Len Amato spent most of his childhood in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood. After graduating from Triton College in River Grove and then Columbia College, he knocked around the city working freelance film-production gigs. He never made it as a musician, composer, actor, director, fiction writer, or screenwriter, and he never went to business school. So how did he end up as president of mighty HBO Films, whose roster of socially conscious, award-winning titles includes movies like Game Change (2012) and The Normal Heart (2014) as well as the recent and controversial Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill true-life drama Confirmation?
When you left Chicago in 1979, you went to New York. If you wanted to be a film director, why you didn’t go to Hollywood?
I found out about this thing I didn’t know anything about, which was that they actually paid people to read books and see plays. I started reading for Gladys Nederlander, of the famous theater family, and eventually I became a freelance reader for a lot of the studios. So my entree into the real movie business was reading books and writing coverage.
While I was part of Tribeca, I got ahold of Kenny Lonergan’s first script. It was a spec script—Analyze This. Lonergan wasn’t a famous playwright yet. But before I set it up, I wound up moving from Tribeca to Spring Creek Productions, and I brought the script with me. Warner Bros. eventually optioned Analyze This, and I ended up making the movie with both Spring Creek and Tribeca, because De Niro ended up being in Analyze This. It went full circle.
—HBO Films president Len Amato
How much of of the job is creative and how much of it is the business end?
