John Gertz

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JOHN GERTZ is the President and CEO of Zorro Productions, Inc.  He has produced four Zorro motion pictures, including The Mask of Zorro (1998) and its sequel, The Legend of Zorro, with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. During his tenure, 13 different TV versions of Zorro have been produced, as well as more than 75 ZORRO stage productions. In 2005, together with world-renowned author Isabel Allende, he released the best-selling novel about the genesis of Zorro.  He teamed up with Quentin Tarantino to create the graphic novel, Django/Zorro, currently being developed into a motion picture by SONY.  Gertz is the worldwide lead producer of Zorro: The Musical, with a score by the Gipsy Kings, which premiered on London’s West End in 2008 and has since been produced throughout the world. In the field of SETI, Gertz served three terms as chairman of the board of the SETI institute; is the only layman member of the Breakthrough Advisory Board, and he has published a number of theoretic papers (available at ArXiv.org).  He is also a classical pianist, a beekeeper, a mycologist, and an organic vegetable gardener.  He has served on innumerable non-profit boards, and as president of five.