Breakfast TV and many "What the Papers Say". He has appeared in many documentaries in Britain, Canada and Australia.

He reviews non-fiction books for The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Times, The Independent (London) and The Australian's Review of Books and The Age (Australia) He is a judge for Canada's Lionel Gelber Prize for the year's best book on international relations ($50,000)

He is a columnist for several leading Indian newspapers and magazines and knows the Indian literary and publishing scene.

Phillip Knightley was born in Australia but has spent most of his life in Britain. He was a special correspondent for The Sunday Times for twenty years and a leader of its team of investigative reporters, Insight. He was twice named British journalist of the year (1980 and 1988) and won the Overseas Press Club of America award in 1975 for the best book on foreign affairs, a history of war reporting and propaganda called "The First Casualty". He has lectured on journalism, law and war at various British and American universities and for the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Royal Military Acadamy, Sandhurst. He travels widely--mostly in India and the South Pacific. He is married with three grown-up children and relaxes by playing tennis most days.

Stephan Lang
RED FILES Web site Writer
Mr. Lang is a freelance Russian interpreter and translator residing in Washington DC. He has an extensive background in Sovietology and ethnography, including graduate work at the prestigious Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He is fluent in Russian, and has travelled widely throughout the former Soviet Union in his work for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and numerous US Government Departments, Agencies, and National Laboratories, and Fortune 500 corporations. A partial list of the persons he has interpreted for includes Vice President Al Gore, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbaev, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. He has been the translator of the academic journals "Soviet Statutes and Decisions" since 1989 and "Anthropology and Archaeology of Eurasia" since 1992.

Steven Leibman
Abamedia
Series Development and Story Editor
Web Site Development
RED FILES
Steven Leibman is Abamedia's senior vice president of creative affairs. Previously, Mr. Leibman was with Touchstone Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures, as vice president of Tom Schulman Productions (the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Dead Poets Society); director of marketing and communications for the Los Angeles Theater Center and Connecticut's Hartford Ballet; and co-founder and president of the licensed genre film merchandiser, The Thinking Cap Company (e.g. Blade Runner, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back)

Jonathan Sanders, PhD
Writer/Editor
RED FILES Web site Investigative Resources

Calling upon his extensive background as a former CBS News Correspondent in Moscow, Jonathan Sanders brings years of research experience to this project. As a News Correspondent, he provided a history-based perspective and eyewitness reporting on all major political, economic, social and scientific developments across Eurasia. Most notably were his stories on the Chechen war for independence; Russian Presidential Elections; and breaking special news events, particularly the failed coups against Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

He spent 1977-78 as a Fulbright Scholar at Moscow State University and received a PhD from Columbia's History Department in 1985. Professor Sanders is the author of Russia 1917: The Unpublished Revolution; V.V. Shul'gin: The Years; Comrade X Was Wrong: Soviet, TV Coverage of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster; and with Heidi Hollinger, The Face of Modern Russia's Political Opposition (forthcoming, North America: summer 1999; Russia: Nov. 1999).

From its founding until summer 1988 he served as assistant director of the W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. Sanders created the Working Group on Soviet Television at Columbia University and helped spread its technological innovations to many other university-based Soviet Studies programs. He also served as Assistant Director at Columbia University of the Russian Institute School of International and Public Affairs between 1980 and 1982, and as Princeton University's Ferris Professor of Journalism from 1998-1999.

 

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