In Search of Lost Time

I have reached a major crossroad in my life. For the past 27 years, I was the CEO of City Lights Media, a film and television company I founded with my brother Jack, and to which my brother Joe joined a number of years later.  With the recent downturn in the economy, great upheaval in the independent film industry and other factors, City Lights Media has shut its doors.  Barry Diller’s IAC bought the remnants of City Lights and is operating it as a company called Notional, run and staffed entirely by people who used to work at the company I built.

In 2008, there were 400 people working for me.  Today I operate out of my Park Slope, Brooklyn brownstone with my brother Jack and a handful of associates.  I am very happy – most days.  I am working on rebuilding my career, and pursuing a number of ventures in film, television and the internet, as well as general business ventures outside of  media.  At the same time, I seek to define, focus and develop on all levels – professional, personal, spiritual – the remaining years of my life.

I have been summoning the numerous influences on my life – my family, the people I have met, the art, literature, film and music that has inspired me, the memories of experiences both joyous and challenging – and mostly the art of fully appreciating each day as a gift and a blessing.

From Marcel Proust at the moment he sipped his famous cup of tea:

And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

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