J. Christopher Hamilton G’99, L’99

Entertainment lawyer/executive producer J. Christopher Hamilton is helping launch careers from his Newhouse classroom.

During his 20 years working in the entertainment business, J. Christopher Hamilton G’99, L’99 built a career as a dealmaker—connecting content with distribution and analyzing risk to monetize to advantage.

In his various roles, he was often the only Black male in the room. “There are pressures with that because you don’t feel immediate support or alliances,” he says.

Rather than be intimidated, Hamilton says the experience empowered him. “Coming from a world without abundant opportunities, I made it a point to maximize every moment to make an impression,” he says. “While others might hold back in the company of more experienced executives, I focused on being confident and assertive in my role.”

Working for the largest media conglomerates in the world—Viacom (now Paramount Global), Disney and Time Warner (now Warner Bros. Discovery)—Hamilton negotiated deals on behalf of celebrities, producers and production companies including Kevin Hart, Alyssa Milano, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Garner, Cedric “the Entertainer” Kyles, DreamWorks and Spyglass Entertainment. As a vice president for Lionsgate’s Digital Studios, Over the Top Services and International Co-Productions, he helped build the Laugh Out Loud and Comic Con HQ streaming services, the Studio L feature film studio, and negotiated deals to remake major theatrical motion pictures including Red, Step Up and Nerve as international co-productions in Asian territories.

As an executive producer and entrepreneur, he brokered deals for his own projects with HBO, VH1, Tubi TV and BET and helped build an independently financed streaming service targeting black and brown millennials.

Having achieved a certain level of success, Hamilton decided to focus on helping create opportunity for the next generation. He’s now an assistant professor of television, radio and film at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

His desire to teach is a direct result of his own trajectory. Growing up in a working-class family in Brooklyn, Hamilton says he witnessed a lot of missed opportunities and unfortunate outcomes among his peers. As a transfer student at SUNY Binghamton, he wasn’t able to gain admission to the business school, so majored in sociology and cinematography. He chose to go to law school because he felt a law degree was the most “bulletproof” path to a successful career.

While a student at the Syracuse University College of Law, Hamilton learned he could simultaneously earn a master’s degree in television, radio and film, which he thought would make an attractive combination for a career in entertainment law. “It was a great counterbalance to reading about torts and contracts and really fed my creative side,” he says.

Nearing graduation, Hamilton applied and was selected into a highly selective executive internship program offered by the Television Academy, which placed him in the business affairs department of Fox for the summer. “All of my classmates were prepping for the bar exam, but I knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says.

Hamilton passed the bar all the same, then served a year as a law clerk for a judge and a year in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office—positions he’d secured prior to graduation—before landing his first position at Viacom, working at MTV Networks.

He remained connected to Syracuse through his association with the College of Law. Along with Felicia Collins Ocumarez L’98, G’98, Hamilton co-founded the Syracuse Black Law Alumni Collective (Syracuse BLAC), which serves as a bridge between Black alumni professionals and current students. Their first initiative was launching a $150,000 endowment through the Our Time Has Come Scholarship Program to create the Syracuse Black Law Alumni Collective x William H. Johnson Endowed Scholarship, named in honor of the College of Law’s first Black graduate.

But Hamilton says it was his Newhouse pedigree that opened the door for the job at MTV. “That distinguished me from just being an attorney interested in entertainment,” he says.

Today, he’s bringing his real-life experiences into his own classrooms. In the course Artist Representation Training (“ART”), Hamilton partners with the United Talent Agency to help guide students to become professional agents. Over a semester, students take on the responsibility of representing other students on campus who aspire to be directors, actors, writers, influencers or other creatives. His Executive Capstone class allows students to explore careers as business executives in media, entertainment or the arts, using the culmination of their knowledge to build capstone projects as executive producers, creative executives or industry innovators that have direct relevance and marketability in the entertainment business.

At the same time, he’s created his own media consulting business (esquiregroupinc.com) to  help companies and creatives navigate the entertainment business and also provides perspective to various media outlets (Yahoo Finance, AP News, Shade Room, NewsNation, etc.) as an author, media commentator and legal analyst.

“Because I spent so much time honing my craft as a lawyer and building credentials as a producer, I'm in a place that benefits both my students and myself because I can approach the business in a multi-hyphenate way instead of just one lens,” says Hamilton.

In addition to getting out of one silo, he’s having a lot of fun.

“Being connected with such a young demographic really informs me professionally in ways that I probably wouldn't have realized if I just remained in a corporate office or on a movie studio lot,” he says. “And the relationships I'm able to build with my students are a lot more fulfilling than I would have ever imagined.”