Dan Klores

The founder and chairman of the PR firm Dan Klores Communications, Klores is primarily focused on his filmmaking career these days. Backstory The son of a Brighton Beach door-to-door salesman, Klores attended the University of South Carolina off-and-on for eight years while battling drug addiction. Following an itinerant stretch when he worked as a bartender, backgammon hustler, teacher (on a Navy boat), and freelance writer, he landed a job at Howard Rubenstein's PR firm in the early 1980s. His first client wasn't terribly glamorous—it was a store that sold shoe inserts—but the streetwise Klores managed to work his way up and build a client base. In 1991, he went off on his own, founding Dan Klores Communications. The firm has since developed into one of the city's premiere PR shops, representing boldface names like Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton, Diddy, Ian Schrager, and Howard Stern, as well as corporate concerns like Delta, Showtime, the NBA, and Sirius Satellite Radio. Along the way, Klores earned a rep as the man to call in a major crisis: Paris Hilton brought him in to do damage control after her sex tape became an Internet sensation in 2003, and Lizzie Grubman hired him to be her spokesman (after briefly engaging Howard Rubenstein) in the aftermath of her 2001 car crash. Although Klores remains chairman of DKC, he's much less involved in the day-to-day since he started pursuing a career as a documentary filmmaker, and has handed management over to his CEO, Sean Cassidy. Despite Klores's semi-retirement, he's managed to combine his dual roles of PR exec and documentarian by drumming up inordinate amounts of publicity for his films. On screen Klores' first documentary film, 2003's The Boys of 2nd Street Park, chronicled his '60s Brooklyn upbringing, and earned entry to Sundance. After producing two sports-related documentaries, he released his fourth film in 2007, Crazy Love, the story of attorney Burt Pugash who blinded his estranged lover, spent 14 years in jail for the crime, and then ended up marrying her after his release from prison. (The film was released by Mark Cuban's Magnolia Films.) He's since followed up with Black Magic, a made-for-ESPN miniseries about civil rights and basketball; a one-act play Myrtle Beach, which was staged in the spring of 2007; and, most recently, a documentary for ESPN, Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks. Health report In the late 1990s Klores learned he had hepatitis C, which he attributes to his many years of drug abuse. Klores says it was the illness—and a doctor who warned him the disease might eventually kill him—that prompted him to pursue filmmaking. Personal Klores has been married to his second wife, Abbe Klores, since 1995. (She worked for him at Klores Communications back in the day.) The Kloreses have three kids and live on East 80th Street. They also have a 7,500-square-foot summer house in Sag Harbor, which cost them $4.15 million in 2005. Campaign trail A close pal of attorney general Andrew Cuomo, Klores has been one of his biggest fundraisers over he past few years. He personally contributed more than $100,000 to Cuomo's 2006 campaign for attorney general.