A Fredric Leopold

Few people in Hollywood have the ability to say yes. The power to green light a motion picture--to commit the resources to make it--rests with a handful of studio executives whose names are well known throughout the industry. A. Fredric Leopold is not one of those names. But the 78-year-old lawyer's stamp of approval matters as much as any mogul's. Leopold is dean of the script vetters.

Soft-spoken and almost professorial, A. Fredric Leopold isn't someone you'd be apt to associate with the madcap world of unscripted television. An 81-year-old grandfather and former mayor of Beverly Hills, he would look out of place among the sun-drenched bodies on Fox's "Temptation Island," the grittiness of "Cops" or those crazy kids on MTV's "The Real World."

Soft-spoken and almost professorial, A. Fredric Leopold isn't someone you'd be apt to associate with the madcap world of unscripted television. An 81-year-old grandfather and former mayor of Beverly Hills, he would look out of place among the sun-drenched bodies on Fox's "Temptation Island," the grittiness of "Cops" or those crazy kids on MTV's "The Real World."

Few people in Hollywood have the ability to say yes. The power to green light a motion picture--to commit the resources to make it--rests with a handful of studio executives whose names are well known throughout the industry. A. Fredric Leopold is not one of those names. But the 78-year-old lawyer's stamp of approval matters as much as any mogul's. Leopold is dean of the script vetters.