HBO's The Pacific Is ΦBK Behind the Camera
“The most important ingredient in my success in Hollywood is undoubtedly my liberal arts education. The critical thinking, love of learning, and research skills that Wesleyan University instilled in me have provided me with the tools necessary to navigate all the different aspects of storytelling in Hollywood.”
— Bruce C. McKenna
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Award-winning writer and producer Bruce C. McKenna (ΦBK, Wesleyan University, 1984) has added the HBO miniseries The Pacific to an already impressive list of credits. McKenna (above, center) created the project, serving as co-executive producer and writing the majority of episodes for the series, which was also produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.
McKenna previously partnered with HBO and Spielberg, Hanks and Goetzman when he wrote episodes for the Emmy Award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers, which garnered him a Writers Guild of America Award, an Emmy nomination and a finalist for the Humanitas Prize.
“Ironically, as the world has become more specialized, a liberal arts education has become more important than ever,” McKenna said. “Without a broad and deep exposure to different disciplines — which higher education provides — the individual in today’s intellectually fractured world risks marginalizing himself. The plethora of information now available to the average person — the facts, as it were — can prove as useless as it is now ubiquitous. It is how we think that is paramount,” McKenna observed.
“The most important ingredient in my success in Hollywood is undoubtedly my liberal arts education,” he added. “The critical thinking, love of learning, and research skills that Wesleyan University instilled in me have provided me with the tools necessary to navigate all the different aspects of storytelling in Hollywood.”
For the big screen, McKenna has sold numerous original pitches and has written several studio film assignments, including the adaptation of Once Upon a Distant War for Jerry Bruckheimer Films and The Perfect Mile for Kennedy/Marshall and Universal. He has worked with such distinguished directors as Ridley Scott, David Fincher and Frank Darabont, among others.
In the theater world, McKenna, along with his wife Maureen, produced off and off-off Broadway plays in New York, where they had the pleasure of producing Neil LaBute’s first commercial play, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times.
McKenna has traveled extensively all over the world, including Central and South America, Polynesia, Japan, Northern Europe, England, France and the old Soviet Union. He worked abroad in Egypt on a paleontology expedition and in Pakistan as a journalist.
He was the first Western journalist to write about the then burgeoning post-Soviet, Russian anti-Semitic movement Pamyat for The New York Times and Areté magazine. Additionally, he penned several articles on Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Pakistan for Areté magazine as well as the National Review, for which he also interviewed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (ΦBK, Harvard, 1989). His first book, The Pena Files — the true story of the world’s highest paid private investigator, Octavio Pena, the only man to ever successfully infiltrate both the Mafia and the IRS — was published by ReganBooks and Harper Collins.
Born and raised in Englewood, N.J., McKenna became a ΦBK member in 1984 at Wesleyan University, where he majored in European history. Upon graduation he received the Dutcher History Prize and was nominated for University Honors, Wesleyan’s highest academic award. Later he entered Stanford University’s Ph.D. program in Russian and Soviet history, focusing on early 20th century Russian fascism. He left Stanford, however, to become a freelance writer focusing on politics and foreign affairs.