Moviemakers and Scholars

Producer, Director, Screenwriter, Publishing Executive, and Literary Agent. Distinguished Visiting professor of Creative Writing at UNCW

As a literary agent, Professor Colbert’s clients included Jack Kerouac and Margaret Atwood, and he headed the literary department of the William Morris Agency in Hollywood, representing authors and screenwriters. As a producer he wrote and produced films for United artists, 20th Century-Fox, and Columbia Pictures, as well as network television series for ABC, NBC, and CBS. As executive in charge of production for Ivan Tors Studios in Miami, he produced Flipper, Gentle Ben, and scores of other shows. He served as executive producer of film drama for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and received an Emmy, together with Jim Henson, for Fraggle Rock. He later became President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers of Canada. His stories and essays have appeared in such publications as Esquire and Creative Screenwriting.

Colbert's credits also include the landmark film, Private Property, a low-budget film he produced in five days in the late 1950s. The film was hailed by Time magazine as the start of the American New Wave and by the New York Times as opening the door to independent filmmaking in an industry that had long been dominated by big Hollywood studios. The film opened at the prestigious Paris Theatre in New York, played in dozens of countries around the world, and sparked a burst of independent films by young filmmakers. Financed, produced, and directed by two young men who had never made a movie before, the story behind Private Property is a textbook example of what can go wrong and right with one’s first feature film.