About
About
(Left to Right) Riveting River Producer Ben Thum, interviewing Jerry Stiller, and Carl Reiner for A Gift for Laughter.
Mission
Our mission is to champion bold, original storytelling that moves, entertains, and connects people across cultures. Riveting River brings together distinctive creative voices and ambitious ideas to produce films and television series with lasting emotional and cultural impact. We believe great entertainment can be both artistically meaningful and broadly accessible, and we approach every project with a commitment to creative integrity, collaboration, and excellence. By embracing new ways audiences discover and experience entertainment, we aim to build enduring stories, nurture visionary talent, and create a body of work that stands apart in an ever-changing global media landscape.
Background
At the Beginning
Riveting River Productions, Inc. began almost twenty years ago with a vision by Ben Thum, an award-winning radio and television producer and former KFI Los Angeles talk show host. Ben sought a way to pay tribute to the best and brightest comedians by examining the reasons behind the extraordinary success of Jews in comedy. He was inspired by a Time Magazine article that noted while Jewish people comprise only 2% of the population, 80% of America’s humorists happen to be Jewish. Ben (pictured above with Jerry Stiller and Carl Reiner) began traveling the country interviewing some of the greatest comedy minds. His mission to document these comedy geniuses before they passed resulted in developing an impressive collection of original footage.
The next step was to decide what to do with a library of interviews. The company made plans to create a feature-length documentary called A Gift for Laughter—using a mixture of the original interviews combined with archival clips featuring great comedy routines of the past. A Gift for Laughter was to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish contribution to American comedy. Initial plans to produce the docu-comedy (a meld between a documentary and a comedy) were put on hold as Ben saw a need to grow the company and bring in the marketing, legal, and financial experts critical to its success. Riveting River had reached a point where it was ready to move forward with accomplishing Ben’s original vision to make A Gift for Laughter a reality.
Expanding the Vision
Roger Margulies, an Art Director with the Collaborative, an award-winning national communications firm, joined Ben in expanding Riveting River’s creative slate.
Together, they developed Seriously Funny, a one-hour television series exploring the birth of modern American comedy. In the spirit of shows such as Mad Men, the series blends historical events with fictional characters, using drama and humor to bring a transformative period in American entertainment to life.
Riveting River enlisted acclaimed author and cultural historian Neal Gabler to write the screenplay. Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and other acclaimed works on American culture and entertainment, has written for publications including The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Newsweek, and Vogue. His honors include two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Circle nomination.
The result is a poignant, compelling—and appropriately funny—screenplay developed for production.
Riveting River Today
As Riveting River developed its original projects, the team recognized another opportunity: helping talented writers and creators navigate the difficult path from screenplay to screen.
Exceptional material can come from anywhere, but access to experienced industry professionals, reliable contacts, and effective development strategies remains difficult for many emerging writers. Riveting River seeks out promising projects and works with their creators to prepare them for the entertainment marketplace.
Today, the company’s portfolio spans film and television, comedy and drama, original concepts and outside submissions.
Riveting River works collaboratively with writers through script evaluation, professional coverage, development, and rewrites. Once a project reaches the appropriate stage, the team develops supporting materials—including pitch materials and series bibles—and works to position the project with production and industry partners.
Depending on the project, that process can include pursuing attachments such as actors, directors, producers, and other key creative talent before approaching studios, networks, streaming platforms, and other potential buyers.
Riveting River’s goal is straightforward: find compelling stories, strengthen the material, assemble the right team, and give each project its best opportunity to move from the page to the screen.
Team
The Riveting River team is the heart of our success and the creative force behind everything we do. We recognize and value the unique skills, experience, ideas, and perspectives that every person brings to our organization. By combining those individual strengths, we’re able to collaborate, solve problems, push creative boundaries, and continually raise the bar for what we produce.
Meet Our Team
What truly makes Riveting River special goes beyond talent and expertise. We consider ourselves not simply colleagues, but friends who genuinely enjoy working together and celebrating each other’s contributions. That sense of camaraderie creates an environment where people feel comfortable sharing bold ideas, experimenting with new possibilities, and having plenty of fun along the way. The result is a workplace that is energetic, supportive, and highly productive—a place where talented people come together every day to create, refine, and perfect some of the most exciting entertainment offerings anywhere.
About
(Left to Right) Riveting River Producer Ben Thum, interviewing Jerry Stiller, and Carl Reiner for A Gift for Laughter.
Mission
Our mission is to champion bold, original storytelling that moves, entertains, and connects people across cultures. Riveting River brings together distinctive creative voices and ambitious ideas to produce films and television series with lasting emotional and cultural impact. We believe great entertainment can be both artistically meaningful and broadly accessible, and we approach every project with a commitment to creative integrity, collaboration, and excellence. By embracing new ways audiences discover and experience entertainment, we aim to build enduring stories, nurture visionary talent, and create a body of work that stands apart in an ever-changing global media landscape.
Background
At the Beginning
Riveting River Productions, Inc. began almost twenty years ago with a vision by Ben Thum, an award-winning radio and television producer and former KFI Los Angeles talk show host. Ben sought a way to pay tribute to the best and brightest comedians by examining the reasons behind the extraordinary success of Jews in comedy. He was inspired by a Time Magazine article that noted while Jewish people comprise only 2% of the population, 80% of America’s humorists happen to be Jewish. Ben (pictured above with Jerry Stiller and Carl Reiner) began traveling the country interviewing some of the greatest comedy minds. His mission to document these comedy geniuses before they passed resulted in developing an impressive collection of original footage.
The next step was to decide what to do with a library of interviews. The company made plans to create a feature-length documentary called A Gift for Laughter—using a mixture of the original interviews combined with archival clips featuring great comedy routines of the past. A Gift for Laughter was to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish contribution to American comedy. Initial plans to produce the docu-comedy (a meld between a documentary and a comedy) were put on hold as Ben saw a need to grow the company and bring in the marketing, legal, and financial experts critical to its success. Riveting River had reached a point where it was ready to move forward with accomplishing Ben’s original vision to make A Gift for Laughter a reality.
Expanding the Vision
Roger Margulies, an Art Director with the Collaborative, an award-winning national communications firm, joined Ben in expanding Riveting River’s creative slate.
Together, they developed Seriously Funny, a one-hour television series exploring the birth of modern American comedy. In the spirit of shows such as Mad Men, the series blends historical events with fictional characters, using drama and humor to bring a transformative period in American entertainment to life.
Riveting River enlisted acclaimed author and cultural historian Neal Gabler to write the screenplay. Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and other acclaimed works on American culture and entertainment, has written for publications including The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Newsweek, and Vogue. His honors include two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Circle nomination.
The result is a poignant, compelling—and appropriately funny—screenplay developed for production.
Riveting River Today
As Riveting River developed its original projects, the team recognized another opportunity: helping talented writers and creators navigate the difficult path from screenplay to screen.
Exceptional material can come from anywhere, but access to experienced industry professionals, reliable contacts, and effective development strategies remains difficult for many emerging writers. Riveting River seeks out promising projects and works with their creators to prepare them for the entertainment marketplace.
Today, the company’s portfolio spans film and television, comedy and drama, original concepts and outside submissions.
Riveting River works collaboratively with writers through script evaluation, professional coverage, development, and rewrites. Once a project reaches the appropriate stage, the team develops supporting materials—including pitch materials and series bibles—and works to position the project with production and industry partners.
Depending on the project, that process can include pursuing attachments such as actors, directors, producers, and other key creative talent before approaching studios, networks, streaming platforms, and other potential buyers.
Riveting River’s goal is straightforward: find compelling stories, strengthen the material, assemble the right team, and give each project its best opportunity to move from the page to the screen.
Team
The Riveting River team is the heart of our success and the creative force behind everything we do. We recognize and value the unique skills, experience, ideas, and perspectives that every person brings to our organization. By combining those individual strengths, we’re able to collaborate, solve problems, push creative boundaries, and continually raise the bar for what we produce.
What truly makes Riveting River special goes beyond talent and expertise. We consider ourselves not simply colleagues, but friends who genuinely enjoy working together and celebrating each other’s contributions. That sense of camaraderie creates an environment where people feel comfortable sharing bold ideas, experimenting with new possibilities, and having plenty of fun along the way. The result is a workplace that is energetic, supportive, and highly productive—a place where talented people come together every day to create, refine, and perfect some of the most exciting entertainment offerings anywhere.