Biography
Al has enjoyed an eclectic career, first as a business attorney, then an investment banker, and finally as an independent film producer and distributor.
After leaving college for two years - one to race and sell skis in Colorado and another to serve as a researcher and speech writer for U.S. Senator Charles H. Percy in Washington -- Al graduated with a B.A. in History from Princeton in 1978 and then earned his law and MBA degrees simultaneously from Cornell in 1982.
Following his graduation, he worked in San Francisco as a corporate and securities lawyer, first with the firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, then as General Counsel & Head of Acquisitions at the global fast food franchiser, Shakey's International. In 1989 he returned to New York where he worked for five years as an investment banker in the Real Estate Capital Markets Group at Bankers Trust Company (now Deutsche Bank) where he helped complete a number of high profile assignments, including the purchase of several hundred million dollars of distressed commercial mortgages for the bank's own account, and a two-year posting to London to start the group's new European office. While there, among other deals, he originated and helped execute the largest structured real estate financing ever completed in Europe at the time ($1.8 billion).
Looking for a change, Al left the financial world in 1994 and started Filbert Steps Productions where, with a financial partner, he produced all of the company's films and succeeded in selling them to world class entertainment outlets like Bravo, Lifetime, Lions Gate, Lorber Films and The Samuel Goldwyn Company. His films have won a collection of awards including the Audience Award at the 2000 Sundance Film festival for Two Family House, Best Dramatic Feature at the 2005 Austin Film Festival for Runaway, and a special 100th anniversary National Board of Review award in 2009 for Trumbo, plus selections to lots of top tier international festivals including Cannes, Toronto, Deauville, London, San Sebastian, and Rio de Janeiro.
In 2008, Al co-founded and ran Filmcatcher with another financial partner, a blog that commented randomly and with flexible taste for years on all things film-related. The blog now resides exclusively on a YouTube channel where the hundreds of on-camera interviews it shot with cutting edge filmmakers and actors are posted, including Dennis Hopper, Charlie Kaufman, Paul Giamatti, Anthony Hopkins, Edie Falco, Colin Furth, Elliott Gould, Danny Glover, Marissa Tomei, Zooey Deschanel, Darren Aronofsky, Bruce Dern, John Sayles, Ben Kingsley, Paul Schrader, Jeff Goldblum, and Mike Leigh.
Most recently, Al co-founded Fisher Klingenstein Films with veteran film and TV distributors Danny and Jack Fisher and another financial partner. Fisher Klingenstein has licensed over 2,000 film and TV titles since its inception in the fall of 2010 and now distributes its content worldwide through its growing relationships with most of the largest film, television and internet companies. In 2011, Fisher also created iWIDK ("Wish I Didn't Know"), an online magazine that features articles, pictures and videos that are weird, shocking, funny, entertaining, helpful or inspiring. iWIDK now attracts over 650,000 hits consistently from more than 150,000 unique visitors on a monthly basis (August, 2012).
