James Lipton

Bringing all the disciplines in which he was trained to his career as a producer, he has been responsible as writer and executive-producer for some of television's most celebrated specials, among them Jimmy Carter's Inaugural Gala, the first Presidential concert ever televised, and the first television special to originate in the Kennedy Center; twelve Bob Hope Birthday Specials, reaching record-breaking audiences; and The Road to China, the first American entertainment program from the People's Republic, which aired for three hours on NBC.

He was the writer and producer of Mirrors, adapted by him from his novel, which appeared on NBC; and he created the story and teleplay for Copacabana, which was chosen by TV Guide as one of the year's ten best TV films.

On Broadway, Mr. Lipton wrote the book and lyrics of two musicals, Nowhere to Go but Up, and Sherry!, which was based on Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner. In 2005, he revisited Sherry!, producing a cast album for Angel Records, starring Nathan Lane, Bernadette Peters, Carol Burnett, Tommy Tune and Mike Myers.

Also on Broadway, he produced The Mighty Gents, starring Morgan Freeman, and Monteith and Rand, which Dennis Cunningham of WCBS TV called “the comic event of the season.”

In addition to his novel Mirrors, which reflected his experience in the world of dance and dancers, he is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction book An Exaltation of Larks, which has been in print since its publication in 1968.

The definitive work on the subject of collective nouns, Mr. Lipton's research, which was as thorough then as it is now, led him to the fifteenth century Middle-English tomes in the library of the British Museum that rendered up the sources of not only the familiar - a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a host of angels - but such unknown (and proper) terms as an ostentation of peacocks, a murder of crows, a charm of finches, a parliament of owls, a skulk of foxes, a shrewdness of apes - and an exaltation of larks.

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