Bill Bleich
CRC Fellow, Radio/TV/Film

By Eri Okuma

Bill Bleich is a screenwriting professor in the RTVF department. His love of movies developed early in life: listening to his father’s stories of running reels back and forth between silent movie houses and hearing how his aunt Katie, in her early teens, played piano accompaniment for those films are among his fondest memories. As a kid, he once went to a run-down neighborhood movie theater and stayed through the same Western 3 times in a row – and would have stayed longer if his father had not come stomping down the aisle to drag him outside and heave him through the open window of the car and into the backseat, Hollywood movie style.

When he was a law student at the University of California at Berkeley, Bill had a job as a “theater checker” and was paid by a detective agency, working for film distributors, to make sure the local houses weren’t stealing and the operations were being run according to policy. In that capacity, he got to see around 15 movies every month, had to count the house and even buy popcorn, soda and candy and send back the wrappers to the detective agency. He remembers how, in an all-black area of Oakland, he would always be the only white guy in the theatre, so the employees would automatically know, “Oh, here comes the checker.” Since he is a film lover, this was his perfect job.

After law school, Bill got his MFA at UCLA film school, where he wrote stand-up comedy for comedians such as David Letterman. Since then, he has written and been a producer on over a dozen network television movies, features, mini-series and pilots. However, he tries to avoid reading reviews of his own work, feeling that those who “live by the sword -- die by the sword.”

Bill enjoys being a CRC faculty fellow, and says he “loves seeing students in their natural habitat.” As an example, he recalls the time he sat in the CRC section at Hinman and discussed the fine points of Fergie’s newest MTV video with a couple of CRCers, a topic that most likely wouldn’t come up in the classroom. Bill regularly participates in dorm activities such as Radiothon and munchies, so when you see him around, come say hi!

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