Hersch, Phillip

Person

Hersch, Phillip

1929-

Phillip Hersch was born in Toronto on June 6, 1929. He left school at the age of 16 and worked at various jobs. He returned to school a couple of years later studying photography at a Ryerson Polytechnic as well as enrolling in the extension programme at the University of Toronto. He joined a firm of commerical and editorial photographers upon completion of the Ryerson course. Within a short amount of time Hersch made his way to New York city where he did a number of jobs in the realm of art photography, including a job as a laboratory technician at Life magazine. Returning to Toronto a year later, he opened his own photography studio. It was during this time that Hersch moved into shooting motion picture film. In 1952, intrigued by the moving image medium, Hersch took the first film job that came his way as an assistant film editor at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). He closed his photography studio.
While at CBC he became a chief film editor, editing the nightly news and a program called Newsmagazine. The CBC gave Hersch a scholarship to attend L'Institut des hautes études cinématographiques where he spent 2 years before returning to the CBC. Upon his return, Hersch wrote and directed for both Heritage and The Nature of Things series, as well as documentary films for the Special Programs Unit. He won a Canadian Film Award for Armagh, an episode of the Heritage series.
After winning the award Hersch went to work for the National Film Board as the production supervisor for airforce training films. This stint did not last long and Hersch soon resigned. In the early 1960's Hersch returned to Toronto and worked as an assistant director on a number of American (co)productions that were being filmed in and around Toronto: Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans, Tugboat Annie and Cannonball. During this time he also worked on the Walt Disney production of Nikki, Wild Dog of the North.
In the mid-sixties the American presence on the Canadian film scene dwindled and Hersch moved into making television commericals for Petersen Productions and and TDF Artists Ltd. in Toronto. While doing this commerical work Hersch started to turn his attention to writing. He submitted plays to CBC, two of which were produced, Prelude and Maitre Chez Nous and went on to be retained on contract with the CBC as a writer. It was at this point that the idea for the series Wojeck came to him, and he wrote the entire first season of the series. In the second season he only wrote a two part episode. The Last Man In The World, the first episode in the series, won the Wilderness Award as the CBC's best film production of the year, and the Golden Nymph at the Monte Carlo Film Festival. The series was sold to foreign markets in the U.K., Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, and Yugoslavia.
Based on the success on the Wojeck series, Hersch was invited to work with Sheldon Leonard in Hollywood. While in California Hersch worked for a number of studios writing, re-writing, and adapting material. He worked at Twentieth Century Fox with a number of well-known producers such as Elmo Williams, Robert Fryer, Arthur Jacobs and Philip D'Antonni. After leaving Fox he freelanced for various companies in the industry.
Hersch returned to Toronto in the late 1970's and continued to write and shop his stories around. He wrote the screenplay for Patman (later Mr. Patman) a feature film which was produced in 1980 as well as numerous other succesful and unsuccesful projects.
Phillip Hersch passed away in 2010.

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