About The Author

Hi. Welcome to my blog. I'm B-Side. Actually, my name is Ben, but B-Side is my online alias. For those of you wondering where that name comes from, I'll explain. Back in 2004, my roommate and I started a blog called TVgasm, a site on which we often skewered the entertainment industry. I was a lowly assistant in "The Industry" at the time, and I thought it would be best if I had a pseudonym, lest my blogging cost me a job (or a prospective one). Plus, I also had a friend who was the star of a TV show which we made fun of quite a bit, and I didn't want him to have any hard feelings (even though fame did subsequently turn him into a douche).

Anyway, my roommate suggested the pseudonym B-Side as a lark, and although there really was no link beyond the first letter of my name, I kind of liked it. That became my online persona, and now, a few years later, while I've shed the need for anonymity, I still like the nickname and what it represents. So that's why I use it for the blog.

Nowadays, while I devote most of my time to screenwriting, I still love to blog. There's nothing more fun than putting something out there that goes viral, or even better, catches on in pop culture as a whole. Granted, the latter situation has only happened once or twice, with my biggest contribution being the coinage of the term "Speidi" (I labeled the twosome that hours after Spencer's MTV debut in January 2007, and it's kind of stuck around since then). But while all that's fun, at the end of the day, I just want to write funny stuff. And get ad revenue. I'm very self-serving.

For more on this blog, click here.

And if you want the more formal version of my biography, look no further than the next section:

Ben Mandelker (B-Side) is a screenwriter currently living in Los Angeles.  His pop culture observations and multimedia creations have been cited in Entertainment Weekly, US Magazine, The New York Times, Details Magazine, Spin Magazine, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Houston Chronicle, among other media outlets.  Additionally, Time Out New York called his work the “flat out funniest thing this year,” and the Rocky Mountain News called him “deliciously clever.”  He has been a reoccurring panelist on NBC's Today and Fox Reality’s Reality Remix as well as WDVE in Pittsburgh.  He has also served as a guest on the TV Guide Channel and Los Angeles’s KABC AM.

In 2004, Ben co-founded the website TVgasm.com, which Entertainment Weekly labeled as one of the top twenty-five entertainment websites on the internet, and in 2007, he left the site after having sold it to Bunim-Murray Productions.  Previously, Ben worked in feature development where he participated in the pre-production of such films as Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and The Grudge.  He also served as a writers assistant on the Fox sitcom Andy Richter Controls The Universe and worked on various television productions such as Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Strangers with Candy, and the WWE.  

Ben is represented by Hopscotch Pictures.