Mentors on the Mic: Your guide to pursuing a career in the Entertainment industry

I recorded the intro to this episode earlier this week and already it's outdated! The strike is over! We can now talk about how GREAT Carol Baum is.

Carol Baum has produced thirty-four movies, seventeen of them independently. Before becoming an independent producer, Baum was co-president of Sandollar Productions, Dolly Parton and Sandy Gallin’s production company, for ten years, where she produced such hits as Father of the Bride; the Academy Award-winning HBO documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; Tidy Endings; I.Q.; Jacknife; True Identity; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Gross Anatomy; Shining Through; Straight Talk; and Kicking and Screaming. As an indie producer, Baum made, among other movies, including The Good Girl; You Kill Me; and Boychoir. She has produced five television movies for Hallmark and several documentaries. 

Her roots are in New York City, where she spent her early career in publishing, working for both Bantam Books and Random House and scouting for the English publisher Corgi. While in New York, she developed Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, Stephen King’s The Shining, and Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil. When she relocated to Los Angeles, Baum became a studio vice president at Twentieth Century Fox and a senior vice president at Lorimar, where she developed Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman. Following her stint as an executive, she produced David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.

Baum currently teaches producing in the Film and Television Production Division at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is also a mentor for the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC.

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