John Newcombe wrote and directed the
award-winning independent feature film Best Man in Grass Creek. The film
was presented in more than 10 film festivals, including the Montreal Film
Festival. It won three awards, including the Bronze Award at the Flagstaff Film
Festival and Best Comedy at the Santa Clarita Film Festival. It was also a
favorite at the Cairo Film Festival in Egypt and India’s International Film
Festival in New Delhi. It played in select theaters in the Midwest before being
released on video/DVD to rave reviews. Newcombe writes the nationally
syndicated comic strip Zack Hill, which he created with
award-winning editorial cartoonist John Deering. The comic appears in more than
20 major newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The Seattle
Times, the Philadelphia Daily News and the Buffalo News, and
it is currently being developed into an animated TV show. Newcombe’s
experience as a comic-strip writer began years ago when he wrote for Archie
Comics Publications, Inc., where he worked with famed Archie artist and creator
of Josie and the Pussycats, Dan DeCarlo, writing the Archie comic
strip, which ran in more than 250 newspapers around the world. Before making
his first feature film, Newcombe was the vice president of development for
Morgan Freeman’s production company, Revelations Entertainment. He also
assisted talent manager Beverlee Dean, who has represented such talent as Reese
Witherspoon, Kevin Sorbo and Jim Caviezel. While attending film school, Newcombe
made the award-winning short comedy Lovestruck, which won an Academy
Award for Student Films in the Mid-Atlantic region and The Judges Award at
Vanderbilt’s Sinking Creek Film Festival. Lovestruck was also
highlighted at the Virginia Film Festival and the Chicago Film Festival, where
it was featured among the Best of Short Films. Newcombe trained as an actor at
the famed Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, where he performed in several
productions at the Goodman Theatre, including the title role in Sir Gawain
and as an acrobatic clown in the smash hit Center Ring Circus. He has
also performed in several productions at Hollywood’s Crossley Theatre,
including the lead in Horton Foote’s 1918 and Checkov’s The Brute.
