Martin Kaplan holds the Norman Lear Chair in Entertainment, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg School, where he was associate dean for ten years. He is the founding Director of the school’s Norman Lear Center, whose mission is to study and shape the impact of media and entertainment on society. In the Carter White House, he was Vice President Walter Mondale’s chief speechwriter; he also was deputy campaign manager of Mondale’s run for the presidency. He worked at Walt Disney Studios for 12 years, where he was first a live-action feature films vice president and then a screenwriter/producer. He has credits on “The Distinguished Gentleman,” starring Eddie Murphy, a political comedy he wrote and executive produced; “Noises Off,” directed by Peter Bogdanovich, which he adapted for the screen from Michael Frayn’s farce; and the action-adventure “MAX Q,” produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. His print and online columns have won six first-place journalism prizes from the Los Angeles Press Club. A summa cum laude in molecular biology from Harvard College, where he was president of The Harvard Lampoon, he received a First in English as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University, and he holds a Ph.D. from Stanford in modern thought and literature.