Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for Professional Directions with Producer Lee Rosenthal ‘87 and Actor Bob Clendenin ’87 on Friday, November 15, at 5:00 pm, in the Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. The event will be hosted by PMA Associate Professor, Beth Frances Milles '88 and is free and open to the public.
Lee Rosenthal ’87 and Bob Clendenin ’87 met as college students, where they co-founded Whistling Shrimp, Cornell’s oldest improv comedy troupe specializing in long-form improvisation. Lee and Bob have gone on to lead prestigious careers in the Entertainment industry. Lee Rosenthal is the President of Worldwide Physical Production for Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Studios. Bob Clendenin has appeared in over 100 television shows and can currently be seen in Bad Monkey on Apple and Bookie on HBO. How did they get there? What can they share about their journeys? Their visit will coincide with the 40th Anniversary reunion of Whistling Shrimp at Cornell.
Lee Rosenthal’s production management team is responsible for supervising physical production, staffing, budgeting, and troubleshooting for the full slate of Paramount feature films and Nickelodeon television series and SVODs – both live action and animated, from pre-production through filming, visual effects, and post production. Lee started at Paramount in 1994 as an assistant to the Vice President of Production Management and was elevated to Production Executive and Vice President before eventually becoming head of the department in 2009. In 2022, he added Nickelodeon animation and live-action production to his purview. Recent projects supervised include Gladiator 2, Top Gun: Maverick, A Quiet Place and Rango, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Bob Clendenin: Cornell’s College of Engineering begrudgingly gave Bob a degree on the condition he not work in the field so he went to Penn State where he received an MFA in acting. After some stints in regional theatre, he landed in Los Angeles in the mid 90s to pursue a career in film and television. Since then, he has appeared in over 100 television shows, two dozen studio films, and nearly 200 national commercials. He tends to play a lot of oddball loners, weird security guards, and creepy neighbors. In addition to co-founding Whistling Shrimp with Lee Rosenthal, he also co-founded the Circle X Theatre Company in Los Angeles. He has one son who is a Cornell alum, and one who is a current student. He lives in Burbank with his wife and a blind pug named Marge. Read more about his work: https://www.robertclendenin.com/
The Professional Directions series brings industry experts to campus to speak about their career journeys as screenwriters, playwrights, editors, producers, directors, theatre critics, dramaturgs, and more.
