Allan Loeb (born 1970 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American screenwriter and film and television producer. He wrote the 2007 film Things We Lost in the Fire and created the 2008 television series New Amsterdam.
Loeb attended Ithaca College in New York from 1988 to 1992, dropping out to work at the Chicago Board of Trade. He relocated to Los Angeles, California in 1993 to pursue a career in screenwriting, but was unsuccessful for twelve years, without selling any of his spec scripts and without landing a deal with any production companies. In 2004, with money he had received from 20th Century Fox for a revision of the script of a thriller, Protection, that he had sold to the company several years before but they had never produced, he moved to New York to write what he calls his "Hail Mary" script The Only Living Boy in New York. The day he started writing the script, however, his agent dismissed him and refused to represent Loeb any longer. He returned to Los Angeles and began to rewrite The Only Living Boy in New York with the help of Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, and joined Gamblers Anonymous to cure his gambling addiction, which he claims changed his writing for the better. He was signed by the Creative Artists Agency and sold The Only Living Boy to Sony Pictures Entertainment a month later in March 2005.
Loeb then wrote 21 and Things We Lost in the Fire, using his own situation as a recovering gambling-addict as inspiration for the latter film's heroin-addicted character Jerry (played by Benicio del Toro). He and his Scarlet Fire Entertainment producing partner Stephen Pearl sold pitches for a pair of police procedural television programs to FOX and FX in 2007, one of which was New Amsterdam.
Loeb was a compulsive gambler from the age of ten until he joined Gamblers Anonymous in 2005, claiming: "Literally the minute I quit gambling my writing changed. It was magical. I had been giving so much emotional energy to gambling that only half of myself was out there writing. Gambling was a time suck, an energy suck, a creativity suck. I started going to GA meetings every Thursday night, and the writing flourished. It had so much more energy and passion." He lost up to $US30,000 to his gambling addiction in a single weekend and he was eventually left with $150,000 in credit card debt. Loeb is a keen follower of rock band Grateful Dead, which he compares to the film industry in its fanbase.
