Randy Greenberg – Class of 1984
Randy Greenberg always wanted to work in the entertainment business. He would daydream of the entertainment business in classes and while completing two-a-day swim workouts in the Burke High School swimming pool for Coach Rich Hood. He would buy the TV Guide Fall Preview magazine at Food City, going through each new TV series presented, making marks about which shows he thought would make it to a second season and which ones wouldn’t.
Greenberg spent countless hours at the Six West and Indian Hills movie theaters watching every movie that came out (all the way through the credits trying to figure out what all those people did).
After graduating from the University of Denver, with a degree in marketing/finance, Greenberg moved to Los Angeles in 1987 (crashing on his older brother Bruce’s (Burke High School Class of 1978) couch and starting his entertainment career as an accounting intern at Warner Bros. before becoming an international film publicist and then the Vice President, International Marketing at MGM/UA Pictures.
After a short stint in San Francisco at an entertainment dot-com start-up, Greenberg moved to Universal Pictures, where he became the head of Universal Pictures’ billion-dollar International Theatrical Division, bringing financial accountability and transparency to that division and providing the Company with two of its best years ever at the international box office. After that division moved to London, Greenberg left the studio and became an executive producer of multiple movies including “Cowboys & Aliens”, “The Meg” and “Meg 2: The Trench”, and was a Co-Executive Producer of the Netflix animated TV series, “A Tale Dark & Grimm”.
Before becoming an entertainment producer, Greenberg helped release more than 200 movies internationally and his theatrical marketing campaigns generated more than $5 Billion at the international box office and allowed him to travel the world and with many talent including George Clooney, Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, Pierce Brosnan, Eminem, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Liam Neeson, the late Paul Walker and Robin Williams, Michael Douglas, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Verhoeven, John Travolta, Danny DeVito, Rene Russo, producer Belle Avery, directors Barry Sonnenfeld, Jon Turteltaub and Quentin Tarantino, to name a few.
As part of his insatiable need to know more about the business of entertainment and media, Greenberg has also been a serial entertainment and media entrepreneur starting four companies (three of which were purchased or were publicly traded) and working at several as a co-founding, senior executive.
Greenberg is currently developing a Megalodon IMAX movie, a few feature films and a television series. Over the past two decades, he has served as an instructor at UCLA Extension, where for the past 12 years, he has taught The Business of Entertainment — helping thousands of students and executives learn about the business behind the camera.
Randy believes in the power of education and our younger generations. When his kids were in school, he was the PTO president, working to better the schools and improve the quality of education. He and his wife also started an art program at Mar Vista Public Elementary School, which continues to this day. Randy also enjoys being involved in various children’s charities.
In his free time, Greenberg can be found body surfing in Marina del Rey or searching for the next great plant-based meal with his artist/author/illustrator wife, Ruthie Briggs-Greenberg. He and his wife have two children — Sophia is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin studying strength and human conditioning for elite athletes and Arthur is a senior at Venice High School in Venice, California (where the movie “Grease” was filmed – which was released when Greenberg was in High School!).
