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Wendy Finerman attended the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate with future studio executive Stacey Snider. In December of 1986, Stacey Snider became the director of development at Guber-Peters Co. at Warner Brothers. The 26-year old UCLA law school graduate was smart and beautiful. Snider was "a dutiful worker with good taste in material, eager to please," writes Hit & Run. "Snider became the closest thing Guber had to a protegee. He was headed for the top, and she hitched her wagon to his and went along for an eight-year old ride... Snider and Mark Canton became intimate friends." (pg. 124) After he married Finerman, Mark Canton aggressively promoted himself as a family man. In interviews, he repeatedly mentioned his wife, producer Wendy Finerman, and their two small kids. In Vanity Fair, he called their home "the Leave It to Beaver Hotel." Writes Hit & Run: "Yes it is difficult to imagine Ward Cleaver disporting himself, as Columbia's chairman did, at the very special dinner party that Jon Peters threw at his Beverly Park home in 1991. The host had invited Canton and two other male friends to dine that night and hired two young women to serve the meal. The girls were fetchingly turned out as French maids with crisp white aprons. When a guest rose from the table to go to the bathroom, one of the girls would follow and ask if he might like some, umm, desert. Peters had hired these hard workers not from a local catering outfit but from Heidi Fleiss." (Hit & Run, pg. 390) In his book American Rhapsody, Joe Eszterhas says Mark's wife Wendy Finerman walked in on him at Columbia having sex on his desk with his secretary. Rachel Abramowitz writes in her 2000 book Is That A Gun In Your Pocket? about Finerman's 1992 push to make Forest Gump: "At age thirty-three [in 1992], the curly-haired, obsessively thin producer had all the jumpiness of a thoroughbred racehorse who had never been allowed to race. What was her only credit? Associate producer of Hot to Trot, the tale of, yes, a talking horse. What did everyone in town know her for? Her marriage to the ebullient, glad-handing Mark Canton, now chairman of Sony, who kept his oeuvre, including Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Batman, lined up in leather-bound editions on his bookshelf. INdeed, when she had married Canton, Finerman, a Wharton School graduate, had said to herself that it was okay that he was the one with the career in the limelight. She was intensely proud of the fact that she had raised two kids after all (three by the end of Gump), although her marriage collapsed soon after." (Gun, pg. 374)
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