Lawrence Bender, renowned producer and political activist, boasts an illustrious career spanning more than twenty years in the entertainment industry. His films to date, among them influential mega-hits Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, Good Will Hunting, Pulp Fiction, Anna and the King, Jackie Brown, and Reservoir Dogs, have been honored with twenty one Academy Award nominations, including two for Best Picture.
Bender’s most recent film, An Inconvenient Truth, weaves the science of global warming with Al Gore's lifelong dedication to reversing the effects of global climate change. An environmental advocate, Bender along with his team worked with director Davis Guggenheim to produce this gripping and engaging rallying cry that calls for all Americans to protect the earth we share. The film was honored with the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary and Best Original Song for Melissa Etheridge’s I Need To Wake Up.
Prior to An Inconvenient Truth, Bender’s Innocent Voices was released in October 2005. The film, inspired by a true story, chronicles the experiences of 11-year-old Chava, who loses his innocence during the War in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Innocent Voices represented Mexico for the Academy Awards and received the 2005 Producers’ Guild Stanley Kramer Award as well as the National Board of Review’s Freedom and Expression Award in January 2006.
Bender was nominated for a Producer’s Guild Award and a Golden Satellite Award for the 1998 film Good Will Hunting, which received a total of nine nominations and won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor.
Pulp Fiction, which received seven Academy Award nominations, including a win for Best Screenplay, marked Bender’s second collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. The film was also nominated for a Producers Guild Award, a BAFTA Award for Best Film, and won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature and Palme d’Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
Bender and Tarantino first teamed on Reservoir Dogs, which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature, in 1992. The film also won Italy’s Raymond Chandler Award and was voted Best Picture by the Australian Film Critics. In addition to executive producing Tarantino’s and Robert Rodriquez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, Bender produced Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, for which Robert Forster earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Bender holds the distinction of being the only producer to have two films in simultaneous competition at the Berlin Film Festival: Good Will Hunting and Jackie Brown.
Bender’s other producing credits include Havana Nights: Dirty Dancing 2 starring Luna and Romola Garai; Knockaround Guys starring John Malkovitch, Dennis Hopper and Vin Diesel; The Mexican with Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini; Anna and the King, which starred Jodie Foster and Chow Yun Fat and was nominated for two Academy Awards for costume and production design; A Price Above Rubies; White Man’s Burden; Killing Zoe and Fresh, which was in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival.
In television, Bender has produced for all the major broadcast and cable networks, including Dr. Vegas, starring Rob Lowe, Joey Pantoliano and Tom Sizemore, for CBS, and The Legend of Earthsea for the Sci-Fi Channel in association with Hallmark Entertainment. The four-hour miniseries starring Isabella Rosellini and Danny Glover aired in December 2004 and was Sci-Fi Channel’s most watched show of the year. Bender was also nominated for a GLAAD Award as executive producer for MTV’s Anatomy of a Hate Crime, about the murder of Matthew Shepard.
Bender began his production career as a production assistant at the American Film Institute in 1985. Three years later, he made his producing debut on the horror film The Intruder, on which he shared story credits with writer/director Scott Spiegel. In addition to his feature film and television work, Bender has enjoyed success in producing commercials and music videos with his production company, A Band Apart.
Bender is also a passionate social and political activist. In 2003, Bender co-founded the Detroit Project, targeting the gas-guzzling SUV. He also traveled to the Middle East with the Israeli Policy Forum. While there, Bender met with members of the Keneset in Israel, with President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and with the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.
Bender is a member of the Executive Forum for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), sits on the Board of Trustees of the Israel Policy Forum (IPF) and is a member of the Pacific Council. He is also on the Advisory Board to the Dean at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and serves on the board of The Creative Coalition. He is a recent recipient of the Torch of Liberty Award from the ACLU and spends much of his time throwing fundraisers for political and social causes in Los Angeles, where he calls home.
His new philanthropic effort is called 18 Seconds. With the EPA and the DOE, he has created a campaign with a network of different groups, including ThinkLA, the Muppets, Yahoo, Wal-Mart, and many other academic, religious, and political groups. The idea is to use the iconic symbol of the energy star compact fluorescent light bulb to get people to take the first step in becoming part of the solution for global warming. In regards to this, he has met with many other fortune 500 groups, including GM, Home Depot, Simon & Company, along with helping to create Wal-Mart’s first sustainability day at the headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Lawrence Bender, Producer/Partner, A Band Apart
Mark Canton, Chairman/CEO, Atmosphere Entertainment
Victoria Hopper, Political Consultant
Arianna Huffington, Editor-In-Chief, The Huffington Post
Mike Medavoy, Chairman/CEO, Phoenix Pictures
Larry Winokur, Co-Founder/CEO, BWR Public Relations
Callie Khouri, Director/Writer
Scott Ross, Digital Entertainment Pioneer; Founder & Former Chairman/CEO, Digital Domain
Frances Arnold, Founder, Gevo; Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry, CALTECH
Philip Coyle, Senior Advisor, Center for Defense Information
David Howe, Managing Director & COO, Civitas Group
Babak Razi, Founder/Partner, Third Wave Ventures
Alex Steffen, Co-Founder, WorldChanging.com
Jonathan Zittrain, Co-Founder, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard; Chair, Internet Governance, Oxford
Ethan Zuckerman, Fellow, Berkman Center, Harvard
Lawrence Bender, Film Producer
Scott Z. Burns, Film Writer / Director / Producer
Nadia Conners, Film Writer / Director
Susan Bonds, President & CEO, 42 Entertainment
Doug Church, Independent Game Producer
Mark DeLoura, Independent Game Producer
Dave Durnil, Director of Engineering, Software Strategy and Multimedia Ecosystem Group, Qualcomm Inc.
Robin Hunicke, Producer, thatgamecompany
Stone Librande, Creative Director, Maxis (EA); Lead Designer, Spore
Adam Sussman, VP Worldwide Publishing, EA Mobile