Ben's early life was shaped by his upbringing in a farm town in Illinois, where his passion for amateur radio first introduced him to a world beyond his small town. This curiosity led him to study engineering, music, theater, and directing in college, during which time he worked in radio and television.
Following college, Ben joined the Army and was sent to Vietnam, where he met Adrian Cronauer and developed a close friendship that would later inspire the film "Good Morning, Vietnam." Ben's experiences in Vietnam and his friendship with Adrian formed the basis of the original concept and story for the film.
Ben's career in television began in local television, working in stations in St. Louis, Missouri; Columbia, South Carolina; Jacksonville and Miami, Florida. He then moved to network television, where he worked as a camera assistant on "The Jackie Gleason Show" in Miami Beach. He married one of the show's June Taylor dancers and moved to New York, where he became a commercial producer for Young & Rubicam and later returned to CBS, working on "60 Minutes" and CBS News specials.
Ben's next role was as Executive in Charge of TV Programming and Production for General Electric, where he developed and supervised the company's "GE Theater" series of TV movies for four years. After his divorce, he moved to Los Angeles to work on Barry Manilow's first special, and stayed with the production team for a half-dozen more specials.
Ben then joined the production unit that produced the Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, and Grammy Awards specials, and worked on many other live musical-variety specials for CBS and ABC. He received his first Emmy Award for a live news special on the battle over amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, and went on to win or be nominated for Emmys for nine more documentaries over a period of ten years.
In the 1990s, after more than 20 years of nearly daily work on a stage or location on one coast or the other, Ben remarried and began to step back from production to raise his two young children. He continued to teach at UCLA and consult with producers and production companies in the US and Europe.
Once his children were in school, Ben returned to developing and producing TV movies, documentaries, and international feature films, with a focus on freedom and democracy around the world.
