He’s GoT Game
How one alum saved his hometown Connecticut movie theater and conquered Hollywood to write for the groundbreaking “Game of Thrones.”
By Tommi Lewis Tilden
Illustrations by Kyle Hilton
IF the blue Huskies T-shirt, jacket, cap, and 2023 championship towel (a gift from basketball guard Joey Calcaterra’s mom) aren’t enough of a giveaway, Ethan J. Antonucci ’99 (CLAS) is amped up to talk endlessly (his words) about his alma mater allegiance. With an ear-to-ear grin, the Hollywood writer and producer admits he’s even placed bets on his beloved Huskies over the years — one year paying off his wife Aimee’s student loans. “I always hold it over her head that my school paid for her school’s loans,” he says with a laugh.
Antonucci wants you to know that his unintentional winding journey from sportswriter to literary agent, TV writer, producer, family man, and proud savior of his hometown cinema was propelled by a series of pivotal and serendipitous moments — a fateful snowstorm, prescient advice, a clipping from the Los Angeles Times, and the lure of free pizza among them.
Let it snow
In his senior year of high school, a planned visit to Emerson College in Boston was scrapped due to a harrowing snowstorm. “We made it maybe 5 miles from our house and there was already 3 or 4 inches of snow piling up on the road,” recalls Antonucci. His parents, both schoolteachers, had only a limited window in which to make college visits. The snowstorm had other ideas. “Connecticut kind of kept me from leaving Connecticut in the strangest of ways,” Antonucci reflects about serendipitously missing out on his first-choice school.
The pizza that changed everything
Antonucci enrolled at UConn to study communications, but sophomore year a professor convinced him to add a journalism major. Two weeks later, he found himself at an open house for the student paper, primarily enticed by the promise of free pizza. Within days he was covering women’s polo for The Daily Campus. He eventually became the sports editor, a road games warrior clocking 44,000 miles in two years.
During his prolific sportswriting period, Antonucci made a vow to watch the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list of movies. “I considered myself a film buff but had only seen 18 or 19 of the movies,” he remembers. “Then I thought it would be funny to see how many top 100 movie references I could incorporate into every article I wrote. I was figuring out creative ways to do it, starting with obvious ones like ‘Rocky.’ I just sort of rolled with it.”
The pinnacle and the epiphany
His senior year, UConn won its first men’s basketball national title. This pinnacle moment marked the end of an era for Antonucci. He was done with sportswriting. “This was a team that I had followed for literally my entire cognizant life. And here they were winning the national title. I’m standing right next to everybody on the team. I have a piece of the net that’s, like, my most prized possession. I thought, it’s just not going to get any better than this, so I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to go work in Hollywood.” He remembers his journalism advisor Wayne Worcester hearing his plans and dryly telling him, “Well, somebody’s gotta do it.”
Antonucci at graduation, with his father (left) and late grandfather proudly holding copies of The Daily Campus
Antonucci (far left) with cast and producers of “Game of Thrones” Minutes after their 2019 Emmy win for Best Drama. “This was a few minutes after we walked offstage. everyone is just sort of being pulled in a million directions and you hear, ‛Hey, you need to come into this room and take this picture.’”
Inside “Outside Providence”
The last movie he saw before leaving Connecticut for Los Angeles was 1999’s “Outside Providence,” which evoked a prophecy about actor Shawn Hatosy. “I said to my buddy, ‘When I get to LA, I swear I’m going to meet the lead of this movie, and I have a feeling we’re gonna work together some day.’”
He landed a job in the mailroom of the Gersh Agency, and a year and a half later, his prediction came true. In an odd twist of fate, Antonucci met Hatosy, who was dating a close friend’s stepsister. The two hit it off, and their bond became a creative one when Hatosy recruited Antonucci to co-write a screenplay — his first official foray into screenwriting after years of reading scripts as a literary agent at Gersh, where he had swiftly risen from the mailroom. While the 2007 writers’ strike put their creative relationship on hold, the experience primed Antonucci for his biggest break yet in the industry.
Let the games begin
Witness Hollywood networking at its finest: Antonucci’s former assistant at Gersh turned him on to a recruiter for entertainment law firms who connected him with entertainment lawyer Gretchen Rush. While prepping for his interview with Rush, Antonucci noticed David Benioff’s name on her client list. Years earlier a Los Angeles Times profile on Benioff, when his film “25th Hour” was coming out, had caught Antonucci’s attention. “I thought, this is the type of person I want to creatively align myself with; this guy has it figured out.”
Landing the gig for Rush’s firm ushered in the next serendipitous life course change. It was November 2008, and HBO had just greenlit the pilot for “Game of Thrones.” Suddenly he had a front-row seat to the making of “GoT.” His passion for the show was palpable as he became part of every deal and privy to behind-the-scenes action. “Every time David [Benioff] or Dan [D. B. Weiss] called, I stopped everything to find out what was going on.”
A dream opportunity and second chance
“Game of Thrones” turned into a cultural phenomenon and Antonucci got an offer to join the production team for Season 4. But it came with a catch — relocating to Belfast for eight months of the year. “As thrilling as that sounded, I couldn’t leave my wife and young son behind to make no money to be a writer’s assistant on the show.”
During Season 5, an opportunity came up again, but this time to work locally. Antonucci happily joined the postproduction crew, and for seasons 6 through 8, he was in the writers’ room. “It was a crazy experience seeing what we were writing end up on people’s TV screens.” By Season 8, he was a staff writer and on stage for the show’s historic final Emmys sweep in 2019. He vividly recalls the surreal experience of looking out at the audience as the team accepted the Outstanding Drama Series award. “You see everybody you’ve ever recognized in Hollywood sitting in the front rows ... it was just wild,” he remembers. “I never had more text messages in my life.”
The one about the boy and the movie theater
While “Game of Thrones” thrust Antonucci’s career to new heights, a childhood dream resurfaced. As a kindergartner waiting at his Bantam, Connecticut, bus stop across from the local cinema, he boldly declared he intended to own that theater and show only movies that he wanted to watch.
In 2020, when the 92-year-old owner of Bantam’s independent movie theater planned to permanently shut down during COVID-19, Antonucci sprang into action and called him. “I spent 90 minutes explaining to this sweet man why he needed to give me the Bantam Cinema, and he spent 90 minutes telling me to find $300,000.” So Antonucci pulled together a group of minority investors for the down payment and converted the theater into a nonprofit. By fall 2021, Bantam Cinema had risen again, with a grand reopening event screening of “The Graduate.”
“Dustin Hoffman is sort of a local, and we thought for a split second we might get him to come introduce the movie.” He didn’t, so Antonucci did. “I told my story of my childhood bus stop and having seen ‘Cinema Paradiso’ there as a 12-year-old.”
Bantam Cinema & Arts Center is now three years back into full operation. “It’s like another job that I get no money for and just lose sleep over every week,” Antonucci says of his role overseeing operations and programming from Los Angeles.
“But I wouldn’t trade anything for it. It’s a very special place.”
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”
One of Antonucci’s favorite quotes, attributed to the Roman philosopher
Seneca, connects to his other special place: Bighead, Littlehead, Berniehead Inc., the production company helmed by “Game of Thrones” colleagues Benioff, Weiss, and Bernie Caulfield. When the trio decided to hang their own shingle in 2019, Antonucci received another career-defining offer to help run the company. “I was like, yeah, I’m in — no questions asked,” he says.
Five years later, as BLB Inc.’s executive vice president, Antonucci has a hand in every facet of production. He’s fresh off working as an executive on Netflix’s adaptation of the bestselling sci-fi novel trilogy “The Three Body Problem,” which even made Barack Obama’s summer reading list, and knee-deep in preparations for Netflix’s hotly anticipated historical drama about President James Garfield. “We start filming in Budapest in two weeks with an incredible cast — Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen, Betty Gilpin, Nick Offerman, Bradley Whitford ...” Antonucci rattles off excitedly.
The end, but not really
Despite the demands of work, Bantam Cinema, and his family, the diehard Huskies fan routinely opens the doors of his Hollywood office to offer tours and share advice with UConn students and alumni aspiring to break into the entertainment industry.
And just the other day he took his 15-year-old son, Cortland, to his first concert — Pearl Jam, a band he and his wife grew up loving. “A Pearl Jam show in Storrs would have been incredible,” he muses, ever nostalgic. “But I did get to see the Violent Femmes open for Biggie Smalls on the football field my freshman year while standing next to Ray Allen, so I’ve always held that show in a special place in my heart”— yet another of the life moments he calls “spontaneous and whimsical.”
Says Antonucci, “I’ve always felt that things in the universe have come into my path because they were meant to be, and I follow and trust my gut in those moments.”
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