It’s tough to pinpoint one break that catapulted Bender to sustained Hollywood success — mostly because it was a drawn-out campaign of quiet hustling and relationship-building — but there’s no doubt that the journey began at Bucknell. He double-majored in economics and art history and remembers taking classes on philosophy and visual narratives in art his senior year, analyzing the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus and contemplating the contours of human nature. “So when I look back on my Bucknell experience, I realize that I was drawn toward visual storytelling,” he says.

The journey from Lewisburg to Sunset Boulevard did not come easily. For every job he got, there were 20 rejections. But he was tenacious, securing a publicity internship at New Line Cinema in New York that would lead to an entry-level floater and distribution job at a company positioned in the thick of an independent film renaissance.

Eventually, he finagled a transfer to Los Angeles, and he ultimately took a job working for a former agent named Warren Zide, who had launched a small enterprise managing writers. “Our business philosophy was to find screenwriters with strong voices who were being ignored by the agencies, sign them and develop a script with them that could become their calling card,” says Bender, who tirelessly networked with young writers, read scripts and pitched ideas to studios. “I would read anything and everything,” he says.

Slowly, that groundwork began to bear fruit. He met a young writer with a script for an episode of The X-Files that Bender helped shape and pitch as a movie concept that would beget the Final Destination franchise — and his first associate producer credit.

Inspired by a series of painfully funny memories from his high school experiences, Bender proposed they develop a comedy about a group of teenage boys desperate to lose their virginity. “I remember that feeling when one friend came back from summer camp and told us he’d had sex for the first time,” Bender laughs. “Some of us had this palpable feeling that if we didn’t lose our virginity before college, we were going to die.”

After recounting an awkward conversation he had with his father about masturbation (“I can still remember sitting in the car at a hardware store sweating”), he rummages through a folder for the cover page of an old script entitled East Great Falls High and an even older treatment for the story that ultimately would become American Pie. With Bender’s source material and guidance, Herz sold that first screenplay for $650,000, and Bender got his first A-to-Z producing experience — helping craft an idea, sell it, cast it and see it through production.

Around this time, Bender connected with another young talent who would alter his trajectory: J.C. Spink ’94, a gregarious hustler who became Bender’s intern and eventually, his roommate and business partner. “He was a complicated guy, but he was born for that moment in time in Hollywood,” Bender says. “He could speed read 100 scripts in a weekend and pluck the two that were good. And above all, he was an incredibly fun person to be around.”

In 1998, the two Bucknellians launched a management production firm called Benderspink. They converted their West Hollywood apartment’s third bedroom into an office, hanging scripts on a shower rod over a photocopier. Bender says they represented about a dozen writers and quickly sold a few scripts before forging a first-look production deal with New Line that became enormously successful for all parties. “Looking back, it blows my mind what we turned our respective internships into,” he says.

Specializing in unsolicited “spec” scripts, Bender and Spink sold scores of screenplays, many of which became successful Hollywood films. Movies like Cats & Dogs, Just Friends, A History of Violence, Monster-in-Law and We’re the Millers all emerged from this collaboration. “We had an amazing run together,” Bender says with a bittersweet voice.

That run lasted nearly 20 years. But among other things, the hard-charging Spink struggled with unhealthy substance use, so the pair decided to amicably dissolve Benderspink in May 2016. Less than a year later, Spink tragically died at his home.

It seems to be working. In the past eight years, Bender and Good Fear have continued to crank out distinctive movies, including Under the Silver Lake, My Spy, My Spy: The Eternal City and Mulan (2020). Bender has worked on films as a so-called career producer — perfecting the kind of A-to-Z process he first tasted with American Pie. Unlike writers, actors or other people who might get a producer credit on a show or film, career producers originate ideas with writers, help select actors and directors, manage budgets and timelines for studios or streamers and otherwise supervise the very complicated process of making filmed content.

“Even if a film has four producers, there’s only one person who oversees every step of the way,” Bender explains. “The producer is the adult in the room and responsible party to both the artistic vision and the financing entity. Making movies is often represented as only fun and sexy, but someone has to be the grown-up, and that’s what the career producer does. And if the producer does their job well in prep and behind the scenes, the production process will go smoothly so that to an outsider, it may appear like the producer is just sitting on set behind a monitor drinking lattes.”

Among the projects that Bender and Good Fear have looming is a highly anticipated movie called The Parenting. To help bring that horror-comedy to life, Bender worked closely with a longtime Saturday Night Live head writer and developed a story about a gay couple that takes their parents on a weekend getaway at a rental house. The couple doesn’t know that the house is already inhabited by a 400-year-old demon who possesses one of the parents (played at full throttle by Brian Cox of Succession fame).

“A big part of developing a successful comedy is being fresh in concept, casting and execution,” says Bender, who expects the movie to begin streaming early in 2025 on Max. “The story has multiple layers about parental expectations — but then it descends into pure comedy as everyone has to come together to solve a much larger problem.”

Reflecting on his career choices and why he’s never taken a secure studio job, Bender admits that the idea of stability, ironically, scares him a little bit. “I remember making movies as a kid with my brother — we had a giant VHS camera back then, and I loved to write, direct and edit little comedies often inspired by my favorite movies or SNL sketches. And I still love that feeling of being creatively close to what I’m working on. That’s producing. I’ll always love supporting the discovery of new talent and new ideas and working directly with the storytellers.”

Bender pauses when asked to identify the North Star that has guided his 25-year-long Hollywood career. “I’d like to amend the old cliché that you should do what you love,” he says. “What I’d say is ‘Pursue what most energizes you.’ ”