About Tommywood (and about Tom Teicholz)

Tommywood is a column that explores the cultural landscape of Los Angeles through a personal lens, taking the reader everywhere from a tour of Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica, to Robert Evans’ bed, with a morning spent in Traffic school and lunch with French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, with time for a game of mah-jong, and a remembrance of when Hungarians ruled Hollywood.

Tom Teicholz is a journalist, producer, podcaster and content creator in Los Angeles whose work has appeared in Forbes.com, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative magazine, Newsweek.com,The LA Times Op-Ed page, The New York Times Magazine, Interview and The Huffington Post.

CURRENT AND RECENT WORK:

Contributor, Forbes.com, HuffPost, the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Co-Host of Podcast, The Buried Lede: Beyond the Bylines (Itunes) a podcast about Journalism by Journalists.

working on non-fiction books under contract to Potomac House, and Kensington Press. Due in 2018.

*developed global multi-media content for Intel for their marketing summit

* developed content for internal communications for Logitech.

*went on assignment as a brand journalist for the INTEL corporation to write about their Ultrabook Project promotions with will.i.am in Mexico City, Mexico and Seoul, South Korea for their internal blogs and social media promotions.

*write and co-produce a 12 minute educational training film for college campuses about free speech, academic freedom, social activism and civil discourse for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance’s Campus Outreach program.

* authored a “case study” for a major not-for-profit organization to be used as part of their promotional materials to attract new clients and members.

*edited a 500 page manuscript on religion and modern science.

TOMMYWOOD

Since February 2004, Tommywood has appeared every two weeks (or so) in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and on The Huffington Post.

The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles has a paid circulation of 50,000 readers and a pass-along readership of 150,000. The Jewish Journal is available by subscription but is also distributed free at venues throughout Los Angeles. The column also appears on the Jewish Journal’s website www.jewishjournal.com. Individual columns have been reprinted in newspapers and websites throughout the US as well as abroad, and often appear on The Huffington Post.

AWARDS

2017 2nd Place Award for online political commentary, The Jewish Journal, “Jews are not White People, or Why Jews Support the Left (a Response to Dennis Prager)”

2015 – Finalist for LA Press Club Awards in four categories

2013 – Winner best Entertainment, review or criticism

2010 – The LA Press Club awarded Tom a 2nd place award for his essay on “Holocaust Movies: Winners and Losers” and he received 2 honorable mentions, one for his YourTango.com series “Motility”  and the other for “Extraordinary Oddities” his profile of Ricky Jay.

In 2007 TOMMYWOOD was the First Place winner of the Southern California Journalism awards hosted by the LA Press Club for Entertainment Reviews/Criticism/Column in Newspapers (with a paid circulation under 100,000) for the column “Susanna Hoffs walks like a Mom/Rockstar.”

In 2006 TOMMYWOOD was the winner of a LA Press Club award for Entertainment Reviews/Criticism/Column; as well as the winner of the 2006 Simon Rockower Award, presented by the American Jewish Press Association for Excellence in Arts and Criticism; both for the column, “Larry David died for our sins.”

BOOKS

Wilshire Boulevard Temple: Celebrating 150 Years (Oro Editions). 2015 Coffee table on the history of Los Angeles’ oldest Jewish congregation and their landmark Temple on Wilshire Boulevard’s renovation and restoration.

Being There: Journalism 1978-2000 (Rare Bird Books / A Vireo Book)

The Collected TOMMYWOOD (Pondwood Press) available on Amazon.com:

Greetings from Tommywood
Who’s in TOMMYWOOD?

Jill Sobule, Lucian Freud, Roman Polanski, Hungarians in Hollywood, Bob Dylan, Mel Brooks, R. B. Kitaj, The Heroes of Jewish Comedy, Maah-jong ,Gunther Grass. Sandor Marai, Budapest in L.A., Frank Gehry, Dreaming of a Blue and White Christmas, Remembering Rod Serling, Randy Newman, Robbie Conal, Schindler’s Impact, Michael Chabon’s “The Escapist,” “Friends,” S. J. Perelman, Uketopia, Robert Evans, Bernard-Henri Levy, The Rambam, Isaac Babel, Yiddish with Dick and Jane, Cleaning House, Lenny Bruce, The cemeteries of LA, Jonathan Schwartz, Nessa Rapoport, Stefan Zweig, Becoming a Nephew, Dance in LA, Don Was, Arthur Miller, Ephraim Kishon: The Funniest Man in the World.

Son of Tommywood
The way it was (Growing up Jewish in New York), Woody Allen, Emigres in LA, Phil Rosenthal & Raymond’s End, Kitty Carlisle Hart, David Hare’s ‘Stuff Happens”), Dreamworks, Alan Zwiebel, Jonathan Rosen, Hungarian Nobel Prize Winners, Missing New Orleans, Simon Wiesenthal, Egyptomania in LA, Kosinski & The Painted Bird at 40, Billy Crystal, Albert Brooks, Vassily Grossman, Bill Graham, Zade, Wendy Wasserstein, Gerard Oury, Michael Tolkin, Susanna Hoffs, Israeli Literature, David Mamet, Old Jewish Jokes, Swimming in the Holocaust, Literary Paprika, ‘Heebie Jeebiees at CBGB,” Assume everyone is Jewish.

TOMMYWOOD III: The Column Strikes Back

TOMMYWOOD III strikes back with:

Foodism, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, the Nuremberg Laws, Mark Rydell, My father who said he wasn’t a hero, Salonistas of LA, Jonathan Gold, The Circus, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Iranian novels, Larry Klein, Joni Mitchell, Michael Chabon, Julius Schulman, Roger Director and the Giants, LACMA, KCRW’s “The Business,” Early Dylan, Harry Bernstein, The Actor’s Gang, Tim Robbins, Jack Black, Elvis, Steve Binder, Dutton’s Closing, William Shatner, Post-Zionism, New Orleans.
Tommywood Jr., Jr.

Fast Furious Tommywood
Josh Kuhn, Arshile Gorky, Joshua Bell, What We Say When We Talk about Mel Gibson, Tony Curtis, Winston, Churchill’s Walk With Destiny, Bill Link Solves the Mystery of Columbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Albert Brooks, Dylan turns 70. How L.A. Grew its own Art, Wendy Wasserstein, Mark Danielewski, Wallace Berman, Weegee in Hollywood, the Klezmatics, Demjanjuk’s Just Epitaph, Jonathan Foer, Culture with a Side of Popcorn, Gutav Klimt, Channa Horwitz, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna, Rita, Mattress King Larry Miller, Lincoln the First Jewish President, Voices and Visions, Arnold Schwartzman, Jon Robin Baitz.

Close Encounters of the Tommywood Kind
This latest volume of collected columns presents a variety of close encounters of the Tommywood kind. It looks forward to high tech offerings from CES and on display at the Israel Conference and looks back at the Hollywood Blacklist in Exile. There are articles about well known writers such as Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow (though the prism of his first born son), and Etgar Keret, profiles of legends such as Lou Adler visual artists past, such as Hans Richter and Jackson Pollack and present, such as Judy Fiskin, Gary Baseman, Miri Chais, Nor Evron and Orit Raff. There are celebrations of those long departed such as The Marx Brothers, the Jewish Heroes of the Soviet Red Army during WWII, and an appreciation of Sandy Frank, a life ended too soon. Singers and songwriters abound from Theo Bikel, to Noa and Danny Sanderson, and Los Angeles resident performer-priest, Leonard Cohen whose new album released around the time of his 80th birthday, is in itself cause for the celebration that occurs in Tommywood.

The Jewish Role in American Life

By Barry Glassner, Hilary Lachoff, and Tom Teicholz

Based on scholarly and popular sources, a survey of the Jewish role in politics, culture, philanthropy, education and literature of the US; written as an annual survey commissioned by the USC-Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life and published by University of Southern California Press in 2002.

Like No Other Store… The Bloomingdale’s Legend and the Revolution in American Marketing
By Marvin Traub (Former CEO of Bloomingdale’s department store) with Tom Teicholz

Traub’s story and the story of retailing since World War Two; published by Random House in 1993.

Conversations with S.J. Perelman | Editor

Assembled the collected interviews of Oscar-winning author, screenwriter and humorist S.J. Perelman for a book published by the University Press of Mississippi; wrote the book’s introduction.

Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski | Editor

Assembled the collected interviews and conducted two new interviews with the award-winning author of The Painted Bird and Being There for a book published by the University Press of Mississippi; wrote the book’s introduction.

The Trial of Ivan the Terrible, State of Israel vs. John Demjanjuk

by Tom Teicholz

Critically-acclaimed account of the Israeli District Court trial of Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk who had concealed his past as a Nazi war camp guard; published by St. Martin’s Press in 1990.
Received positive reviews in The New York Times Book Review, Time, and The Chicago Tribune.

The Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd Edition,

Tom served as American Film and TV editor of the Second Edition, reviewing all entries, assigning and editing the new ones, as well as writing several entries and essays himself.

MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS and Websites

Tom Teicholz’s work has appeared on Forbes.com, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Op-Ed Pages of the LA Times, at Newsweek.com in The New York Sunday Times Magazine (where he broke the story of Michael Milken’s battle with prostate cancer), The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of The Town’, Andy Warhol’s Interview (where Tom was a contributing editor), The Forward, The Paris Review, and The Budapest Sun, Mult es Jovo, YourTango.com, Narrative Magazine, Purple Clover, LifeReimagined.com and the Huffington Post.

FILM

Tom has worked as a film executive and producer for many companies, including HyperFilms based on the Universal lot, and had his own producer deal with Fox TV Studios.

CONSULTING

Tom has also applied his editorial experience and pop culture expertise to being a consultant on content creation and business development for advertising and online companies, such as the INTEL Corporation, FANDANGO.COM where Tom consulted on the launch of its immensely successful and world-famous “Lunch bag characters” advertising campaign (created by Len Fink and his Amoeba creative boutique), and to FANISTA.COM, Amway’s attempt at an entertainment e-commerce site driven by a social network, which although now shuttered was an intensive education in all aspects of next generation social media and the harnessing of user-generated content.

RADIO AND LIVE INTERVIEWS

Tom has hosted KCRW FM’s “The Politics of Culture” on Einstein in California and produced a segment for “Final Curtain” on the world’s greatest humorist, Ephraim Kishon.

Tom interviewed David Mamet live on stage at UCLA for the Nextbook Festival ideas and has interviewed novelists Nathan Englander and Jonathan Lethem live on stage at the Mark Taper Auditorium of the LA Central Public Library as part of the ALOUD series. Most recently Tom interviewed Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket) and Lisa Brown on stage at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Click on link below to see video:

Tom Teicholz interview segments with David Mamet and Nathan Englander

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