Jerry Sherlock is an educator and former film and theater producer. Sherlock founded the New York Film Academy School of Film & Acting, in 1992. Sherlock currently resides in New York City and is the President of the New York Film Academy.
Starting his career as a roustabout in a carnival at the age of fourteen, Sherlock became a film and Broadway producer[1] in the early 1980s. As an independent producer for film, stage, and television he developed projects for Disney, Warner Brothers, United Artists, Paramount, E.M.I. and others.[2] His credits are Executive Producer of the major motion picture, The Hunt for Red October, for Paramount Pictures; the Producer of Lolita, a Broadway production; and Executive Producer of the television production, Amal and the Night Visitors, for CBS.
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Sherlock dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to join the carnival. From the circus he joined the United States Air Force before receiving an honorable discharge. He started his career as a buyer for S. Klein, On The Square (he would return to Union Square years later to house the New York Film Academy in the Tammany Hall building), before eventually leaving to establish his own design business in Tokyo and Hong Kong.
He returned to New York to join Amtec, a textile brokerage, which he eventually built up to become the largest company of its kind in the world.
Sherlock left textiles to establish his own film production company, within six-months of establishing his company he had produced his first film, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen in 1981, starring Michelle Pfeiffer (in one of her first major roles), Peter Ustinov and Angie Dickinson. Later in 1981 he would produce an Edward Albee adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The play starred Donald Sutherland as Humbert Humbert.
Sherlock went on to work as an independent producer for Disney, Paramount, United Artists and EMI. He had purchased the rights to the Tom Clancy novel Hunt for Red October which he would Executive Produce through Paramount.
In 1991 he went back to China, consulting for their film industry and founded the New York Film Academy upon returning to New York in 1992.
Jerry's son Jean Sherlock runs the Universal Studios branch of the New York Film Academy.