Tribeca Film Festival (https://www.tribecafilm.com/festival)
co founded by Craig Hatkoff (real estate investor), Jane Rosenthal, and Robert de Niro following 9/11 to “revive downtown” (1st festival = 2002)
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/gallery/20070916/FEATURES/309169999/83
Top mayoral aide Patricia Harris, who has worked with Ms. Rosenthal since the first festival, says, "Anytime the city needs her help, she is always ready to lend a hand."
http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/features/5963/
So Rosenthal has tapped her unparalleled Palm pilot of entertainment-political names: enlisting Ben Stiller to perform for free in TV ads, asking Richard Holbrooke for advice on landing Nelson Mandela as a speaker, calling on Deputy Mayor Patti Harris to slice red tape. "Jane cuts a swathe through New York City. She can rally the troops," says Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax. "She has political connections all the way to the top, whether it's Republicans like George Pataki or friendships with ex-president Clinton. She can also rally the mommy brigade. Do not underestimate that group. They can work you and blackmail you and get anything done."
Rosenthal's husband, real-estate financier Craig Hatkoff, has also been working full time on the festival, lining up insurance and landing sponsors (American Express signed a multi-million-dollar, three-year deal). These days, the couple, who moonlight as major Democratic Party fund-raisers, talk on the phone or e-mail each other several times an hour (yes, an hour) on festival or family business. As Paula Weinstein, Rosenthal's co-producer on Analyze That, says, "This is the moment when all the parts of Jane's life have come together."
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Harvey Weinstein, who rents office space in De Niro's Tribeca Film Center and has had an entertainingly volatile relationship with the duo, says, "Jane can make Bob do things the right way, the polite way, and Bob will listen to her in a way he'll never listen to Marty Scorsese and me. He has the ultimate respect for her."
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"A lot of people who work with actors have the need to make themselves important, and want to be the bridge between the actors and the world," says Paula Weinstein, who first worked with the pair on Analyze This. "Jane has none of that. Her identity is not caught up with him in that way. Only a very secure person can do that."
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Rosenthal and Hatkoff became involved with Democratic fund-raising in 1997 at the instigation of Hatkoff's older sister, Susan Patricof, and her husband, venture capitalist Alan Patricof, who befriended the Clintons back in 1991. "We asked Jane and Craig to do a fund-raiser," says Susan, "because we were looking for a younger crowd, for people who hadn't been exposed to the political scene." Rosenthal, of course, pulled out all the stops: Her first foray featured De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his Titanic fame, and a cast of movers-and-shakers for a $25,000-per-person dinner at which Clinton played the saxophone.
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her father, Martin, ran a prosperous wire import-export business, with her mother, Ina, who also acted in community theater.
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She couldn't wait to get to college, enrolling in an experimental program at Brown University for what would have been her last two high-school years. Tim Forbes, now the chief operating officer of his family's magazine empire, was an upperclassman who met Rosenthal in film class. "She was bright-eyed, precocious, sweet, and focused. The guys were really smitten by her personality," says Forbes, who remains a close friend. They have helped each other out over the years: Rosenthal, as a fledgling movie exec, hired would-be screenwriters Forbes and his wife, Anne Harrison, to write an after-school special[.]
(On Wendy Wasserstein, friend of Jane: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/wasserstein-wendy)
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