- Deborah Johnson's twenty-nine year career in the motion picture industry has been one of rapid growth and ever-increasing responsibility. She began in the payroll department and made the steady climb up through the positions of production comptroller, line producer, independent producer, and studio vice-president. She has always been involved in both the creative and the physical sides of production. She believes in the importance of blending creative freedom with physical and fiscal responsibility.
The projects she worked on were wide ranging. Whatever the project - feature film, movie-for-television, game show, live and taped special for cable, weekly hour-long series, or sitcom - Deborah met the unique challenge of each.
In 1986, Lorimar selected her to work on their East Coast projects and to develop their production base in New York. During that time, Deborah developed her signature hands-on approach in personally seeing projects through pre-production, production, and post-production.
Deborah left Lorimar to form her own production company, Dryads Entertainment, Inc., in 1990 with Susan Solt. While housed at Warner Brothers, Johnson and Solt produced Presumed Innocent and Doc Hollywood.
In 1996, she was hired by Universal Studio as a Production Executive and in 1998 she was promoted to Vice President of Feature Film Production. She was responsible for motion pictures with top budgets, complex special effects and cutting edge visual effects. The fifteen pictures she oversaw had costs totaling over $975,000,000. Additionally, the complicated, multiple locations on many of the films took her to sets throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Africa, and Australia.
During her tenure at Universal, Ms. Johnson gained a reputation for holding a tight rein on budgets and at the same time fighting for the artistic integrity of her films. She has worked with some of the industry's top director and producers, including Jonathan Mostow, Martin Breast, Stephen Sommers, Ang Lee, John Hughes, Ted Hope, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, Sean Daniels and Jim Jacks, and Dino and Martha De Laurentis. Deborah was the Production Executive for such films as The Mummy, Meet the Parents, U-571, Meet Joe Black, The Mummy Returns, Snow Falling on Cedars and October Skies.
In November of 2002, Deborah established Whirling Rainbow Productions, a full service motion picture production company, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Deborah D. Johnson
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