Michel Shane

On April 3, 2010, Michel Shane's daughter Emily was murdered on Pacific Coast Highway and the following year his wife started The Emily Shane Foundation ( www.emilyshane.org) to help children in middle school who were struggling by offering a mentoring program. The only cost to the child is that they must "Pass It Forward" by doing a good deed for each session. This one of the corner stones of the foundation.

In 2005, Michel Shane founded Hand Picked Films, an independent film and television production company, with business partner Anthony Romano. Romano is in charge of television production, and Michel Shane film production. Based out of both Los Angeles and Montreal, Hand Picked has established itself as an international production company, recently producing films in Brazil, Italy, Croatia, India, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Leaving Prolusion in 1987, Michel Shane began working in television distribution on his own, and started consulting work in Hollywood. During the next several years he produced "Return to the Titanic Live" and "Dracula Live From Transylvania" for television networks in Canada, and acquired the rights to the book, "Catch Me If You Can."

In 1982, in an effort to study the emerging market, Shane attended a conference on the future of video in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he was mistaken as an industry expert by a local news affiliate. With this small break, he was able to develop connections and start MKS, an independent video distribution company, which at the beginning sold "How To" videos from the trunk of his car. Two years later, Shane turned MKS into the Prolusion Group with the help of a few business partners, and began to travel internationally purchasing new titles at film festivals he attended.

Michel Shane got his first taste of the movie business in high school when he directed and produced a video short of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." Then, at age 17, he picked up a job as a page with CFCF, a local television network, followed by an internship at Columbia Pictures Television. In 1980, after graduating with a degree in Communication and Marketing from McGill University, he moved to Lansing, Michigan, to seek a degree in Entertainment Law at Cooley Law School. After two years, however, he left Cooley to enter the newly developing video industry.

Michel Shane (born October 8, 1955) is a film producer and co-founder of Hand Picked Films. He is best known for receiving an executive producer credit on Catch Me If You Can and I, Robot along with his business partner Anthony Romano.