Hi there! We’d like to introduce you to Team Gramarye….
Gramarye Media has assembled a very experienced team of A-List veteran industry experts to help us select content, budget efficiently, and ensure smooth, professional productions. Their expertise helps us with:
- Content incubation and mentorship.
- Licensing and merchandise partnerships.
- Extensive budget review and due diligence by experienced Production Advisors.
- Review and development of a project’s marketing and distribution plan by experienced production and financing executives who combined have financed more than 100 film and television projects.
Leadership Team
Over the course of a 20-year career in advertising, marketing, and new media John Adcox has held a number of titles including Executive Producer, Vice President of Digital Media, Creative Director, Vice President of Marketing and Creative Services, and CEO. A few of his clients have included AT&T, Mercedes-Benz, Holiday Inn, Coca-Cola, UPS, SCANA, AutoTrader.com, Time Warner, Disney, Delta Airlines, 3M, Ford, and many more.In addition, he has hosted a radio show, acted professionally (although not since age 15), designed and written scripts for games, written a play for a professional theatre company, taught university astronomy, and written articles on topics including mythology, psychology, technology, religion, and marketing strategy.
John served for more than four years as the Lay Leader and Council Chair at Inman Park United Methodist Church. His many, many interests include books and literature, religion and philosophy, mythology, the Arthurian legends, travel, baseball, science fiction and fantasy, marketing communications, Celtic music and lore, new media, theatre, and politics, not to mention astronomy and cosmological physics.
John is now concentrating on storytelling—he is the author of Blackthorne Faire and has a screenplay in development—and maintains a laser focus on Gramarye Media and its film and television content development and production arm.
Alice P. Neuhauser has a broad range of entertainment experience in financial management, establishment and oversight of corporate, legal and accounting procedures, and business development and strategic planning. From successfully developing a major commercial real estate project to assisting lenders in maximizing the value of distressed assets to managing the day-to-day operations of independent film companies, Alice has demonstrated entrepreneurial success in maximizing effort and investment by finding opportunities to utilize both existing studio structures and independent constructs.
Over the course of her career, Alice has managed project financing for motion pictures ranging in budget from $2 million to $100 million each, totaling over half a billion dollars. Such financings included some of the largest independently financed pictures including Terminator 2 (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Cliffhanger (starring Sylvester Stallone). More recently, Alice coordinated the bank financing of produced pictures including Oscar-nominated 3:10 to Yuma (starring Russell Crowe), The Forbidden Kingdom (with Jackie Chan and Jet Li), The Bank Job, Brothers, A Perfect Getaway, Nine, Spy Next Door, Dear John, Season of the Witch, The Fighter (starring Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg), Limitless (starring Bradley Cooper), Haywire, The Immortals, Mirror, Mirror (starring Julia Roberts), 21 & Over, Movie 43, Safe Haven and Out of the Furnace. Alice also managed two $100 million revolving film production credit facilities with two separate syndicates of banks, which helped finance such movies as Basic Instinct (starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone) and Total Recall (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone).
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Looking for opportunities to capitalize on businesses that support film production, Alice developed a $100 million motion picture and television production facility from concept through 100% utilization. With Roy Disney’s Shamrock Holdings as investment partner, the first full-service production facility in Los Angeles in over 50 years was created. This 22-1/2 acre studio lot includes 14 state-of-the-art sound states, eight production buildings, a commissary, a four-story office building, and a parking garage. Current tenants include James Cameron’s Avatar 2 and Avatar 3. Hands-on, Alice’s efforts included developing the financing model and working with prospective investors, tenants and lenders, managing construction of the project and on-site coordination of final move-in by the tenants.
Among other consultancy roles, Alice also advised The Trend Exchange, a start-up financial marketplace for trading various media-related options contracts. The exchange was successfully approved by the Commodities Future Trading Commission, with Alice providing a key link among the regulatory agency, the financing community and content producers. Operational management has been a hallmark of Alice’s career. Prior to the bankruptcy of Carolco Pictures, she coordinated the preparation of the due diligence materials, including among other things chain of title for the development projects and produced pictures, sales and availabilities for the licensing of the produced pictures and an abbreviated library valuation. She also managed the due diligence process with prospective buyers. Ultimately, through various negotiated assets sales she returned a remarkable 100% of senior bond and trade debt of Carolco Pictures Inc. after its bankruptcy, exceeding investment banker projections by over 100%.
Alice continues to manage the sequel/remakes rights and development properties for the former Carolco, working with producers to turn them into new motion pictures and television series. On behalf of various lenders, including GECC and JP Morgan Chase, she has managed or liquidated distressed entertainment companies.
As Responsible Officer for The Kushner-Locke Company, Alice has overseen the operations of the Company since shortly after it filed for bankruptcy in 2001. In addition to compliance with bankruptcy and SEC requirements, Alice was been responsible for day-to-day operations, managing the various sales agent relationships, organizing documentation, establishing procedures and negotiating settlements of claims. Post-reorganization, Alice negotiated and managed the sale of the Company’s film library. She continues to represent the derivative rights for the Company.
At the request of certain senior financiers, Alice was retained by the New York-appointed, New York-based Receiver for The Shooting Gallery in connection with the liquidation of The Shooting Gallery assets for the benefit of its creditors. Alice utilized a team of experienced professionals who collectively had worked on the preparation for, and sale of, the film libraries for, among other companies, Carolco Pictures, Epic Productions (the Credit Lyonnais library), Harvey Entertainment, 7.23 Slate and Prosperity Pictures. Due to the sudden closing of the Company’s operations, the liquidation included shutting down the office space, negotiating out of facility and equipment leases, organizing chain of title and sales/availabilities information and preparing, marketing and soliciting buyers for the sale of Company assets.
Alice also managed the wind-up of a family of companies with real property holdings and film financing, production, sales and post-production businesses in Los Angeles. When the Companies lost their financing, Alice managed the self-liquidation process by, among other things, selling the post-production equipment, selling the building, winding down the various corporate entities, bringing current past-due tax obligations and paying off outstanding trade debt. In addition, Alice helped develop an asset management software system for tracking sales and availabilities for the pictures distributed by the production entity. She organized a team to service the on-going distribution obligations for the produced pictures.
GE Capital retained Alice as Chief Restructuring Officer of Unapix Entertainment to manage the operations of the Company in bankruptcy, oversee the preparation of information for selling the library and the successful sale of the library. Among other consultancy roles, Alice also advised The Trend Exchange, a start-up financial marketplace for trading various media-related options contracts. The exchange was successfully approved by the Commodities Future Trading Commission, with Alice providing a key link among the regulatory agency, the financing community and content producers.
Alice is an honors graduate of Harvard College and earned her MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA while working full-time. She also supports various non-profit organizations and has served on the National Council of Defenders of Wildlife since 2010 and joined the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2016.[/read]
Don’s professional experience has been an extensive voyage into the world of advanced interactive media. He’s spent most of his career on the front lines of the new media space working with emerging technologies in Interactive TV, mobile devices, video distribution, and broadband Web applications. In Don’s eleven years of creative design and implementation, his work has focused on creating forward thinking applications that aid large media companies in their pursuit of the future of media often targeting multi-screen experiences.
Don led the design team that was awarded the first ever Emmy in Interactive Television for the creation of an Interactive TV application enhancing the HBO Band of Brothers experience. He also led the effort to design and build CNN’s Pipeline and the Washington Redskins experiences for Media Center and Intel’s Viiv initiative. Don has participated in the incubation, testing and launch of many new interactive products ranging from a wireless traffic guidance system, desktop applications (TWC Desktop Weather), browser plug-ins, widgets, and new forms of digital video collection, encoding, and distribution.
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Over the course of his career he’s have worked with clients like HBO, HGTV, DIY, FOOD, Fine Living, Disney, AOLTV, NASCAR.com, CNN, Cartoon Network, Captain Planet foundation, Philips, PoliticalIQ.com, Psydex, Subaru, Worldspan, Cox Cable, Cox Radio, IntelliOne, Time Warner, Rhapsody, MetaByte, and many more. Don’s specialties include Concept incubation, Technology assessment, Information architecture, Advanced UI design and Development, Flash interfaces, Advanced interactive advertising, Cross-platform experiences, Video shooting, editing, and motion graphics, and Web Applications.
As the Creative Director of Beyond Z, Don oversaw the entire process of product development. Working with the client, design team, and development team in the initial planning stages, he remains hands-on all the way through. Clients have included HBO, Cartoon Network, The Weather Channel, HGTV, Food Network, DIY, Ford, Suburu, NASCAR, Redskins, Disney, and many more. The bulk of the company’s work focused in the Interactive Television industry.
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Irtaza Barlas brings more than 20 years of diverse technology and product development experience to Gramarye. He is currently the Director of Software Engineering of a very successful healthcare IT company in Georgia. He was also the Program Manager at Impact Technologies, where he led the research and development efforts associated with advanced computing, image analysis, and data mining systems for the industry and the US Department of Defense.
Irtaza was the architect and Principle Investigator on a multi-year research program on “Self-Aware Processing Systems” for DARPA. Irtaza worked with Raytheon and Georgia Tech to develop technologies for monitoring and real-time reconfiguration. His other DoD research programs include datamining and visualization for US Navy, distributed monitoring of Virginia Class Submarine Combat Systems, and Multi-agent Distributed Data Fusion for Unmanned Surface Vehicles for Office of Naval Research. Impact Technologies was acquired in 2011 by United Technologies’ Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation—and is now a Sikorsky Innovations company.
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Previously Irtaza was the principal and Director of Software Development at Atlanta-based Intelligent Automation Systems (IAS), where he led the development of several products related to image processing, industrial process monitoring, and automation in the utilities, wire, cable, and textile industries. Impact Technologies acquired IAS, in its third year of operation.
Irtaza received his MS from California State University, Sacramento where he worked extensively on microprocessors, digital systems, computer networks, and FPGAs. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech., with a thesis on Multi-Agent systems for Diagnostics and Prognostics of complex systems. His other research interests include the design of self-aware processors, integrity verification and the repair of distributed systems, mobile agents, e-publishing, image analysis, data mining, and data visualization. His interests outside of technology include literature, music, philosophy, and religion.
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Juliet Ulman
A former Senior Editor at Random House and Editor in Chief at Pugilist Press, Juliet has extensive experience in both acquisitions and development editing. She is an award-winning editor with extensive experience in trade publication, both corporate and independent, with a particular interest in branding and development.
In her own words, she works with “author, imprint, identity — I find the story inside the story, and help you tell it. This is what I do.” Her specialties include intensive developmental/structural editing, branding, and identity. In 2010, she won a coveted Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor in speculative fiction.
Christopher Golden
Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of Snowblind, Ararat, The Boys are Back in Town, Tin Men, Of Saints and Shadows, and dozens of other novels. He has also written books for teens, including the thriller series Body of Evidence, honored by the New York Public Library and chosen as one of YALSA’s Best Books for Young Readers. With Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, he co-created two fan favorite comic book series — Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and the New York Times bestselling Baltimore. With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the co-author of multiple novels, as well as comic book miniseries such as Talent and The Sisterhood, both currently in development as feature films. With Amber Benson, Christopher co-created the BBC’s online animated series Ghosts of Albion and co-wrote the book series of the same name.
Chris has also written short stories, video games, dozens of other comic books and graphic novels, a BBC radio play, and screenplays. He has adapted his own work for Fox, New Regency, Constantin Films, and the CW, and is one of the writers of the 2019 film reboot of Hellboy. He is also an editor, anthologist, lecturer, and keynote speaker who has appeared at conferences, schools, and libraries from Dallas to London to Transylvania (really).
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The author is also known for his many media tie-in works, including novels, comics, and video games, in the worlds of the X-Men, Alien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellboy, Sons of Anarchy, and Daredevil, among others. He collaborated with director Guillermo del Toro on the book Blackwood’s Guide to Dangerous Fairies.
Chris began his career as Licensing Manager for the parent company of Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Back Stage, and many other magazines. In that capacity, he worked with the producers of the first two years of the Billboard Music Awards, as well as with the producers of American Top 40 radio, and numerous other projects.
Chris was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fifteen languages in countries around the world.
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In a professional career that has spanned more than 35 years, Arthur Stepanyan has been fortunate to meet, work with, and learn from captains of industry and government leaders from all over the world. Through these interactions, Arthur became intimately familiar with such diverse industry verticals as aerospace, automotive, metallurgy, oil and gas exploration and production, microelectronics, tele-communications, and nuclear energy — all seen through essential principles of business, finance, and law.
As an international business consultant, Arthur was involved in Chevron’s mega-JV in Kazakhstan, in Kaiser Aluminum technology transfer projects, in International Launch System’s commercial satellite launches, and in US DOE’s IPP/NCI programs.
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During his years in Silicon Valley, Arthur consulted a diverse range of high-tech companies, including the developers of parallel processing Tandem Computer, the pioneers of cell telephony Array Communication, as well as the IT industry supermajors like Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Intel, SAP and Microsoft.
Arthur worked with international customer groups, from Chilean Air Force to Australian banks to German software developers, assisting them in learning from the Silicon Valley model and applying the disruptive innovation solutions and processes into their business models.
Through his work in Silicon Valley Innovation Center, Arthur led the effort on promoting diversity and inclusion in startup ecosystem and set the example in the conferences/startup competitions in Robotics and IoT. Arthur is a board member and cofounder of several startup companies in various industry verticals, such as data analytics, drones, robotics and traffic optimization.
Arthur is always interested in finding/learning/applying new trends and disruptive technologies and in engaging with the people who develop them. Arthur eagerly shares his accumulated experience with the younger generation of entrepreneurs and startup founders in USA and globally, as a coach, mentor, public speaker, board advisor and fractional executive for startup teams and growing companies, concentrating his effort on the early-stage technology startups. In this work, Arthur’s primary focus is on establishing and refining the company’s core structure, operational procedures, business plan, product/market fit and exponential growth strategy.
Since relocating to Atlanta, Georgia, in 2017, Arthur has remained actively involved in the local startup ecosystem as an advisor as well as an investor, through his affiliation with UAE-based FasterCapital VC fund. Arthur is currently engaged in promotion of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies among Atlanta businesses. The Gramarye Media ICO is his latest — and largest — effort.
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Suresh Sharma
Suresh is a proven entrepreneur, innovator, and a global business creator. A clear thought-leader, he is known for translating vision into reality through team building, operational execution, and optimal use of resources. A former GE executive, he exemplifies a rare combination of hands-on technology and business leadership. Suresh is widely published and cited not only for his peer-reviewed technical journal papers but also equally well known for his internationally acclaimed business books on innovation and entrepreneurship (“The 3rd American Dream”, 2014), and global sourcing (2005).
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Over the past two decades, he led five major technology and operational initiatives, and has served as President & CEO of four ventures creating several billion dollars of value. With his quick ability to sense and step-change business DNA, Suresh has specially contributed to: Energy and Power Industry (from ‘Wellhead to Consumer’ including Renewable Power Generation, and Transmission & Distribution), and other businesses in aerospace, materials, sensors, e-Commerce, IT, global sourcing, manufacturing, Six Sigma quality, healthcare and defense.
Most recently, Suresh has been serving as part-time Industry Fellow of GRA (Georgia Research Alliance), wherein leveraging his strong multi-disciplinary experience, he has been effectively transforming innovations into commercial enterprises invented or discovered by a number of Georgia’s eminent scholars and research faculty.
An internationally acknowledged keynote speaker, Suresh serves or has served on the Board of Directors or Advisors of several small or big organizations: publicly traded corporations, non-profits, universities, and other ventures globally.
Suresh graduated with B.E. (Hon) in Mechanical Engineering from BITS, Pilani (India). Further, he did Advanced Management & Aerospace Engineering Courses with British Aerospace PLC and its Consortium Partners in Europe, U.K (1981-1982), and later received his M.S. in Aerospace, University of Florida, in 1994.
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Legal Representation by:
Incubation Mentors
Candice Alger
• Executive Producer of Motion Capture Effects on Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, Warcraft, and more
Peter Miller
• Author Promotion/Platform Coach
• Executive Producer
Chris Soth
• Author and Filmmaker
• Screenwriting Consultant
• Member of the WGAw
• MFA from USC
Lou Aronica
• Publisher at Berkley & Avon
• Founded The Story Plant
• Award-winning Author/Editor
James A. Moore
• Game Writer
• Comic Book Writer
Paul Jenkins
• Award-winning comic writer
• Editor
• Game, Screen, and Television writer
• Educator
Our Partners
RoadShow Equity Partners will invest in 10 to 12 film and television productions over a five-year period. The Funds will invest between $500,000 to $2,000,000 on either a “first in” or co-investment basis in independent productions. RoadShow’s model is designed to protect investors. By investing in a slate of films, the Investor avoids the risk that comes with the “one and done” approach.
The traditional Hollywood system has routinely paid investors after everyone else has been paid. As a result, investors have waited years, at best, for their returns. RoadShow is committed to ensuring that Investors are the “first in” and “first out” position. The Fund will be in first position profit participation derived from worldwide exploitation. Unlike the large studio model, the Fund has no internal overhead charges or fees that push back recoupment and profit participation.
The Fund is expected to receive a preferred return of 20 percent and thereafter 50 percent on-going participation in all net revenue generated in the subsequent years of exploitation. As a result, successful productions generate returns to investors for decades.
Gramarye Media was one of the very few companies lucky enough to participate in Georgia Tech’s Flashpoint, one of the world’s most successful and prestigious business accelerators.
Flashpoint works closely with founders to enable them to think clearly about their businesses, using rigorous processes to enable reliable innovation. It is unique in implementing startup engineering, a business creation and innovation process developed by Dr. Merrick Furst at Georgia Tech. Its companies have attracted more than $150 million in commitments from angels and investors and have a market cap of over $800 million.
Startup Engineering is a program and framework for finding genuine unmet demand and building scalable companies to satisfy it.
Startup engineers take a “problem first” approach to identify inadequately addressed pain in their customer’s personal or professional lives. They generate theories about customer improvement goals and the constraints that prevent existing solutions from meeting them. They work toward actionable truth by testing to disconfirm their theories, modifying them, and retesting. They prioritize and gauge progress through a framework of understanding, bounding, and reducing the risks that all early stage companies face.
Gramarye Media also partners with the Creative Media Industries Institute (CMII) at Georgia State University to apply innovative technology to reduce the cost of film and television productions.
The CMII, arguably the single most advanced virtual production facility on the planet, features Virtual production to support live performances driving 3D characters in virtual worlds, layering virtual characters and objects over real world environments, an augmented Reality CAVE Lab, a walking VR Lab, best-in-Class Editing, Color-Correction, and Post-Production Suites, “Lagless” Music and Dialog Recording, and more.
Our sister company, ConcentraQ, helps power Gramarye’s powerful social media and tracking capability. ConcentraQ is a cloud-based software platform that allows marketing and brand management teams to quickly design and launch highly personalized campaigns to inspire, incent, and empower consumers to become champions for their brand.
In short, ConcentraQ maximizes social endorsement and brand visibility, beyond what can be achieved through traditional marketing channels. With ConcentraQ, marketers can guide the conversation and identify (and potentially reward) their brand’s most significant individual influencers. The result? Faster, more agile promotional campaigns leading to:
- Deeper brand affinity, stronger bonds with current and potential customers
- More compelling personal, unpaid endorsements and buzz
- Significantly increased brand visibility
- More precisely-targeted promotion budgets and properly-attributed ROI
ConcentraQ enables real visibility into social influence and endorsement activities from the ground up — starting at the individual consumer level. It provides tools for brand marketers that seamlessly integrate into promotions, giving prospects and customers the opportunity to easily endorse brands/products within in their social spaces.
The Story Plant was founded in 2008 by two long-term industry professionals, Lou Aronica and Peter Miller. From the start, the company has been dedicated to publishing quality fiction and to developing authors. Though we’re always trying to improve, we feel that we’ve delivered on both. Our books regularly receive rave reviews (click on any of our titles to check for yourself) and since our launch, nearly a third of our novels have appeared in the top 100 of one major bestseller list or another – and often several at once.
In 2013, The Story Plant was acquired by Studio Digital CT, LLC, a limited liability company headed by Lou Aronica. With this, Mitchell Maxwell came on board to add his unparalleled blend of creativity, passion, and business acumen.
The Story Plant has an absolute dedication to its authors. Both Aronica and Maxwell are novelists as well, and they understand the desires, needs, and insecurities of writers at the most personal level. We want The Story Plant to be a good home for those who write for us, and we want it to be a place where readers can be assured that everyone involved in bringing these books to them cares deeply about what they’re doing.