Kenneth Atchity


Kenneth John Atchity aka "Kenneth Atchity" or "Ken Atchity" is an American producer, author and columnist, book reviewer, brand consultant, and professor of comparative literature.

Personal

Atchity was born January 16, 1944 in Eunice, Louisiana, son of Fred J. and Myrza Atchity; he grew up between Louisiana and Kansas City, Missouri. He has two children, Rosemary and Vincent.
His son, Vincent Atchity, graduated from Georgetown College and his daughter, Rosemary Atchity, from Columbia University,. Both Rosemary and Vincent have two children, Meggie and Teddy; and Oliver and Eliot John.
Atchity is married to documentary filmmaker and former NHK producer Kayoko Mitsumatsu, founder of the non-profit organization Yoga Gives Back for which he serves on the board of directors. He resides in Los Angeles, California, and New York City.

Academic career

After receiving a Jesuit education from Rockhurst High School and Georgetown University, where he received an Ignatian Scholarship to study Greek and Latin classics, Atchity received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Yale and received his MPhil in Theatre History and his Ph.D. Comparative Literature from Yale. His dissertation, Homer's Iliad: The Shield of Memory, was awarded the John Addison Porter Prize. He went on to become a professor of literature and classics at Occidental College, where he served as the chairman of the comparative literature department, distinguished instructor at , and as Fulbright Professor of American studies to the University of Bologna. During his teaching career he was a frequent columnist for The Los Angeles Times Book Review. With Marsha Kinder, he founded and edited Dreamworks. An Inter-disciplinary Quarterly. Its advisory board included John Cage, William Dement, Ann Faraday, John Fowles, J. Allan Hobson, John Hollander, Ursula Le Guin, W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov and Robert L. Van de Castle. Atchity resigned his tenured professorship at Occidental in 1987 to devote full-time to entertainment and publishing.
His articles on English and American literature appeared in American Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Kenyon Review, Philological Quarterly; on Italian literature in Italian Quarterly, Spicilegio Moderno, and Italica'; and on classical literature in Arethusa, Classical Philology. His scholarly reviews were published in Ball State University Forum, Kansas Quarterly, Mediterranean Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Thought, University of Portland Review, and Western Humanities Review. In addition to The Los Angeles Times Book Review, reviews appeared in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Folio, Huntington Post, New Haven Register, Orpheus, Poem, Poetry LA, The San Francisco Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Washington Post.

Entertainment career

In 1976, Atchity founded L/A House, Inc., a consulting, translation, book, television, and film development and production company whose clients included the Getty Museum and the US Postal Service. L/A House began by extending Atchity's teaching of creative writing to manuscript consultation and soon moved on to publishing with the production of Follies, a magazine covering creativity, and CQ: Contemporary Quarterly; Poetry and Art of which he was editor. In the 1980s L/A House moved into television, with a syndicated television pilot of BreakThrough! of which Atchity was executive producer and co-writer.
In 1985, L/A House began development of a set of video/TV romance film projects entitled Shades of Love, which became 16 full-length films, produced in 1986–87 with Atchity as executive producer, that aired throughout the world, distributed by Lorimar, Astral-Bellevue-Pathe, Manson International, and Warner Brothers International, nominated for Canada's Gemini Award; in the U.S. they premiered on Cinemax-HBO.
In 1989 he sold L/A House and founded AEI, a literary management and motion picture production company. Atchity sold Steve Alten’s Meg to Bantam-Doubleday at auction in a $2.2M deal; and then to Disney, partnered with Zide-Perry, for $1.2. Incorporated in 1996, its name was changed to Atchity Entertainment International, Inc. in 2005.
In 1996 Atchity also founded The Writer's Lifeline.
In 2006, he and manager-partner Fred Griffin of Houston's Griffin Partners along with a group of investors from Louisiana and Texas, acquired The Louisiana Wave Studio, LLC in Shreveport, Louisiana from Walt Disney Productions. The LWS is the only tank specifically designed to make waves for motion pictures in North America. Films produced at the LWS include The Guardian, Mayday—Bering Sea, Shark Night 3D, Streets of Blood, and I Love You, Philip Morris; along with numerous government and industrial films.
In 2011 Atchity was nominated for an Emmy for producing The Kennedy Detail based on their clients' Jerry Blaine and Lisa McCubbin's New York Times bestselling book by the same title published by Gallery/Simon & Schuster in 2010. AEI's films include Joe Somebody, Life Or Something Like It, and The MEG.
In 2010, Atchity also founded Atchity Productions and Story Merchant.

''The Messiah Matrix''

In 2012, Atchity published his completion of William Diehl's Seven Ways to Die and his first solo novel, The Messiah Matrix. The novel centers on a fictional marine archaeological find of a rare Herodian coin honoring Augustus. A romantic interest develops between the American archaeologist who has discovered the coin, and a young Jesuit priest intrigued by its implications. A powerful faction of the Jesuits has been preparing to announce that the fictional character Jesus of Nazareth was inspired by the life of Caesar Augustus, and the coin is crucial evidence for their claim. Regarding the premise of his novel, Atchity said that it is based on actual historical facts linking Jesus and Augustus.

Producing filmography