Dean Adams Curtis
- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Arriving in Los Angeles from Pleasant Ridge, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where he had been chairman of his high school's student government, antiwar protester, and underground newspaper editor, the first job Dean Adams Curtis got was a page position at CBS TV City, where he observed his role model, writer/producer Norman Lear, creating socially relevant sitcoms "All in the Family," "The Jeffersons," and "Good Times." He was also page on "The Carol Burnett Show" and shows created by Mary Tyler Moore and her husband Grant Tinker. Next, Dean got his undergrad degree after attending Wayne State, Grand Valley, and Antioch universities, then worked for eight years as a director/producer of aerospace industrial films at the Hughes Aircraft Company, then California's largest manufacturing employer and crown jewel of America's military-industrial-complex. While working for the Film Unit at Hughes Aircraft, Dean served as the team's animator, creating the art for, and shooting the animation for, company films. Dean acted as the Disco Engineer in the Hughes engineering recruitment film "Disco Engineer," seen in engineering colleges across the U.S. While at Hughes, Dean earned his Master of Arts degree in Organizational Management from Antioch University, then during a battle for his billions after Howard Hughes' death, Dean proposed democratic elections of employees to the Hughes board of directors, with shared ownership of the company by employees. Instead, GM bought Hughes Aircraft Company. Dean became the IT guy at Lorimar-Telepictures, the company that had offered TV audiences the wildly popular show "The Waltons." As this was at the dawn of minicomputing, he supported the word processing needs of writers and producers of the "Dallas" and "Knott's Landing," shows, and thereafter became a microcomputer system administrator/trainer for Mike Medavoy's Orion Pictures. His physical art studio where he creates his multidisciplinary works, is in Venice, California. There, he wrote, produced, and directed his not-yet-distributed feature film, "Pastel Party." In 1991 and 1992, when the first President Bush seemed unbeatable for a second term, Dean became the first Democrat to announce his candidacy to seek the party's nomination to be President of the United States. Dean ran on a platform of liberal ideas centered on his proposal that there be democratic elections of employees to the boards of all publicly traded companies in the country. Dean ran against Bill Clinton in the Democratic caucuses in Iowa and primary in New Hampshire. Mid-campaign, to make money, Dean returned to LA, where he worked as a writer and producer on two IBM history projects based on laserdiscs, CDROMs, and IBM microcomputers, "The Columbus Project" and "Evolution & Revolution: The World Discovers Itself," directed by computer animation pioneer Robert Abel. Dean rose to become executive producer on these IBM projects, then he returned to the campaign trail. He won seven local delegates across Iowa in the that state's 1991 caucuses, then received enough votes to put him halfway up the pack of Democratic Party competitors in the New Hampshire primary. Dean is the author of a book about these experiences, and the progressive policies he put forward during his longshot candidacy. The book's title is "Running for President on $10 a Day." Back in California, Dean worked as a computer support contractor. He created a database for Criterion laserdiscs for company founders Bob and Ailene Stien. At MGM-United Artists during its ownership by French bank Credit Lyonnais, Dean advised company's execs about upcoming technology, such as the internet, helped set up on the company's first internet development team, became Director of Multimedia Development at the new MGM-UA Interactive Department. There he was executive producer of the CDROM, "Rob Roy: Legend of the Mist," and shared oversight of a wide variety of interactive productions, including James Bond titles. For a while he created CDROMs to accompany feature film releases while also working with a team on his "Goddesses" CDROM. Stints at Universal followed, where Dean as a computer instructor and consultant for the IT project management office, as well as Access database admin in the Paramount TV Research department at the time of Spelling merger and CBS acquisition, and then at Fox cable channels FX, FXM, and Fox Sports International as an operation's coordinator. Dean created and produced his series, "Tomorrow's Stars," for The Tennis Channel's first two seasons, then he supervised operations for an earth station in the France Telecom network, transmitting and receiving HDTV programming via satellites and fibers around the globe. Additionally, Dean is the entrepreneurial owner and creator of two dozen web sites. Beyond that, in 2009, Dean was certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as a LEED accredited professional. He then served as a new technology change agent at the Advanced Sustainability Institute, after which he was an instructor and an interactive online course designer for UCLA Extension sustainability courses. He's been a volunteer campaign worker for various Democratic Party candidates, and in 2012, Dean worked as a paid deputy field organizer on President Obama's re-election effort in Dayton, Ohio. Back in LA, Dean worked as Operations Manager of the UCLA School of Engineering's Smart Grid Energy Research Center during the time the lab's engineers worked on a smart grid for the City of Los Angeles funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. When an EV charger startup called MOEV was spun off from the research center, Dean was a senior manager there. He currently has varied entertainment content in development.