OS DIRETORES [USA]

Legendary Broadway writer/producer/director George Abbott was born in 1887 in Forestville, New York. His father was mayor of Salamanca, New York, for two terms. In 1898 his family moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Abbott attended Kearney Military Academy. The family returned to New York, where Abbott attended Hamburg High School, graduating in 1907, and the University of Rochester (BA degree in 1911). He wrote the play "Perfectly Harmless" for University Dramatic Club. He attended Harvard University from 1911-1912, studying play writing under George Pierce Baker, and wrote "The Head of the Family" for Harvard Dramatic Club. In 1912 he won $100 in a play contest sponsored by the Bijou Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts, for "The Man in the Manhole", and worked at the Bijou for a year as assistant stage manager. He made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1913 in "The Misleading Lady" (as Babe Merrill, a drunken student), followed by "The Yeoman of the Guard" (1915), "The Queen's Enemies" (1916), "Daddies" (1918), "The Broken Wing" (1920), "Dulcy" (on tour) (1921), "Zander the Great" (1923), "White Desert" (1923), "Hell-Bent for Heaven" (1924), "Lazybones" (1924), "Processional" (1925) and "Cowboy Crazy" (1926). From that point he concentrated on writing and directing, with "The Fall Guy" (his Broadway's debut, 1925), "Three Men on a Horse" (1935), "Jumbo" (1935), "On Your Toes" (1936), "The Boys from Syracuse" (1938), "Too Many Girls" (1939), "Pal Joey" (1940), "Best Foot Forward" (1941), "On the Town" (1944), "High Buttom Shoes" (1947), "Where's Charley?" (1948), "Call Me Madam" (1950), "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1951), "Wonderful Town" (1953), "The Pajama Game" (1954), "Damn Yankees" (1955), "New Girl Town" (1957), "Fiorello!" (1959), "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Forum" (1962), "Flora, the Red Menace" (1965; Liza Minnelli's Broadway debut).

He won five Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize (for "Fiorello!"). He was nominated for an Oscar for writing All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). His daughter, Judith Abbott, is a stage actress/director and was married (1946-49) to Tom Ewell.

Derwin Abrahams was born on 17 August 1903 in New York, USA. He was a director and assistant director, known for Smoky River Serenade (1947), Chick Carter, Detective (1946) and Hop Harrigan America's Ace of the Airways (1946). He died on 5 November 1974 in Yolo County, California, USA.

Writer, producer and director James S. 'Jim' Abrahams was born in Shorewood, Wisconsin, to lawyer Norman Sidney Abrahams (1913-1965) and his wife Louise (née Ogens, 1915-2012), a University of Michigan graduate. Along with childhood friends and future collaborators Jerry Zucker and David Zucker, Abrahams studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1971, the trio --who would later be known simply as 'ZAZ'-- set up the small Kentucky Fried Theater to showcase their sketch comedies. Material for their first film, The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), was trialed by their improvisational troupe in front of a local audience. In the absence of approval from the big Hollywood studios, ZAZ decided to produce the film independently. Having managed to secure investors for the budget of $650,000, the picture proved a box office hit and ended up making $7.1 million in domestic rentals.

Influenced by the work of Mel Brooks, Abrahams and the Zucker brothers would eventually gain a cult following for creating an imperishable series of absurdist screwball comedies, spoofing genre movies through the blending of outrageous sight gags, witty (often risqué) rapid-fire dialogue peppered with quotable catchphrases and a smattering of pop culture references. They began the process by taping late night movies on television, often cliché-ridden or poorly acted B-grade productions. Abrahams explained: "In one day, we took a look at what was on our video machine, and there was this movie called "Zero Hour!," which is a 1957 melodrama. So you got this script, then, full of jokes, but you get actors who aren't known for telling jokes, who aren't comedians." To this, the team added the opening scene which parodied the beginning of Jaws (1975), effectively setting the tone for their disaster spoof Airplane! (1980). The cast was made up of 'serious' actors, who would deliver their lines in deadpan fashion, adding a surreal comic element to the proceedings. Leslie Nielsen, who had before been typecast as stern authority figures and villains, turned out to be a 'closet comedian', who pranked members of the cast in-between takes. Robert Stack, Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges, who had made their reputations as stalwart, unsmiling protagonists in TV action dramas, had to be persuaded to lampoon their heroic screen image (especially Graves, who initially rejected the script as 'garbage'). Some who declined to be cast later rued their decision (horror star Christopher Lee, in particular), while others who auditioned didn't make the cut (David Letterman for the Robert Hays role, Shelley Long and Sigourney Weaver for that of Julie Hagerty).

'Airplane!' was shot in nine weeks on a $3.5 million budget and ended up grossing $158 million worldwide. Nominated for a BAFTA, it won a 1981 Writer's Guild of America Award for 'Best Comedy Adapted from another Medium' and has been added to the National Film Registry as a significant work by the Library of Congress. It has also become one of the most quotable movies ever made ((Hays): "Surely, you can't be serious?" (Nielsen): "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."). In today's world of political correctness, Airplane would hardly be allowed to take off. Even so, new generations of film goers continue to find this and other ZAZ productions irresistibly funny.

The Abrahams/Zucker team followed up their success with the TV series Police Squad! (1982) (which, in turn, spawned the popular 'Naked Gun' series of movies). Police Squad was a hilarious send-up of procedural crime dramas, with the vintage M Squad (1957) and The Felony Squad (1966) serving as templates. It fully established Leslie Nielsen as a comedy star in the role of bumbling Detective Frank Dreben. Unaccountably, ABC cancelled Police Squad after just one season, ostensibly because "the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it", a rationale TV Guide magazine subsequently described as "the most stupid reason a network ever gave for ending a series".

Later work by the ZAZ team included Top Secret! (1984), a zany, gag-filled spoof of Cold War espionage thrillers and Elvis Presley musicals; and the Top Gun (1986) burlesques Hot Shots! (1991) and Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993). The trio also directed the black comedy Ruthless People (1986), another palpable box office hit, described by critic Roger Ebert as being "made out of good performances, a script of diabolical ingenuity and a whole lot of silliness." A plot idea for an Airplane Sequel was also floated. Titled 'Airplane II: The Godfather', it would have featured Stack, Bridges, Graves and Nielsen as 'mob guys'. Though the idea was initially endorsed by Paramount studio bosses Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, it was ultimately given the thumbs down by Francis Ford Coppola who could not be dissuaded from his projected The Godfather Part III (1990).

In October 2023, ZAZ published their new book "Surely You Can't Be Serious", which provides an in-depth look at the making of Airplane!, complete with personal anecdotes and many not previously revealed snippets of information.

Justus Addiss was born on 23 June 1917 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director, known for From Here to Eternity (1953), The Twilight Zone (1959) and General Electric Summer Originals (1956). He died on 26 October 1979 in Hollywood, California, USA.

Lou Adler was born on 13 December 1933 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is a producer, known for Up in Smoke (1978), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Witness (1985). He has been married to Page Hannah since 28 March 1992. They have four children. He was previously married to Shelley Fabares.

Entering films as an actor in 1910, John G. Adolfi soon switched careers and became a director. He turned out numerous, mostly low-budget films for minor companies, but every so often got a chance to work at a big studio like Fox. His big break came in the sound era, when he formed a partnership with actor George Arliss and directed several of Arliss' most successful films.

Robert Aldrich entered the film industry in 1941 when he got a job as a production clerk at RKO Radio Pictures. He soon worked his way up to script clerk, then became an assistant director, a production manager and an associate producer. He began writing and directing for TV series in the early 1950s, and directed his first feature in 1953 (Big Leaguer (1953)). Soon thereafter he established his own production company and produced most of his own films, collaborating in the writing of many of them. Among his best-known pictures are Kiss Me Deadly (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and the muscular WW II mega-hit The Dirty Dozen (1967).

James Algar studied at Stanford where he developed his skills as a cartoonist by drawing for the university's satirical magazine, The Chaparral. He joined the Disney Organisation in 1934, initially as animator. He directed the classic "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Fantasia (1940), as well as several sequences of Bambi (1942). Algar was one of several key personnel to whom Walt Disney delegated higher executive functions. During the 1950's, he assumed the mantle of chief writer/director for Disney's True Life Adventure series, turning out such Oscar-winning documentaries as The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954).

Algar was named a Disney Legend in 1998 and has been recipient of the Look Magazine Movie Award for outstanding achievement in production.

Although originally a journalist by trade, Allen had always loved the movies and had wished to be a part of them. In the process, he became one of the biggest names in show business during the 1970s, producing and directing some of its most popular films. After working in magazines and advertising, he produced the documentary, The Sea Around Us (1953). This excellent film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, and he decided to branch out into commercial film. His spoof of history, The Story of Mankind (1957), was a critical and commercial disaster, but he scored box office success with The Big Circus (1959) and The Lost World (1960), a remake of a silent classic, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961).

As the 1960s emerged, he became interested in science fiction, and scored considerable success. The TV takeoff of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964) struck a cord with TV audiences, and so did Lost in Space (1965), The Time Tunnel (1966) and Land of the Giants (1968).

However, it was during the 1970s that Allen became became a household name. Noting the massive box office success of Airport (1970), he immediately branched out into disaster movies and was able to obtain star-studded casts. The Poseidon Adventure (1972), about passengers abroad a capsized cruise liner, was one of the biggest box office hits of the year, and its theme song, "The Morning After", by Maureen McGovern, won an Academy Award for Best Song. He followed up that triumph by producing and co-directing the smash, The Towering Inferno (1974), about a group of people trapped in a burning skyscraper, which also drew huge audiences and profits. In his personal life, at that time, he fell in love with actress Sheila Allen (Sheila Matthews), whom he married in 1974. He returned briefly to television with the series, Swiss Family Robinson (1975), but the familiar story only lasted two seasons. It was then that his popularity was at its peak, and he had become known as "The Master of Disaster". He then produced and directed the killer bee film, The Swarm (1978). In spite of a big budget and star-studded cast, the poor special effects and dialog made it a complete flop. The following year, he made produced and co-directed, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979), which audiences found dull and implausible. In 1980, he attempted a comeback with When Time Ran Out... (1980), about tourists and natives struggling to escape a volcano eruption. The film drew attention when Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupted during its release, but the lavishly financed film was a box office disaster. After three expensive films lost vast sums of money, Allen was never able again to make films on such a grand scale. He remained active in the entertainment industry during the 1980s, however. He designed a special effects ride at the Universal Studios Theme Park, and also produced some TV mini-series. He passed away in 1991. His widow helps run a website dedicated to his memory.

Woody Allen was born on November 30, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in The Bronx, NY, the son of Martin Konigsberg and Nettie Konigsberg. He has one younger sister, Letty Aronson. As a young boy, he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today.

Allen broke into show business at 15 years when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows but felt that his jokes were being wasted. His agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, convinced him to start doing stand-up and telling his own jokes. Reluctantly he agreed and, although he initially performed with such fear of the audience that he would cover his ears when they applauded his jokes, he eventually became very successful at stand-up. After performing on stage for a few years, he was approached to write a script for Warren Beatty to star in: What's New Pussycat (1965) and would also have a moderate role as a character in the film. During production, Woody gave himself more and better lines and left Beatty with less compelling dialogue. Beatty inevitably quit the project and was replaced by Peter Sellers, who demanded all the best lines and more screen-time.

It was from this experience that Woody realized that he could not work on a film without complete control over its production. Woody's theoretical directorial debut was in What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966); a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the next year in the mockumentary Take the Money and Run (1969). He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in about a film a year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of comedy.

While best known for his romantic comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody has made many transitions in his films throughout the years, transitioning from his "early, funny ones" of Bananas (1971), Love and Death (1975) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972); to his more storied and romantic comedies of Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); to the Bergmanesque films of Stardust Memories (1980) and Interiors (1978); and then on to the more recent, but varied works of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Husbands and Wives (1992), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Celebrity (1998) and Deconstructing Harry (1997); and finally to his films of the last decade, which vary from the light comedy of Scoop (2006), to the self-destructive darkness of Match Point (2005) and, most recently, to the cinematically beautiful tale of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Although his stories and style have changed over the years, he is regarded as one of the best filmmakers of our time because of his views on art and his mastery of filmmaking.

Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces and became a copilot of a B-24. After his discharge from the military, he became fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)), songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, "The Rumors are Flying"), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the Calvin Co., who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable, from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging projects. He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature film Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), he produced and directed several television commercials including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the TV series The Pulse of the City (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community theater. His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co., and went to Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock's TV show. From here, he went on to direct a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for M*A*S*H (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer's first choice - more than fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn't his first movie, but it was his first success. After that, he had his share of hits and misses, but The Player (1992) and, more recently, Gosford Park (2001) were particularly well-received.

Robert Alton was a ballet student in New York, and worked his way up to choreographer on many Broadway productions. He started choreographing films in 1936, and directed dance sequences in many of Hollywood's most famous musicals (The Harvey Girls (1946), Easter Parade (1948), Show Boat (1951)). He also directed many Broadway plays. He directed two films in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but both were critical and financial flops.

Joe Alves was born on 21 May 1936 in San Leandro, California, USA. He is an art director and production designer, known for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Escape from New York (1981). He has been married to Jerri Lauridsen since 29 April 1990. They have two children.

Best known for the inspirational sports dramas Hoosiers (1986) and Rudy (1993), David Anspaugh has enjoyed a long career as a director and producer of film and television. Born in Decatur, Indiana in 1946 to Lawrence Anspaugh, a portrait photographer, and his wife, Marie, he was a member of his high school's football, basketball, and track teams. As a student majoring in secondary education at Indiana University, Anspaugh shot his own short movies and filmed concerts, football games, and Vietnam War protests using a 16mm camera. After graduation he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as a substitute teacher, waiter, and ski instructor before relocating to Los Angeles to attend film school at the University of Southern California. At the time he couldn't imagine ever working in Hollywood, although that would change in just a few years.

Anspaugh started his career as a producer and director of acclaimed TV shows Hill Street Blues (1981), St. Elsewhere (1982), and Miami Vice (1984). He made the transition to feature films when his best friend from IU, Angelo Pizzo, wrote "Hoosiers" and wanted Anspaugh to direct. The scene in "Hoosiers" in which the Hickory Huskers and their coach enter the enormous and empty Butler Fieldhouse was suggested by Anspaugh. Seven years later the two friends reteamed to make the college-football movie "Rudy." Anspaugh insisted on casting Sean Astin in the lead role, even though studio executives wanted someone tall and athletic. And it was Anspaugh's idea to hire NFL Films to shoot the movie's game footage. Anspaugh and Pizzo also collaborated on 1950s World Cup soccer film The Game of Their Lives (2005). Anspaugh has rounded out his career by directing motion pictures and TV movies on many topics other than sports.

In 2014 Anspaugh relocated from Santa Monica, California to Bloomington, Indiana, where he taught a class at IU, directed local theater productions, and served as an executive producer on films.

Joseph Anthony made his Broadway debut in 1937, and in the years following he was the partner of dancer Agnes de Mille, was employed as a set designer on films and dabbled as a film actor. His main interest, however, was the stage, and he became one of Broadway's most accomplished directors. In addition to occasionally acting on stage and in TV, he directed a handful of films, with varying success, and tried his hand at directing for television, becoming the house director on the series "Brenner" (1964).

Emile Ardolino was born on 9 May 1943 in Maspeth, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Dirty Dancing (1987), Great Performances: Dance in America (1976) and He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin' (1983). He died on 20 November 1993 in Bel Air, California, USA.

Allan Arkush was born on 30 April 1948 in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. He is a producer and director, known for Heroes (2006), Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) and Crossing Jordan (2001).

Samuel Armstrong was born on 5 February 1893 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). He died on 29 September 1976 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Jack Arnold reigns supreme as one of the great directors of 1950s science-fiction features. His films are distinguished by moody black and white cinematography, solid acting, smart, thoughtful scripts, snappy pacing, a genuine heartfelt enthusiasm for the genre and plenty of eerie atmosphere.

Arnold was born on October 14, 1912, in New Haven, Connecticut. He began his show business career as an actor in both on- and off-Broadway stage productions in the late 1930s and early 1940s; among the plays he appeared in are "The Time of Your Life," "Juke Box Jenny," "Blind Alibi," "China Passage," and "We're on the Jury." Arnold served in the US Army in the Signal Corps during World War II. He apprenticed under famous documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty. Following his tour of duty Jack started making short films and documentaries. One short, With These Hands (1950), was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary Feature. Arnold made his theatrical movie debut with the B picture Girls in the Night (1953). He then did his first foray into the science-fiction genre: the supremely spooky It Came from Outer Space (1953). Jack achieved his greatest enduring cult popularity with Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), a scary yet poetic reworking of "Beauty and the Beast". Revenge of the Creature (1955) was a worthy sequel. Tarantula (1955) was likewise a lot of fun. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) rates highly as Arnold's crowning cinematic achievement; it's an intelligent and entertaining classic that's lost none of its potency throughout the years.

Arnold's final two genre entries were the enjoyable Monster on the Campus (1958) and the offbeat The Space Children (1958). His other movies are a pretty varied and interesting bunch, including the hugely successful The Mouse That Roared (1959) (which helped to establish Peter Sellers as an international star), the teen exploitation gem High School Confidential! (1958), the superior Audie Murphy western No Name on the Bullet (1959), the goofy comedy Hello Down There (1969) and the silly softcore romp The Bunny Caper (1974).

In addition to his film work, Arnold also directed episodes of such TV shows as Science Fiction Theatre (1955), Peter Gunn (1958), Perry Mason (1957), Rawhide (1959), Gilligan's Island (1964), Mod Squad (1968), Wonder Woman (1975), The Love Boat (1977), The Bionic Woman (1976) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).

The father of producer/casting director Susan Arnold, Jack Arnold died at age 79 on March 17, 1992.

Newt Arnold was born on 22 February 1922 in Palo Alto, California, USA. He was an assistant director and actor, known for The Godfather Part II (1974), Blade Runner (1982) and WarGames (1983). He was married to Judy Arnold and Peg Yorkin. He died on 12 February 2000 in Encino, California, USA.

Dorothy Arzner, the only female director during the "Golden Age" of Hollywood's studio system--from the 1920s to the early 1940s and the female director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day--was born January 3, 1897 (some sources put the year as 1900), in San Francisco, California, to a German-American father and a Scottish mother. Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café which featured German cuisine and which was frequented by silent film stars including: Charles Chaplin and William S. Hart, and director Erich von Stroheim. She worked as a waitress at the restaurant, and no one could have foreseen at the time that Arzner would be one of the few women to break the glass ceiling of directing and would be the only woman to work during the early sound era.

In her fifteen-year career as a director (1928-43), Arzner made three silent movies and fourteen talkies. Her path to the director's chair was different than that of female directors in the future (indeed, different than most male directors too). Directors nowadays are typically graduates of film schools or were working actors prior to directing. Like most of the directors of her generation, Arzner gained wide training in most aspects of film-making by working her way up from the bottom. It was the best way to become a film-maker, she later said.

After graduating from high school in 1915, she entered the University of Southern California, where she was in the premedical program for two years. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Arzner was unable to realize her ambition of serving her country in a military capacity, as there were no women's units in the armed forces at the time, so she served as an ambulance driver during the war.

After the cessation of hostilities, Azner got a job on a newspaper. The director of her ambulance unit introduced her to film director William C. de Mille (the brother of Cecil B. DeMille, one of the co-founders of Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became known by the title of its distribution unit--Paramount Pictures). She decided to pursue a film career after visiting a movie set and being intrigued by the editing facilities. Arzner decided that she would like to become a director (there was no strict delineation between directors and editors in the immediate postwar period as the movie studios matured into a "factory" industrial production paradigm).

Though she was the sole member of her gender to direct Hollywood pictures during the first generation of sound film, in the silent era a woman behind the camera was not unknown. The first movie in history was directed by a Frenchwoman, and many women were employed in Hollywood during the silent era, most frequently as scenario writers (some research indicates that as many as three-quarters of the scenario writers during the silent era--when there was no requirement for a screenplay as such as there was no dialogue--were women). Indeed, there were female directors in the silent era, such as Frances Marion (though she was more famous as a screenwriter) and Lois Weber, but Arzner was fated to be the only female director to have made a successful transition to talkies. It wasn't until the 1930s and the verticalization of the industry, as it matured and consolidated, that women were squeezed out of production jobs in Hollywood.

The introduction to William deMille paid off when he hired her for the sum of $20 a week to be a stenographer. Her first job for DeMille was typing up scripts at Famous Players-Lasky. She was reportedly a poor typist. Ambitious and possessed of a strong will, Arzner offered to write synopses of various literary properties, and eventually was hired as a writer. Impressing DeMille and other Paramount powers that be, Arzner was assigned to Paramount's subsidiary Realart Films, as a film cutter. She was promoted to script girl after one year, which required her presence on the set to ensure the continuity of the script as shot by the director. She then was given a job editing films. She excelled at cutting: as an editor (she was the first Hollywood editor professionally credited as such on-screen), she labored on 52 films, working her way up from cutting Bebe Daniels comedies to assignments on "A" pictures within a couple of years. She came into her own as a film-maker editing the Rudolph Valentino headliner Blood and Sand (1922), about a toreador. Her editing of the bull-fighting scenes was highly praised, and she later said that she actually helmed the second-unit crew shooting some of the bullfight sequences. Director James Cruze was so impressed by her work on the Valentino picture that he brought her on to his team to edit The Covered Wagon (1923). Arzner eventually edited three other Cruze films: Ruggles of Red Gap (1923), Merton of the Movies (1924) and Old Ironsides (1926). Her work was of such quality that she received official screen credit as an editor, a first for a cutter of either sex.

While collaborating with Cruze she also wrote scenarios, scripting her ideas both solo and in collaboration. She was credited as a screenwriter (as well as an editor) on "Old Ironsides", one of the more spectacular films of the late silent era, being partially shot in Magnascope, one of the earliest widescreen processes. She would always credit Cruze as her mentor and role model. "Old Ironsides" proved to be the last film on which she was credited as an editor, as her ambitions to become a director would finally come to fruition. To indulge her, Paramount gave her a job as an assistant director, for which she was happy--until she realized it was not a stepping stone to the director's chair, and she was determined to sit in that chair.

Arzner pressured Paramount to let her direct, threatening to leave the studio to work for Columbia Pictures on Poverty Row, which had offered her a job as a director. Unwilling to lose such a talented film-maker, the Paramount brass relented, and she made her debut with Fashions for Women (1927). It was a hit. In the process of directing Paramount's first talkie, Manhattan Cocktail (1928), she made history by becoming the first woman to direct a sound picture. The success of her next sound picture, The Wild Party (1929), starring Paramount's top star, Clara Bow, helped establish Fredric March as a movie star.

Arzner proved adept at handling actresses. As Budd Schulberg related in his autobiography "Moving Pictures", Clara Bow--a favorite of his father, studio boss B.P. Schulberg--had a thick Brooklyn accent that the silence of the pre-talkie era hid nicely from the audience. She was terrified of the transition to sound, and developed a fear of the microphone. Working with her sound crew, Arzner devised and used the first boom mike, attaching the microphone to a fish pole to follow Bow as she moved around the set. Arzner even used Bow's less-than-dulcet speaking tones to underscore the vivaciousness of her character.

Though Arzner made several successful films for Paramount, the studio teetered on the edge of bankruptcy due to the Depression, eventually going into receivership (before being saved by the advent of another iconic woman, Mae West). When the studio mandated a pay cut for all employees, Arzner decided to go freelance. RKO Radio Pictures hired her to direct its new star, headstrong young Katharine Hepburn, in her second starring film, Christopher Strong (1933). It was not a happy collaboration, as both women were strong and unyielding, but Arzner eventually prevailed. She was after all the director. The fiercely independent Hepburn complained to RKO, but the studio backed its director against its star. Eventually the two settled into a working relationship, respecting each other but remaining cold and distant from one another. Ironically, Arzner would display her directorial flair in elucidating the kind of competitive rivalries between women she experienced with Hepburn.

The Directors Guild of America was established in 1933, and Arzner became the first female member. Indeed, she was the only female member of the D.G.A. for many years.

Arzner's films featured well-developed female characters, and she was known at the time of her work, quite naturally, as a director of "women's pictures". Not only did her movies portray the lives of strong, interesting women, but her pictures are noted for showcasing the ambiguities of life. Since the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1960s, Arzner's movies have been seen as challenging the dominant, androcentric mores of the times.

Arzner was gay, and cultivated a masculine look in her clothes and appearance (some feel as camouflage to hide the boy's club that was Hollywood). Many gay critics discern a hidden gay subtext in her films, such as "Christopher Strong". Whereas feminist critics see a critique of gender inequality in "Christopher Strong", gay female critics see a critique of heterosexuality itself as the source of a woman's troubles. The very private Azner, the woman who broke the glass ceiling and had to survive, and indeed throve, in the all-male world of studio film-making, refused to be categorized as a woman or gay director, insisting she was simply a "director." She was right.

Arzner did have less troubled and more productive collaborations with other actresses after her experience with Hepburn. She developed a close friendship with one of her female stars, Joan Crawford, whom she directed in two 1937 MGM vehicles, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937) and The Bride Wore Red (1937). Arzner later directed Pepsi commercials as a favor to Crawford's husband, Pepsi-Cola Company's Chairman of the Board Alfred Steele.

In 1943 Arzner joined other top Hollywood directors such as John Ford and George Stevens in going to work for the war effort during World War Two. She made training films for the U.S. Army's Women's Army Corps (W.A.C.s). That same year her health was compromised after she contracted pneumonia. After the war she did not return to feature film directing, but made documentaries and commercials for the new television industry. She also became a film-making teacher, first at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1950s and 1960s and then at the University of California-Los Angeles campus during the 1960s and 1970s. At U.C.L.A. she taught directing and screenwriting, and one of her students was Francis Ford Coppola, the first film school grad to achieve major success as a director. She taught at U.C.L.A. until her death in 1979.

She was honored in her own life-time, becoming a symbol and role model for female directors who desired entry into mainstream cinema. The feminist movement in the 1960s championed her. In 1972 the First International Festival of Women's Films honored her by screening "The Wild Party", and her oeuvre was given a full retrospective at the Second Festival in 1976. In 1975 the D.G.A. honored her with "A Tribute to Dorothy Arzner." During the tribute, a telegram from Katharine Hepburn was read: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?"

Hal Ashby was born the fourth and youngest child in a Mormon household, in Ogden, Utah, to Eileen Ireta (Hetzler) and James Thomas Ashby, on September 2, 1929. His father was a dairy farmer. After a rough childhood that included the divorce of his parents, his father's suicide, his dropping out of high school, getting married and divorced all before he was 19, he decided to leave Utah for California. A Californian employment office found him a printing press job at Universal Studios. Within a few years, he was an assistant film editor at various other studios. One of his pals while at MGM was a young messenger named Jack Nicholson. He moved up to being a full fledged editor on The Loved One (1965) and started editing the films of director Norman Jewison.

A highlight of his film editing career was winning an Oscar for the landmark In the Heat of the Night (1967). Itching to become a director, Jewison gave him a script he was too busy to work on called The Landlord (1970). It became Ashby's first film as a director. From there he delivered a series of well-acted, intelligent human scaled dramas that included The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979). Great reviews and Oscar nominations became common on Ashby films.

Ashby was always a maverick and a contrary person and success proved difficult for Ashby to handle. He became unreliable due to his dependence on drugs and a reclusive lifestyle. He actually collapsed while making The Rolling Stones concert film Let's Spend the Night Together (1982) in Arizona. Although he recovered, he was never the same after that. He began taking too much time in post production on his films and actually had a couple of his later projects taken away from him to be edited by others. He tried to straighten himself out, but in the 1980s, he was considered by many to be unemployable. Just when he felt he was turning a corner in his life, he developed cancer that spread to his liver and colon. He died on December 27, 1988. Actor Sean Penn dedicated his first film as a director, The Indian Runner (1991) to Ashby and John Cassavetes, even though Penn was never directed by either one. Because he did not have a set visual style, many mistake this for no style at all. His career is not discussed as often as the careers of some of his contemporaries.

William Asher was born on 8 August 1921 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Bewitched (1964), Fireball 500 (1966) and Kay O'Brien (1986). He was married to Meredith Coffin, Joyce Bulifant, Elizabeth Montgomery and Danni Sue Nolan. He died on 16 July 2012 in Palm Desert, California, USA.

Howard holds his Master of Arts in Cinema from the University of Southern California. He was one of the top students in the cinema department, winning the coveted George Cukor Award. Howard is also a graduate of the London School of Film Technique and has a Bachelor of Arts with honors in English literature. He speaks several languages, including French.

Avedis made his mark writing and directing many motion picture box office hits, including a French-style romantic thriller that received an Academy Award nomination for best theme song. Avedis is a member of the Writers Guild of America West.

He and his wife, Marlene, presently divide their time between Southern California and Paris, France. Hotel Paradise is his first novel, and he is now working on his second.

Hy Averback was born on 21 October 1920 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. He was a director and producer, known for M*A*S*H (1972), The Tom Ewell Show (1960) and The Real McCoys (1957). He was married to Dorothy Wayne Bridges. He died on 14 October 1997 in Los Angeles, California, USA.