Jeff has taught thousands of students from Broadway to Hollywood. Jeff was classically trained as a playwright in the works of Aristotle and the legendary Broadway script doctor, W.T. Price, who in the early 1900’s established the world’s first-ever playwriting school. Of Price's twenty-eight students, twenty-four of them had hits on Broadway. But Price's work is largely forgotten today, and Jeff was determined to get to the bottom of his techniques. He spent three years intensely studying Price's work and had a major epiphany when he discovered a groundbreaking but incomplete technique called Sequence Proposition Plot. This tool was a giant leap forward in the craft of the dramatist, but was left unfinished and unnoticed. Jeff dug deeper into the work of Price's students and after some dogged detective work, completed the tool—saving this revolutionary three-step process from being lost.

Jeff has taught the craft of the dramatist for over thirty years in Hollywood and New York. He worked as a dramaturg in New York theater and taught playwriting on Broadway, and then taught screenwriting for years in Hollywood. In 2006, Jeff Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting was published. He has trained story executives at all the major Hollywood studios and they consistently say that his tools, especially Dilemma and Sequence Proposition Plot, are the most advanced story development and plot construction tools in the industry. Jeff now runs this two-year apprenticeship program. In 2023 he wrote the book, The Hero's Dilemma: Drama at the Heart of Your Story.

Jeff is also an avid treasure hunter and was part of the crew that recovered the largest sunken treasure ever found. He lives in Santa Monica, CA with his wife and twin daughters.