Todd Shuster
Todd Shuster has recently returned to his work producing and executive producing feature film and television projects. His credits include The Inheritance, the 2-hour movie produced for CBS based on Louisa May Alcott’s first novel (1997, Associate Producer); and Six Ways to Sunday, an independent film (1997, Co-Executive Producer) produced by Scout Productions (currently producers of Bravo’s Queer Eye series) starring Deborah Harry and Oscar® award winner Adrien Brody. As a principal of Veralux Media, Shuster is currently in post-production on a feature-length documentary exploring a highly controversial area of the criminal justice system for Showtime (forthcoming in 2007).
As a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency, Shuster represents both fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction list includes biography, true-crime, popular science, adventure, politics and civil rights, history, memoir, business, health, and psychology. His fiction list is comprised primarily of literary and "crossover" commercial novels. In addition to representing books to publishers, Shuster places film and television rights on behalf of agency clients, dealing directly with producers, studios, and networks in New York and Los Angeles. He has recently sold projects set up at Paramount, Universal, Sony, Warner Brothers, Participant, CBS, Showtime, Discovery Health, VH-1 and HBO.
Book projects Shuster has recently represented include: the New York Times bestseller Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter by James Hirsch (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); CI: Team Red and the continuing Army Counterintelligence fiction series (Warner Books, 2005) by former CI agent David DeBatto and Pete Nelson; Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security by Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Cooper and Robert Block (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2006); The Last Good Time, a nonfiction narrative from Vogue's Jonathan Van Meter (Crown, 2002); best-seller Real Boys: Rescuing our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood by William Pollack, Ph.D., professor at Harvard Medical School (Random House, 1999); It! by New York Post Page Six reporter Paula Froelich (Miramax Books, 2005); The Spy Next Door, a nonfiction narrative about FBI mole Robert S. Hanssen by TIME correspondents Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman (Little Brown, 2002); Pull Me Up, an acclaimed memoir by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times columnist Dan Barry, and Eating, Drinking, Overthinking by Yale psychology professor and best-selling author Susan Nolen-Hoeksema.
In addition to working with authors to sell their own manuscripts, Shuster represents numerous journalists, collaborative editors and ghost writers. These clients have helped scores of major celebrities and national figures complete their books, including Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Poitier, Ginger Rogers, Maureen Stapleton, former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey, supermodel Petra Nemcova, and many others.
Shuster went to Yale (where he graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and then completed law school at Northeastern University (where he subsequently taught on the adjunct faculty). Prior to his current career, Shuster practiced publishing and entertainment law at the Boston law firms of Palmer & Dodge and Ropes & Gray.