Biography
With over forty (40) years of legal experience, Paul S. Levine began handling entertainment transactions and litigation directly out of law school. Now, through his private law practice, he represents a diverse clientele ranging from individual "creatives" to large production companies, in a wide range of media, including: film, television, music, visual arts, and book publishing.
Visit Paul S. Levine Literary Agency website.
Levine is one of the few lawyers on the West Coast who specializes in book publishing. As such, he offers comprehensive literary legal services and acts as a literary agent. He particularly enjoys assisting screenwriters who wish to adapt books into screenplays, as well as "reversing the process", by working with writers who have "reverse-adapted" their screenplays into books, helping them sell their novels to publishers, and finally selling the "movie rights" to those novels, along with their screenplays, to "Hollywood".
Education, Entertainment Law, and Literary Agency Experience
Born in New York City and raised and educated in Montreal, on full academic scholarships, Levine received a Bachelor of Commerce (Magna Cum Laude) from Concordia University in Montreal and went on to earn a Master of Business Administration from York University in Toronto. In the late 1970s, he came to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (also on full academic scholarship), leaving tobogganing in the cold Canadian winters for the Santa Anas blowing through the palm trees of Southern California.
Levine began his career as an associate attorney at the Law Office of Stephen F. Rohde, where he specialized in business transactions and civil litigation, with an emphasis on trademark, copyright, unfair competition, trade secrets, book publishing, and the rights of privacy and publicity, for some six years.
Then, answering a "blind" advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter, he went to work for over three years for the Business and Legal Affairs Departments of Warner Bros. Television, where he negotiated and drafted agreements for all above-the-line personnel (writers, directors, actors, and producers) for network and cable television programming. He was then recruited by the now-defunct Hearst Entertainment Productions, where he spent two years as Resident Counsel, negotiating and drafting agreements for all above-the-line personnel in the production and distribution of made-for-television movies, first-run development, television series, and documentary programming.