Ari Bass

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1985, Bass attended New York University as a Dean's List pre-law major and worked part-time and/or summers at New York City law firms such as Howard, Darby & Levin and Davis, Markel & Edwards. At the same time, Bass, as keyboardist and vocalist, performed and recorded regularly with a number of local musicians, most notably The Wildcats, with and without sensational frontman Charles "Bubba" Brown. From 1987, Bass became a frequent "guest" member of Mickey Gilley's Urban Cowboy Band on select dates around the United States. In 1990, Bass married, and he and his wife Erica relocated to Boston, MA where he attended his first year of law school at Boston University. In 1991, the couple relocated to Nashville, TN, where he completed his Juris Doctorate degree at Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1993. Trips home to New York usually meant off-the-cuff recording sessions, yielding spontaneous gems featuring Brown, The Blue Scoobies, B.U. Law School classmate Glenn Moses on guitar, fellow New York law firm employee and monster bassist Kevin MacNeil, and French guitar wiz Daniel Hoffenberg. It was during this period that Bass turned his love of music and eye for detail into another part-time vocation, as he began writing articles and assembling discographies and liner notes for LP and CD reissues of many seminal recordings in American popular music. His jaundiced view and avowed love of genre movies brought requests for articles and interviews concerning past and present cult movie stars, and in 1993, the Basses relocated to Los Angeles, California. Almost immediately, Bass met writer, film encyclopedia, and fellow traveler, Lawrence Greenberg, then working in development at Touchstone, and b-movie auteur Richard Gabai. Following a series of behind-the-scenes articles (most notably for "Femme Fatales" magazine) and stints in film publicity, Ari earned a series of production jobs on independent features, including a few produced by Gabai. After working with Daily Variety chief film critic Todd McCarthy on McCarthy's exhaustive 1997 biography of filmmaker Howard Hawks, Ari joined the production team on the short film, "Three Women of Pain" starring friend Jeremy Sisto. The Basses divorced in 1997, and the same year, Ari entered the field of film distribution, incorporating U.S. Rep Corp. with Paul Davis-Miller later that year, and thereafter joining Producer's Rep Seth J. Kittay at All Channel Films, Inc. Bass joined Gabai, a veteran singer/songwriter/guitarist in a revamped version of Gabai's 1980s band, The Checks, before co-founding Uncle Daddy, a much-loved local "rock 'n' roll cabaret" act which featured B-movie sexpots Shannon Whirry and Alexander Keith (aka Wendy Schumacher) as dancers/back-up vocalists. In late 1998, Bass and Greenberg began developing Greenberg's directorial debut, "Men Named Milo, Women Named Greta." With the addition of the more experienced Gabai as fellow producer, it was shot in May 1999 with an ensemble cast (including Jeremy Sisto, Poppy Montgomery, Allen Garfield, Sally Kirkland and Jonathan Silverman, as well as one ex-girlfriend, Alexander Keith), and a cinematographer (Antonio Calvache, recommended by another flame, Melissa Behr) who went on to shoot "In The Bedroom." Milo was a film festival success, appearing at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, and being picked up by the Sundance Channel. In 2001, Bass and Greenberg re-teamed for "What They Wanted, What They Got," starring Alana Ubach, Zach Galligan and Michael Des Barres. In 2005, Bass departed All Channel Films and took the reigns of Pop3 Media Corp., a publicly-traded film production and distribution shingle.