40 Years Behind the Numbers of Hollywood

Thank you.

Okay, so I'm going to go into my first question, and it's going to take us back in time.

Please share your journey that led you from theater, which I think that was really where you started from, to a career in forensic accounting.

You're going to have to explain that to me.

You know, to put it simply, it has to do a lot with money.

I love the theater and I love the 12 years that I spent in it.

But it was very difficult to make a decent living.

I managed to get by, but I had a young son and I was going through a divorce.

And there's all these questions about he seemed to have a bright future.

And I wanted to make sure that I had enough money to let him realize that.

I had always been good with math.

Even in high school, I was being sort of shoved in that direction.

Then, unfortunately, I found the theater, and it was just all over.

I was in love.

So I went from basically realizing that I was good with figures, that I spent several years with Santa Cruz Repertory Theater, and I was the one who had to do the books because I was the only one that could add two and two and consistently come up with four.

Right.

After I moved down here, I had been doing some small parts in movies, and I seemed to end up in the production accountant's trailer helping him out, largely because he had an air-conditioned trailer, and I was not a star, so I didn't.

But I enjoyed it.

So I started doing some production accounting and then I went to work full time for an advertising agency as the billing supervisor.

And at that point, my supervisor suggested to me that I was being grossly underpaid for the work I was doing and that it was because I didn't have the credentials and that I should do myself a favor and go back to school and make up the accounting courses.

So I thought, yeah, I'd give it a try going at night because UCLA has this wonderful program where you can essentially do all of the basic accounting courses at night.

And so you don't have to give up your job.

And in the second course that I took, it was taught by Phil Hacker.

And we just really hit it off.

And when he found out what my background was and I found out what his business was, which was profit participation auditing, And looking at the Hollywood accounting, if you will, and coming up with what was wrong with the accounting that was being issued.