Spotlight on Jason Levine
Jason Levine began his television industry career in 1989 as an actor and soon realized his passion lay on the other end of the lens. Since then, Jason has found himself wearing many hats, from finances and legal to logistics and creative work on shows. It’s prepared him very well for the position he now holds as Executive in Charge of Production at O’Malley Productions.
Jason is the second generation of his family to work in the television industry. He grew up watching his father “direct quirky 90’s action shows like Xena and Pacific Blue.” He fell in love with production and says he can’t really imagine himself doing anything else. One thing Jason loves most about what he does is developing an idea into an actual show and if he could produce anything he wanted, “it would be some sort of GOT-esque [Game of Thrones] inter-connected world, except we wouldn’t have to do any filler episodes because we’d have the cash. Every episode would feel like a season finale.”
We don’t know if the public could handle so much excitement every week, but if you find that unlimited budget, we’d be more than happy to be your rental house – eh hem.
Being so experienced, we wanted to know if Jason had any advice for anyone coming into the TV industry. His answer is one we completely agree with:
“Make yourself indispensable. I see a lot of younger people coming up with a very focused skillset. You need to be a jack-of-all-trades if you’re going to survive. Ask the guys that used to load film.”
As we all know, the TV industry is changing constantly. We asked Jason what changes he has experienced or what he sees happening and is excited for:
“Even when I was first working as a producer, we were still loading film. Watching digital production take hold and then eventually become the norm has really been a game-changer. I don’t think most of the younger people coming up today realize how recently that all changed. Oh yeah, and the Internet. One of my first EPs made us call after we sent an email to verify that they received it. It wasn’t considered reliable at that point.”
Haha we remember those days, the days of fax machines and pagers. Who messed with janky electronic mail (email)?
Jason also gave a nod to Gene Duggan, Imagecraft’s Director of Sales and Business Development:
“Gene Duggan. The man has gone out of his way so many times to fix issues that aren’t even really his problems… it’s just rare to have a vendor care so much about your success.”
These kinds of acknowledgements are what keep us here at Imagecraft in the business. Sometimes it can be crazy making, but clients and friends like Jason make our job great.
More about Jason
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