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.”
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.
