Hoyt Richards (Screenwriter, Actor, Producer, Script Consultant)

Hoyt Richards

Screenwriter | Actor | Producer | Script Consultant

Biography

Hoyt Richards – Award winning Actor/Writer/Filmmaker and Founder/Executive of Tortoise Entertainment Originally from the Main Line area outside Philadelphia, Hoyt was a scholar-athlete who graduated from Princeton with a BA in Economics where he also played football. In his early career, Hoyt worked as a fashion model for Ford and Wihelmina Models and is considered by many to be the world’s first male supermodel. Over his fifteen-year career, Hoyt was the face of numerous campaigns for the industry’s top designers and he appeared in over two hundred commercials. In 2000, he moved to Los Angeles, where he began working as an actor and now has over thirty films to his credit. Expanding his skill set to include directing, screenwriting, editing and producing, Hoyt created his own production company, Tortoise Entertainment in 2010. With Tortoise, Hoyt has produced two feature films: Dumbbells, a buddy comedy set in a gym that was theatrically released in 2014. His latest project, Intersection, a psychological, romantic thriller will be theatrically released in 2018. These two films have won nearly two hundred awards combined during their respective film festival runs. Intersection became one of the most acclaimed indie films of 2016, winning well over a hundred awards in total, including 50+ wins for Best Picture. As an actor, Hoyt has won over fifty Best Actor awards. And he also won several awards for screenwriting and Indie Spirit. Hoyt has co-written two scripts with acclaimed writer/filmmaker Lawrence Nelson, Away With My Heart and Invisible Prisons, that are currently making their run on script competition circuit. Both scripts have won or placed in over twenty festivals each. Also, Hoyt is writing/producing a docu-series that chronicles his twenty-year journey into the Eternal Values religious cult and his subsequent escape and recovery. Simultaneously, he is co-writing a book, Seemed Like a Great Idea at the Time, with best-selling author, Kim Wong Keltner, who is also an ex-Eternal Values member. The book catalogs their journey and friendship through the cult years and after. Hoyt speaks publicly about the dangers and lessons learned from his experience with cultic and abusive environments. He also assists families and individuals who have loved ones caught in cultic situations.