CORT CASADY

A Hollywood Adventure

Cort Casady has won two Emmy Awards and three NAACP Image Awards for his work as a television and documentary writer-producer. In a career that has spanned more than 30 years, his numerous credits include a TV movie mini-series, music specials, television’s first environmental magazine series, an award-winning daily, live, prime time variety series, awards shows, tributes, books, and a musical.

Born in McAllen, Texas, on April 22, 1947, Casady grew up the youngest of five sons of newspaper editor and publisher Simon Casady (1908-1995) and former librarian Virginia Kent Boon (1908-1987). The family has roots in Oklahoma City, OK where Casady School, a well-known and highly regarded K-12 preparatory academy is named after Casady’s grandfather, Episcopal Bishop Thomas Casady.

After moving from Texas to Arizona, where his father was editor of the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette newspapers for two years, Casady moved with his family to El Cajon, California where his father purchased and published The El Cajon Valley News from 1954 until 1964. A graduate of Grossmont High School in La Mesa, CA, Casady went on to graduate from Harvard University with a BA degree cum laude in Government, working summers during college in Washington, D.C. for U.S. Representative Lionel Van Deerlin (D-San Diego).

After Harvard, Casady moved to Los Angeles where he got his first job in television at KNBC-TV in Burbank as a commercial coordinator in Operations. He then became a production assistant on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, eventually serving as Tommy Smothers’ executive assistant at CBS Television City during the tense period when CBS executives were attempting to censor the program. (The highly rated show was cancelled in April 1969.)

After a brief stint on the Smothers show, Casady was made an associate producer of the Los Angeles production of the rock musical Hair, which was co-produced by the Smothers and was the first Broadway musical ever presented in Los Angeles. Prior to the opening of Hair at the Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard in December of 1968, Casady, 21, was made Vice President of the Theater of Aquarius Corporation, the entity presenting the play. When Casady asked if the new title came with a raise, the attorney for the production, Frank Wells (later the President of the Walt Disney Company), laughed and informed Cort that he had been given the position because he was the only member of the production company, including the Smothers Brothers and their managers, Ken Kragen, Ken Fritz and Neil Rosen, who did not have a police record. In the event the play was closed down by the Vice Squad for its controversial nude scene, Wells said, Casady would be the individual arrested.

“Not wanting to go to jail, I spent many nights in the follow spot booth at the Aquarius Theatre scanning the audience to see if there were any Vice Squad guys present,” Casady recalled. “If I saw them, I’d call backstage and, for that performance, the nude scene would be completely dark,” he said. “It worked. We were never busted, the play became a huge hit, and ran for two years.”

Following the success of “Hair,” Casady joined Kragen and Rosen in the personal management company, Kragen & Friends, assuming daily responsibility for and touring with music acts Kenny Rogers & The First Edition, Mason Williams, Jennifer Warnes, John Hartford, and John Stewart. After working for several years as a personal manager, Casady left Hollywood in 1974 to live and ski in Sun Valley, Idaho for a winter. He spent the next three years in San Diego, where he helped run a Congressional campaign, joined a music group (playing drums), wrote his first screenplay, and started writing magazine articles. In 1977, Casady returned to Hollywood to become a professional screenwriter.

Prior to landing his first job as a television writer, to make ends meet, Casady wrote bios for recording artists, souvenir books for touring performers, and worked as a freelance investigative magazine reporter. He also landed a contract as a staff songwriter for Nashville and Los Angeles music publisher Al Gallico, writing one song that was recorded by Crystal Gayle, Jesse Colter, and Marshall Chapman, and others that were used as placeholders in early edits of the Warner Bros. films, Electric Horseman and Honeysuckle Rose.

“I discovered you could make some meaningful money having your songs used to persuade other people to license and write their songs,” Casady recalled.

Casady got his first TV staff writing job after producers Rocco Urbisci and Neal Marshall read a 7,000-word investigative magazine article Casady had written for San Diego Magazine about US Representative Bob Wilson (R-San Diego). The article landed Casady a job on The American Flyer, an “entertainment magazine” show inspired by the success of 60 Minutes, and hosted by comedian Dan Rowan.

Around the same time, Casady was asked by his early mentor, personal manager and producer Ken Kragen, to listen to The Gambler, a new single which had just been recorded by Kenny Rogers. Kragen asked Casady if he thought the song could be turned into a television show; Casady said “yes” and wrote several scenarios which led to creating the original story and characters for the popular TV movie, Kenny Rogers as the Gambler (1980). Since Casady wasn’t a member of the Writers Guild yet, the teleplay for the first film was written by veteran Gunsmoke writer Jim Byrnes. The initial two-hour movie, which aired on the CBS Television Network, when there were only three networks, received a 50 rating/share.

“When the first Gambler aired, it was amazing to think that every other TV set in America was tuned to something you helped create,” Casady said later.

The first Gambler movie inspired four sequels on CBS and NBC between 1982 and 1994.

Casady went on to pursue a career as a TV staff writer, joined the Writers Guild, and penned scripts for the syndicated variety-talk series, The Jim Nabors Show, with comedy writer Brian Pollack. Casady also wrote two musical documentary specials for CBS – A Special Kenny Rogers and Kenny Rogers & The American Cowboy – in addition to joining the staff for Barbara Mandrell & The Mandrell Sisters, a prime-time variety series on NBC.

As serendipity would have it, while working with the comedy writing team of Rick Kellard & Bob Comfort on A Special Kenny Rogers for CBS, Casady met Kellard’s ex-wife, Barbara, an interior designer, whom he later married.

Always eager to maintain his connection to music, Casady and songwriter Michael Cannon composed songs for several television pilots created and written by Kellard & Comfort including First Time, Second Time, Nichols & Dymes, and One Night Band. Casady made the transition from staff writer to TV writer-producer when he was asked to do both jobs on The Music City News Songwriter Awards, a program honoring songwriters that was broadcast live from Nashville, Tennessee (1983-1985).

In 1983, Casady helped format and was the sole writer on the first season of Star Search with Ed McMahon, the long-running reality-competition series that served as the forerunner of American Idol.

A lifelong environmental activist, Casady co-created, launched, and produced television’s first weekly environmental magazine series on TBS. Launched in 1989 as Earthbeat, the show aired as Network Earth for five years on the Turner channel. Around the same time, Cort’s original screenplay, Underground LA, the story of two “environmental cops” investigating the pollution of Santa Monica Bay, was purchased by actor-producer Michael Douglas and Columbia Pictures.

In 1991, the Casadys moved to New York City, after Cort was hired to create and executive produce a daily, live, prime-time variety-talk series for Super Station WOR-NY. Casady won his first Emmy Award for the series – New York at Night Starring Clint Holmes – in 1992.

In 1995, after moving back to Los Angeles and trying for years to start a family, Barbara gave birth to triplets – Braden, Carter, and Jackson. With three babies at home, Casady gained unexpected notoriety for writing, producing and naming the landmark factual reality series, When Animals Attack! (1996-1997).

Tasked with coming up with a title for the factual reality show, Casady recalls watching footage of animals attacking people and making a list of possible titles on a yellow pad.

“The show is about what happens when animals attack people, so I wrote down ‘When Animals Attack!’ and pitched it,” Casady recalls.

Brad Lachman, Casady’s executive producer at the time, wasn’t so sure, but network executives loved the title. After When Animals Attack! set ratings records on the Fox Network using real footage and dramatic recreations, Casady told a friend, “My wife says I’ll be remembered for popularizing the adverb ‘when.’”

Soon after the show became a hit, talk show host David Letterman famously threatened to produce a TV Christmas special called, “When Reindeer Attack!”

“I learned way too much about animals from that show,” Casady once recalled with a laugh. “For years, we didn’t go hiking for fear of cougars; we didn’t go to dog parks for fear of Pit Bulls and Rottweilers; we didn’t swim in the ocean for fear of sharks.”

From 1996 to 2001, Casady served alongside one of television’s pre-eminent executive producers, Ken Ehrlich, as producer-writer-show runner of The Blockbuster Entertainment Awards. Ehrlich, who produced the Grammy Awards for decades, told Casady at the time that he was the first producer he trusted to “cover for me” while Ehrlich was executive producing both shows.

In 1997, Casady also teamed with Emmy-winning director Louis J. Horvitz to revamp the annual TV special that raised funds and awareness for the United Negro College Fund (UNCF). Together, Casady and Horvitz transformed The Lou Rawls Parade of Stars telethon, which had been on the air since 1979, into a multi-hour, prime time, network-quality concert event called An Evening of Stars. In 2004, Casady and Horvitz overhauled An Evening of Stars, turning it into a high-profile, annual, televised tribute special. For 14 years, Casady wrote and produced the annual special benefiting the UNCF, including tributes to R&B legends Lou Rawls (2004), Quincy Jones (2005), Stevie Wonder (2006), Aretha Franklin (2007), Smokey Robinson (2008), Patti LaBelle (2009), Lionel Richie (2010), and Chaka Khan (2011). Casady won NAACP Image Awards for the tributes to Stevie Wonder (2007), Smokey Robinson (2009), and Lionel Richie (2011).

A member of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) since 1979, Casady had the distinction for a decade of being the only producer of The Writers Guild Awards who was both a long-standing member of the Guild and an experienced awards show producer. Through his company, TriMedia Productions, Casady executive produced the WGA Awards in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2013 and 2014, helping to raise the profile and prestige of the show within the industry.

Veteran Hollywood publicist and manager David Brokaw once described Casady as “a five-tool producer,” borrowing the baseball term reserved for players who hit with power, hit consistently, can throw the ball, field the ball, and run fast. “For TV producers, the five tools are producing high-profile events, consistently delivering top production values, working successfully with big talent, having strong writing skills, and being able to adapt to rapidly changing conditions,” Brokaw said. “Cort could claim all five tools, and he was always looking forward to his next at bat.”

For 21 years, from 2003 to 2024, Casady served as Supervising Producer of the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award tributes to America’s leading actors and filmmakers, serving alongside AFI President & CEO Bob Gazzale, producers Chris Merrill, Christine Callandra, and Bill Urban. Casady helped create and supervised the televised tributes to Robert De Niro (2003), Meryl Streep (2004), George Lucas (2005), Sean Connery (2006), Al Pacino (2007), Michael Douglas (2009), Mike Nichols (2010), Morgan Freeman (2011), Shirley MacLaine (2012), Mel Brooks (2013), Jane Fonda (2014), Steve Martin (2015), composer John Williams (2016), Diane Keaton (2017), George Clooney (2018), Denzel Washington (2019), Julie Andrews (2022), and Nicole Kidman (2024). Casady won his second Emmy Award in 2014 for AFI’s tribute to Mel Brooks.

Casady is the author of a bestselling memoir, Not Your Father’s America: An Adventure Raising Triplets in a Country Being Changed by Greed (Chandler Press, 2023). The book combines two narratives: one is an account of Barbara and Cort’s emotional struggle to start a family using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), the shock of having triplets, and the challenge of raising them; the other is a timely and insightful father’s commentary on changes taking place in the America the triplets would be inheriting.

“One day we were a double-income, no-kids (D.I.N.K.) couple on our way to dinner; the next day we were a party of five,” Casady recalls. “It was great, except we always felt we were one parent shy of a perfect family.”

Casady is the co-author of two other books, The Singing Entertainer: The Art & Business of Being a Professional, a handbook for performers (with John Davidson, Alfred Publishing, 1980), which remained in print for more than a decade, and You Oughta Be Me: How to Be a Lounge Singer and Live Like One by The Fabulous Bud E. Luv, a mock autobiography of a delusional performer (with Ned Claflin, St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

Casady is also co-author with Mary Miller of a musical play, King of the Road: The Roger Miller Story, which had its World Premiere at the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach, CA in 2017.

“King of the Road received a standing ovation after every one of its 29 performances,” Casady recalls. “The Playhouse told us they’d never had a play get a standing ‘o’ after every performance. They also told us that the only thing harder than getting your play produced the first time is getting it produced a second time. Then COVID happened.”

Asked once by a friend how he would like his obituary to read, Casady, always one to go for a laugh, said, “When I die, I’d like my obituary to be something you never see: ‘Casady died of a tiny heart attack that wouldn’t have killed most people, while strangers restrained him, and friends went looking for his family members.’”

Barbara and Cort Casady will celebrate 43 years of marriage in 2025. Their three sons, Braden, Carter, and Jackson, were born on January 7, 1995 in Pasadena, CA. As of June 2025, Carter and his wife, Sarah, who were married in 2015, had four daughters: Ruth, Tova, Ella, and Naomi. Braden and his wife, Kendall, were married in August 2024; Jackson and his wife, Andie, were married in December 2024.