“Columbia Prepared Me For (Almost) Anything”

Joe Seldner ’73, JRN’76 is a writer, producer, journalist and media and entertainment veteran. He has produced movies and television for HBO and independently, was creative executive for actor Tom Hanks at Disney Studios and was assistant to the president of Columbia Pictures. His adviser at the Journalism School was the great Fred Friendly.

Seldner earned an M.B.A. from Yale and was a fellow at Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute from 2022 to 2023; he continues to write and develop projects in entertainment.

He began his career as a journalist, earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1980. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Magazine and dozens of others. He has provided strategic communications advice for media companies; given seminars on screenwriting and idea development; been a judge and panelist at the Ivy Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival and Bahamas Film Festival; and worked with scores of writers and actors.

Seldner summited Mount Kilimanjaro in June 2013 (artificial hip and all!), played touch football regularly into his 60s, and is always seeking new challenges and adventures. He raised his children from very young ages as a single father; they are his best work.

What were you like when you arrived at Columbia?

Despite having gone to high school only a little more than an hour from Columbia, and knowing the campus pretty well from visits with my father, Abraham Seldner ’40, I felt like a sardine in a sea of intellectual whales and yes, a few savvy and sophisticated sharks. Like many freshmen, I was both intimidated and intrigued by the city and remember well a moment when Ed Harris, a classmate and yes, the actor, and I got off on the “wrong” subway side of Morningside Park late at night, and figured, well, we made it to 18, that’s not bad. We walked through the park back to campus and were just fine.

What do you remember about your first-year living situation?

The 12th floor of John Jay Hall always reminded me of a cruise ship (not an elegant cruise ship, however) with its long hallways. Also, despite its then-much derided reputation for football (not so much anymore) we had about 20 players on our floor (I “played” football badly for two years) and about half of them were quarterbacks. And I remember well that at the first sign of spring, usually in mid-March, one or two students would perch their amplifiers on their window sills and blast the Rolling Stones song “Street Fighting Man.” I knew spring was near when that happened.

What Core class or experience do you most remember, and why?

There was a two-semester course on psychoanalysis my senior year, the first semester about Freud and the second about a wide range of famous psychoanalysts from Jung to Adler to R.D. Laing, but the Freud course was taught by a brilliant psychiatrist named Willard Gaylin who was utterly mesmerizing, probably the best professor I had. I also remember my “advanced” freshman English class. Four sections were offered, each studying one book the entire semester, to us bratty kids who had gotten a 5 on the AP English exam. One of the books was Moby Dick, and I can’t remember two of them. But I chose Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer for the incredibly stupid reason that I saw a guy named Richard Thomas had signed up for it. Richard, a really good guy, had been in a movie I saw the summer before freshman year and I thought, hey it might be cool to get to know him. Halfway through the semester, the professor told us Richard has dropped out and moved to California to star as “John Boy” in a new television show, The Waltons. Yes, I was an idiot, and I still had to study the book for two more months.

Did you have a favorite spot on campus, and what did you like about it?

I loved the Journalism School, loved its energy and its ethos that journalism could be a force for good (it still can) back in the Woodward and Bernstein era. Famous, accomplished people moved in and out of the J-School on an almost daily basis. I also loved Baker Field —not the 40-minute bus ride each way — but the view of the Hudson, the love of athletics I have always had and the feeling it gave me that the life of the body was (almost) as consequential as the life of the mind.

What, if anything, about your College experience would you do over?

Not much; I loved it. Maybe more exploration of neighborhoods — especially neighborhoods where students rarely would go. I took courses in many departments and felt I took advantage of the University’s offerings, but might have been a little more adventurous with courses in hard science and some of the weirder courses, of which there were many in the early ’70s. After seven years on campus, I moved to Denver — a place I’d never been — to be a journalist. As much of a shock as it was going from Princeton, N.J., to NYC, NYC to Denver was just as jarring. But I felt Columbia had prepared me for (almost) anything. And I am grateful.