Ben Moses

Ben was raised in a farm town in Illinois, and it was his love of amateur radio that introduced him to the world beyond his small town. He worked in radio and television during college (he studied engineering, music, theater and directing) and then joined the Army and got a free boat ride to Vietnam and Armed Forces Radio, where he met Adrian Cronauer. Their close friendship resulted later in "Good Morning, Vietnam;" Ben developed the original concept and story based on their experiences there. Ben first honed his craft in local television (St. Louis, Missouri; Columbia, South Carolina; Jacksonville and Miami, Florida) and network television. His first network job was as a camera assistant on "The Jackie Gleason Show" in Miami Beach. He married one of the show's June Taylor dancers and they moved to New York, where he became a commercial producer for Young & Rubicam and then returned to CBS, working on "60 Minutes" and CBS News specials. He then became Executive in Charge of TV Programming and Production for General Electric, where he developed and supervised the company's "GE Theater" series of TV movies for four years. Then divorce followed. Ben moved to Los Angeles to work on Barry Manilow's first special, and stayed with the production team for a half-dozen more specials. Then he joined the production unit that produced the Academy Awards, Emmy Awards and Grammy Awards specials, and worked on many other live musical-variety specials for CBS and ABC. He received the first of his eight Emmys for a live news special on the battle over amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, and then won or was nominated for Emmys for nine more documentaries over a period of ten years. During the '90s - after more than 20 years of nearly daily work on a stage or location on one coast or the other, he remarried, and soon backed away from production to raise their two young children. He continued teaching at UCLA and consulting - to producers and production companies in the US and Europe. By the 2000s, with the kids in school, he returned to developing and producing TV movies, documentaries and international feature films, particularly documentaries with a focus on freedom and democracy around the world.