Kenneth Atchity


Kenneth John Atchity is an American producer, author, columnist, book reviewer, brand consultant, and professor of comparative literature.

Personal

Kenneth Atchity was born in Eunice, Louisiana, and is the son of Fred J. and Myrza Atchity.
Atchity is married to documentary filmmaker and former NHK producer, Kayoko Mitsumatsu. Atchity has two children.

Academic career

After receiving a Jesuit education from Rockhurst High School and Georgetown University, where he was a member of the Philodemic Society and received an Ignatian Scholarship to study Greek and Latin classics, Atchity received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Yale and received his MPhil in Theatre History and his Ph.D. Comparative Literature from Yale. His dissertation, Homer's Iliad: The Shield of Memory, was awarded the John Addison Porter Prize.
He went on to become a professor of literature and classics at Occidental College where he served as the chairman of the comparative literature department, distinguished instructor at UCLA's Writers Program, and as Fulbright Professor of American studies to the University of Bologna. During his teaching career, he was a frequent columnist for The Los Angeles Times Book Review.
His articles on English and American literature have appeared in the following publications: American Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Kenyon Review, Philological Quarterly; on Italian literature in Italian Quarterly, Spicilegio Moderno,
In addition to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, his reviews have appeared in Folio, The Huffington Post, New Haven Register, San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Washington Post.

Entertainment career

In 1976, Atchity founded L/A House, Inc., a consulting, translation, book, television, film development, and production company whose clients included the Getty Museum and the US Postal Service. L/A House began by extending Atchity's teaching of creative writing to manuscript consultation and soon moved on to publishing with the production of Follies, a magazine covering creativity, and CQ: ''Contemporary Quarterly; Poetry and Art of which he was editor. In the 1980s L/A House moved into television, with a syndicated television pilot of BreakThrough! of which Atchity was executive producer and co-writer.
In 1985, L/A House began development of a set of video/TV romance film projects entitled Shades of Love, which became 16 full-length films, produced in 1986–87 with Atchity as executive producer, that aired throughout the world, distributed by Lorimar, Astral-Bellevue-Pathe, Manson International, and Warner Brothers International, nominated for Canada's Gemini Award; in the U.S. they premiered on Cinemax-HBO.
In 1989, he sold L/A House and founded AEI, a literary management and motion picture production company. Atchity sold Steve Alten’s Meg to Bantam-Doubleday at auction in a $2.2M deal; and then to Disney, partnered with Zide-Perry, for $1.2. Incorporated in 1996, its name was changed to Atchity Entertainment International, Inc. in 2005.
In 1996, he founded The Writer's Lifeline. In 2006, he and manager-partner Fred Griffin, along with a group of investors from Louisiana and Texas, acquired The Louisiana Wave Studio, LLC in Shreveport, Louisiana from Walt Disney Productions. The LWS is the only tank specifically designed to make waves for motion pictures in North America. Films produced at the LWS include The Guardian, Mayday—Bering Sea, Shark Night 3D, Streets of Blood, and I Love You, Philip Morris; along with numerous government and industrial films.
In 2011, Atchity was nominated for an Emmy for producing The Kennedy Detail based on their clients' Jerry Blaine and Lisa McCubbin's New York Times bestselling book by the same title published by Gallery/Simon & Schuster in 2010.
AEI's films include Joe Somebody, Life Or Something Like It, and The MEG''.
In 2010, Atchity also founded Atchity Productions and Story Merchant.

''The Messiah Matrix''

In 2012, Atchity published his completion of William Diehl's Seven Ways to Die and his first solo novel, The Messiah Matrix. The novel centers on a fictional marine archaeological find of a rare Herodian coin honoring Augustus. A romantic interest develops between the American archaeologist who has discovered the coin, and a young Jesuit priest intrigued by its implications. A powerful faction of the Jesuits has been preparing to announce that the fictional character Jesus of Nazareth was inspired by the life of Caesar Augustus, and the coin is crucial evidence for their claim.

Producing filmography

Books by Atchity

  • Sell Your Story to Hollywood: Writers Guide to the Business of Show Business ;
  • The Meander Tile of Lisa Greco
  • The Twaesum Aik of Brae MacKenzie
  • The Messiah Matrix ;
  • How to Quit Your Day Job and Live Out Your Dreams ;
  • Seven Ways to Die ;
  • How to Publish Your Novel ;
  • How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream: A Guide to Transforming Your Career ; revision of The Mercury Transition, below.
  • Writing Treatments That Sell: How to Create and Market Your Story Ideas to the Motion Picture and TV Industry ;
  • The Classical Roman Reader ; ;Independent Publisher Book Awards, 2017
  • The Classical Greek Reader ; ;
  • The Renaissance Reader ;.
  • Cajun Household Wisdom.
  • The Mercury Transition: How to Escape Lifetime Security to Live Your Impossible Dream.Homer: Critical Essays, including essays "Greek Princes and Aegean Princesses: The Role of Women in the Homeric Poems" and "Andromache's Headdress" ;
  • A Writer's Time: A Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in The New York Times review, called AWT "the best recent book on writing";
  • Sleeping with an Elephant: Selected Poems, 1965–1976 ;
  • Homer's Iliad: The Shield of Memory Introduction by John Gardner ;Italian Literature: Roots & Branches including his essay, "Dante's Purgatorio: The Poem Reveals Itself" ;In Praise of Love Libretto for choral symphony premiered at Lincoln Center.Eterne in Mutabilitie: The Unity of the Faerie Queene .

Memberships