Failed Council Candidate Andy Licht Targets Judy Manouchehri

Andy Licht has lost two races for Beverly Hills City Council. His 2026 campaign, however, is still sending political mail. On October 29, its latest message urged residents to elect Jackie Kruger and Kimberly Lifschitz to the Beverly Hills Unified School District Board of Education, a two-seat contest that also includes sitting Board President Judy Manouchehri.

The endorsement never says Manouchehri's name. It does not have to. Backing both challengers for both seats is a direct political challenge to the incumbent, dressed in the polite language of unity, trust and accountability. Licht wants a different board. The question is what evidence his email provides for that change.

Start with Licht's record at the ballot box. Beverly Hills' certified June 2022 results show him finishing fifth with 2,476 votes in a three-seat Council election. In June 2026 he ran again, finishing fourth with 3,284 votes, behind the three elected candidates. That is two attempts and no Council seat. The 2026 margin between Licht and third-place finisher Rebecca Pynoos was 218 votes. His losses were real, though the latter race was close.

Now his former City Council campaign is weighing in on school governance. The email came from andy@andylichtforcouncil.com and closes with an explicit political disclaimer: "Paid for by Andy Licht for Beverly Hills City Council 2026 FPPC ID #1486146." That disclosure identifies the committee behind the communication. It does not by itself establish anything improper. But it makes the political nature of the message impossible to miss: a committee organized for a City Council race is paying for an endorsement in another contest.

Licht's letter devotes paragraph after paragraph to the volunteer and professional backgrounds of his preferred candidates. It says the school board must put students first, demand academic excellence, responsibly oversee money and restore confidence. Yet the reader reaches the signature without seeing a single current CAASPP result, a districtwide test-score trend or a specific example of the academic decline his endorsement might lead readers to expect.

Those numbers are available. The California assessment results show 68.72% of tested BHUSD students met or exceeded the mathematics standard in 2026, up about 5.9 percentage points from the year before. English Language Arts reached 75.44%. BHUSD's October academic presentation reported that mathematics proficiency rose from 57.74% in 2024 to 68.72% in 2026 and science from 42.68% to 56.44%. All four comprehensive schools posted improvements in all three tested subjects compared with 2025.

The results do not erase budget concerns, enrollment challenges or criticism of board conduct. They do show that academic performance is moving upward on significant measures. Students, teachers and school administrators did the work behind those scores. Board leadership can be evaluated on its policies, but no single official can claim personal ownership of every gain.

There is a revealing contrast in Licht's own political messaging. In the City's 2026 candidate materials, he presented himself as a businessman who had managed multimillion-dollar projects "on time and on budget." In this new letter, financial oversight is again among the tests he says school board members should meet. But the letter offers no BHUSD budget figure, expenditure example, audit finding or specific financial proposal to substantiate its demand for a change of leadership.

Then there is the Hollywood credit. The American Film Institute identifies Andrew Licht as an executive producer of the 1995 film Waterworld, which became famous for its enormous production costs. Its reported $175 million production budget made it the costliest film of its time; worldwide box-office receipts later totaled approximately $264 million. Those figures do not establish studio profit or loss. Nor does an executive-producer credit prove Licht caused the overruns. The production remains part of his professional résumé, but personal responsibility for the overruns is not established by the record.

That is the distinction the current school board campaign deserves too: a claim about competence should be tied to an identifiable decision or outcome, not merely to a reputation. Licht's email calls his choices candidates of integrity and sound judgment, but it supplies no comparable documented finding against Manouchehri. His support for Kruger and Lifschitz is clear. His evidentiary case for removing the incumbent is far less developed.

There are legitimate issues beyond test scores. Kruger and Lifschitz have argued publicly that district governance, staff relations, spending and trust warrant change. Licht can share those priorities, and voters can take them seriously. But an endorsement that invokes educational results without acknowledging current academic gains gives readers only a partial account of the district it seeks to change.

In 2022 and 2026, Licht asked residents to judge him on his experience, fiscal discipline and civic service. On October 29, he asked them to judge two school board challengers by much the same language. The question left hanging is straightforward: Where, in his own pitch for a new school board, is the evidence that confronts what BHUSD students have actually accomplished?