Temple Fennell – ATO Pictures

Posted by Bryan Bieber on November 26th, 2009 filed in Personal

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Temple Fennell over the phone after meeting him at the Virginia Film Festival. Temple Fennell is a fellow UVA alumni wo co-founded ATO Pictures with producer Johnathan Dorfman and musician Dave Matthews. Some of the films that Temple Fennell produced are “Choke” which was written by the author of “Fight Club”, “Savage Grace” starring the lovely Julianne Moore, and the movie “Joshua”. “Choke” recently sold to Fox Searchlight for a multi-million dollar deal.

Most recently Temple Fennell has taken on the immense task of starting a small distribution company called “ATO Gotham” that has partnerships with major studios. He has the people and network in place reading scripts and scouting for films in festivals. I questioned Temple Fennell on the long time it must have took to develop the relationships with the major studios and he agreed by saying, “Yeah, it took a really long time”. It truly is the work of a lifetime, hats off to Temple Fennell, I hope to eventually work with him somehow in the future.