Lee Caplin

Lee Caplin is an American film producer and executive. He founder and chairman of Picture Entertainment Corporation,[1] a motion picture, television and theatrical production company that Executive Produced the Sony-Columbia Pictures $115 million feature film "Ali", starring Will Smith. Caplin is co-owner of Keystone Studios the successor to America's first motion picture studio, founded by Mack Sennett in 1912.

Caplin is the son of prominent lawyer and former Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Mortimer Caplin, and screenwriter, Ruth Sacks Caplin.[2]

He is executive producer of the Literary Estate of Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner. In 2005, Lee Caplin co-founded PMC - a business that started as Velocity Services Incorporated ("VSI"), an affinity marketing and internet services company that later briefly operated as Interactive Digital Publishing Group. The company acquired the mail.com domain, was renamed Mail.com Media Corporation ("MMC"), and re-launched the domain as a new service in 2007. The company then successfully created, built, and sold (Mail.com), which was at the time the 5th largest web portal, to United Internet.

In 2008, the company raised $35 million of venture capital financing from an investor group led by Quadrangle Capital Partners. In 2009 it bought Deadline Hollywood Daily, an entertainment industry insider blog, from its founder Nikki Finke, in a cash and stock earnout transaction valued at $10-$15 million.

On April 27, 2010, Mail.com Media Corp. announced it had acquired American technology blog 'Boy Genius Report' via a press release posted on Boy Genius's website. The Boy Genius Report announced its intentions to relocate its website to newly acquired "www.bgr.com", which was launched in May 2010. In November 2010, the company launched TVLine.com, a consumer TV focused website, operated by co-founder and Editor in Chief Michael Ausiello, formerly of Entertainment Weekly, Oncars.com, and purchased 40% of India.com, one of the largest internet providers in Asia and which carries MMC content.

Mail.com was sold to the German company United Internet in 2010, however MMC continues to be an exclusive content provider to United Internet and the Mail.com portal, as well as to India.com,m and launched a German-language version of BGR.com in March 2011.

In 2012 MMC was renamed Penske Media Corporation ("PMC").

In October 2012, PMC bought Variety from Reed Elsevier. PMC continues to be the owner of Nikki Finke's Deadline.com which since the 2007-08 WGA strike has been considered Variety's largest competitor in online showbiz news. On October 10, 2012, Jay Penske announced the paywall for Variety would come down, the print version would remain, and that he would invest more in the digital platform Variety.com.

Caplin's companies have published over 200 titles of illustrated educational and children's and books. He is also author of the book The Business of Art.[3]

Caplin was a Founding Faculty member of California State University Monterey Bay’s high tech campus in the establishment of its program in telecommunications, and participates on the International Advisory Board of the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Center for Non-Proliferation.[4] He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Duke University, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review.

Filmography

Producer

... aka William Faulkner's Old Man
... aka Fulfillment
... aka Dracula: The Love Story

Director

References

  1. ↑ Picture Entertainment website
  2. ↑ Langer, Emily (2014-08-09). "Ruth Sacks Caplin, screenwriter of 'Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,' dies at 93". Washington Post. Retrieved 2014-09-01.
  3. ↑ Caplin, Lee, The Business of Art, Prentice Hall Press, 1998
  4. ↑ Center for Non-Proliferation website

External links