OThe images were indeed moving at the annual indus-try benefit at the St. Regis for The Museum of the Moving Image, honoring CBS/Viacom’s Leslie Moonves and Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes. Awards were presented to the two industry heavyweights by Time Warner’s Richard Parsons and Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, who also served as event co-chairs.

As he took the podium, Bewkes had ‘em in stitches from the second he said he was “co-honored to be here.” He then regaled the crowd with tales of the hardships he faced coming up in the biz due to circumstances of birth. “When I was very young,” he began, “I told my ‘birth parents’ that I was thinking about a career in the entertainment industry. That’s when they… broke it to me. We were not Jewish.” In a tongue-in-cheek jab at the industry, Bewkes, a Catholic from Patterson, NJ, vowed, “I was not going to let not being Jewish stand between me and my dream.” In his pre-teen years, he first “started to experiment with Jewishness—mostly nickel-and-dime stuff,” he confessed, including “dissing Richard Nixon, getting beaten up after school. By the time I was 12 years old, I was sending back soup at restaurants!” Eventually, Bewkes was adopted by a set of “surrogate Jewish parents”—Museum Board Chair Herbert Schlosser and Museum Director Rochelle Slovin, whom he credited for guiding his career at HBO and Time Warner, and who chuckled along with the audience.

Other moving images in the crowd: CBS News anchor Julie Chen (wife of Les Moonves), news writer/producer/director Peggy Bewkes (wife of Jeff Bewkes), New Line Cinema’s Michael Lynne, Showtime’s Matt Blank, Melina Kanakaredes, Court TV’s Henry Schleiff, Dina Merrill and Ted Hartley, Linda Janklow, Kaufman Studios’ George Kaufman, and Paula Redstone. Pure cinema, golden moments….