[1] Grossman was a manager of folk and rock musicians in the 1960s, with clients including Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Janis Joplin and The Band.
[2] After graduating from Princeton in May 1969, Taplin moved to Woodstock, New York to serve as The Band's full-time tour manager.
[2] In early 1973, Taplin moved to Los Angeles where he was introduced to a young film editor who had worked on the Woodstock documentary, Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese, who had just finished shooting his second feature, Boxcar Bertha, for Roger Corman, showed Taplin his script named Season of the Witch (co-written with Mardik Martin).
[5] In 1997, Mean Streets was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
[7] In January 2004, Taplin joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication as an adjunct professor.
The Lab is funded by the University as well as corporations such as IBM, Intel, Cisco, Verizon, Warner Bros., Orange, DirecTV, EPB, Levi Strauss, and Petrobras.Taplin served on the State of California Broadband Policy Taskforce and the Singapore Government Media Development Authority Advisory Board.
Taplin is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, which was published in April 2017.