Lou Reda Bio

For more than than thirty years Lou Reda has been the man writing the book for TV documentary production. In producing more than 400 outstanding shows, Mr. Reda can claim that his work has been seen and enjoyed by an international audience approaching half the population of the earth. As Executive Producer of Lou Reda Productions, he is the builder of an organization and a physical plant that sets a standard for the production business everywhere.

MANAGEMENT BIOGRAPHY

Lou Reda
Executive Producer

"Emmy Magazine" June, 2004

In the mix
LABORS OF LOVE
history on location

The last time Lou Reda worked in Hollywood, he was a big band singer at the Hollywood USO waiting to ship out to the Pacific. Now the seventy-nine-year-old ex-Navy Seabee is making history. And working in it too.

In 250 year-old Easton, Pennsylvania, seventy-five miles west of Manhattan, Reda has carved out a niche producing documentaries for cable, like the 2003 Emmy nominee The Day the Towers Fell. He and his staff of eleven, including son Scott, shoot, edit and archive their work, along with 100 million feet of historical film, in renovated 19th century silk mills.

"We have a lot of warehousing we can turn into anything we want to turn it into," Reda says of the 400,000 square foot complex which, he says, contains the country's largest private archive of historical film.

The onetime musician and big-band booking agent got the TV bug after landing a syndicated series for a client, the mentalist known as the Amazing Kreskin. He followed that with the 1982 CBS miniseries The Blue and the Gray, based on material by civil war historian Bruce Catton. Reda liked reenacting history; he didn't like spending seven years putting the deal together. "I vowed never again (to go the broadcast network route)," he says. "I said, 'Let's go into doing documentaries, biographies, things like that'".

Thanks to a contact in the 8th Air Force, Reda got the film footage he needed to produce the syndicated series War Chronicles. That experience positioned his company perfectly for the growing non-fiction cable market. "We indirectly helped launch the History Channel," he says, "because we had a lot of material they (were) looking for." Covering subjects as diverse as chocolatier Milton Hershey, B-Westerns and the military, Reda has produced almost 400 documentaries. Currently he has several projects at the History Channel - and no intention of leaving Easton.

"I probably do more," he says, "by not being in Hollywood."

- Sandy Siegel