Nellie Andreeva

EXCLUSIVE: Rob Golenberg, former Gersh Head of TV Literary and Packaging who left the agency in November amid a restructuring, is moving to the management side, joining Evolution Entertainment as a manager and producer. Additionally, Golenberg has teamed with longtime client Alon Aranya to launch a new production company, Scripted World.

This season, Golenberg and writer-producer Aranya, who specializes in getting rights to international formats and bringing them to the U.S., sold 5 projects — three of them based on Israeli formats, and two on European ones. Two of them, ABC’s Penoza, based on a Dutch format, and NBC’s Midnight Sun, based on an Israeli series, were recently ordered to pilot with Aranya executive producing. The new company will focus on scripted foreign formats. While the U.K. has been America’s biggest source of scripted formats over the years, Aranya sees the rest of Europe as the next hotbed. “In the past few years we’ve been seeing a tremendous creative growth in European scripted shows resulting in outstanding drama series such as (Danish) The Killing and Penoza which have been set up for remakes in the US,” Aranya said. I believe that following the success of Penoza at ABC we will see more European TV drama adapted for US remakes.

At Evolution, Golenberg re-teams the company president Michael Menchel with whom he worked at AMG. Save for the 4-month stint at the ill-fated AMG, Gelenberg spent the last 22 years as an agent at Triad, Paradigm, WMA and most recently at Gersh where he was for 9.5 years. He brings with him about a dozen of his clients, including Charlie Craig (exec producer showrunner of Eureka), Scott Williams (co-executive producer of NCIS) and Melissa Carter (Jane By Design). “For the past few years, I saw the agency business becoming mainly about market share, and am much more interested in new business models, and working in a creative position with my clients,” Golenberg said.

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