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Sergio G. Sánchez was born in 1973 in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain. He is a writer and producer, known for Marrowbone (2017), The Orphanage (2007) and The Impossible (2012).- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Friedkin's mother was an operating room nurse. His father was a merchant seaman, semi-pro softball player and ultimately sold clothes in a men's discount chain. Ultimately, his father never earned more than $50/week in his whole life and died indigent. Eventually young Will became infatuated with Orson Welles after seeing Citizen Kane (1941). He went to work for WGN TV immediately after graduating from high school where he started making documentaries, one of which won the Golden Gate Award at the 1962 San Francisco film festival. In 1965, he moved to Hollywood and immediately started directing TV shows, including an episode of the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962); Hitchcock infamously chastised him for not wearing a tie.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Ari Devon Sandel was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Calabasas and Tarzana, California. He went to Taft High School for a year and then graduated from Calabasas High. He studied media arts at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he also received a special certificate in Middle Eastern studies.
Ari started his professional career in entertainment in 1999, creating and hosting the comedic TV segment "The Traveler," for the FX Channel's The X Show (1999), in which he traveled the globe, offering a tongue-in-cheek view of the world's unknown hot spots for the young and hip.
Earning a master's degree in film from the University of Southern California in 2005, Ari directed and co-wrote the short film West Bank Story (2005), which won the 2007 Academy Award for best short film, live action. His documentary Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland (2006) was his feature documentary directorial debut, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released nationwide in theaters in 2008. Ari then went on to direct episodes of Aim High (2011), an action comedy series that starred Jackson Rathbone and Aimee Teegarden for Warner Bros. Digital. In 2015, he directed the hit high school comedy The DUFF (2015) for CBS Films, which was nominated for a People's Choice Award and five Teen Choice Awards. Ari recently completed a romantic comedy for Netflix starring Adam Devine, titled When We First Met (2018), which premiered in 2018, and he is attached to direct a franchise launch of Universal's Monster High: The Movie (2022), based on the billion-dollar toy line from Mattel.
Ari is represented by WME and Principatto Young and is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures of Arts and Sciences. Ari is also represented by the Harry Walker Agency as a public speaker, and speaks globally about filmmaking and how to tackle controversial subjects through comedy.
Between projects, Ari is an adjunct professor at U.S.C's School of Cinematic Arts, where he teaches a graduate-level course on how to navigate the film business.- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Initially an indie film favorite, actor Jon Favreau has progressed to strong mainstream visibility into the millennium and, after nearly two decades in the business, is still enjoying character stardom as well as earning notice as a writer/producer/director.
The amiable, husky-framed actor with the tight, crinkly hair was born in Queens, New York on October 19, 1966, the only child of Madeleine (Balkoff), an elementary school teacher, and Charles Favreau, a special education teacher. His father has French-Canadian, German, and Italian ancestry, and his mother was from a Russian Jewish family. He attended the Bronx High School of Science before furthering his studies at Queens College in 1984. Dropping out just credits away from receiving his degree, Jon moved to Chicago where he focused on comedy and performed at several Chicago improvisational theaters, including the ImprovOlympic and the Improv Institute. He also found a couple of bit parts in films.
While there, he earned another bit role in the film, Rudy (1993), and met fellow cast mate Vince Vaughn. Their enduring personal friendship would play an instrumental role in furthering both their professional careers within just a few years. Jon broke into TV with a role on the classic series, Seinfeld (1989) (as "Eric the Clown"). After filming rudimentary roles in the movies Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), Notes from Underground (1995) and Batman Forever (1995), he decided to do some risk taking by writing himself and friend Vaughn into what would become their breakthrough film. Swingers (1996), which he also co-produced, centers on Jon as a luckless, struggling actor type who is emotionally shattered after losing his girlfriend, but is pushed back into the L.A. social scene via the help of cool, worldly, outgoing actor/buddy Vaughn. These two blueprint roles went on to define the character types of both actors on film.
In 1997, Jon appeared favorably on several episodes of the popular TV sitcom, Friends (1994), as "Pete Becker", the humdrum but extremely wealthy suitor for Courteney Cox's "Monica" character, and also appeared to fine advantage on the Tracey Takes On... (1996) comedy series. He later took on the biopic mini-movie, Rocky Marciano (1999), portraying the prizefighter himself in a highly challenging dramatic role and received excellent reviews. Other engagingly offbeat "everyman" films roles came Jon's way -- the ex-athlete in the working class film, Dogtown (1997); a soon-to-be groom whose bachelor party goes horribly awry in the comedy thriller Very Bad Things (1998); a newlywed opposite Famke Janssen in Love & Sex (2000); a wild and crazy linebacker in The Replacements (2000); as Ben Affleck's legal partner in Daredevil (2003); and another down-and-out actor in The Big Empty (2003). He wrote and directed himself and Vaughn as two fellow boxers who involve themselves in criminal activity in Made (2001). Both he and Vaughn produced. He also directed the highly popular Will Ferrell comedy Elf (2003), in which he had a small part.
Jon went on to re-team favorably with his friend, Vince Vaughn, who enjoyed a meteoric rise into the comedy star ranks, in such light-weight features as The Break-Up (2006), Four Christmases (2008) and Couples Retreat (2009), the last of which he co-wrote with Vaughn.
Jon has made even greater strides as a writer, producer and/or director in recent years with the exciting mega-box office action-packed Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jr., and its sequels, Iron Man 2 (2010) and Iron Man 3 (2013). Jon's character of "Happy Hogan" would be featured in a number of Marvel Comic adventures. Other offerings behind the scenes have included the adventure dramedy Chef (2014), in which he also starred in the title role; the revamped film version of The Avengers (2012) also starring Downey Jr., and it's sequels Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019); and the animated Disney features The Jungle Book (2016) and The Lion King (2019) and the TV series The Chef Show (2019).
Favreau's marriage to Joya Tillem on November 24, 2000, produced son Max and two daughters, Madeleine and Brighton Rose. Joya is the niece of KGO (AM) lawyer and talk show host, Len Tillem. On the sly, the actor/writer/producer/director enjoys playing on the World Poker Tour.- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Mike Flanagan is a prolific writer, director, and editor. He entered into an exclusive overall deal with Amazon Studios in 2023 for television projects (after a similar exclusive deal with Netflix from 2018-2022), and has made feature films for Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Netflix and more. Flanagan is best known for his work in horror films and television series, which has attracted the praise of critics for his focus on character and lack of reliance on jump scares. Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, and William Friedkin, among others, have praised him.
Flanagan was born in Salem, Massachusetts to Timothy and Laura Flanagan. The family relocated frequently, as Timothy was in the U.S. Coast Guard, and finally settled in Bowie, Maryland. As a child, he would shoot and edit short movies on VHS. This continued as he attended Archbishop Spalding High School in Severn, Maryland, where he was active in the theatre department and the president of the Student Government Association. A graduate of Towson University's Electronic Media and Film department, Mike moved to Los Angeles in 2003 and began working as an editor of sketch comedy shows, reality television, documentary programming and commercials before his Kickstarter-funded breakout feature Absentia (2011) launched his filmmaking career.
Flanagan's films, all of which he directed, wrote, and edited, include Oculus (2013), Hush (2016), Before I Wake (2016), Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), Gerald's Game (2017), Doctor Sleep (2019), and The Life of Chuck (2024). He also created, directed, and served as showrunner on the series The Haunting of Hill House (2018), The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Midnight Mass (2021), the teen horror series The Midnight Club (2022) and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023).
Flanagan has been nominated for dozens of awards for writing, directing and editing, and was presented with the Visionary Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films in 2022. He is an active member of the Producers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, Writers Guild of America West, Motion Picture Editors Guild, and Screen Actors Guild.
Flanagan lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actress Kate Siegel, whom he married in 2016. They have a son and a daughter together, as well as a son from Flanagan's previous relationship with Absentia actress Courtney Bell. He has been sober since 2018, and frequently uses his work to explore themes of addiction, recovery, and empathy.- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Steve Dildarian is known for The Life & Times of Tim (2008), Ten Year Old Tom (2021) and The New V.I.P.'s (2017).- Actress
- Writer
Bodil Steensen-Leth was born on 12 January 1945 in Svendborg, Denmark. She is an actress and writer, known for A Royal Affair (2012) and Huset ved havet (1989).- Writer
- Producer
Kazuo Ishiguro was born on 8 November 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. He is a writer and producer, known for Living (2022), Never Let Me Go (2010) and The Remains of the Day (1993). He has been married to Lorna Anne MacDougall since 1986. They have one child.- Writer
- Soundtrack
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born on 7 May 1927 in Cologne, Germany. She was a writer, known for Howards End (1992), A Room with a View (1985) and The Remains of the Day (1993). She was married to Cyrus Jhabvala. She died on 3 April 2013 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Director
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Anderson was born in 1970. He was one of the first of the "video store" generation of film-makers. His father was the first man on his block to own a V.C.R., and from a very early age Anderson had an infinite number of titles available to him. While film-makers like Spielberg cut their teeth making 8 mm films, Anderson cut his teeth shooting films on video and editing them from V.C.R. to V.C.R.
Part of Anderson's artistic D.N.A. comes from his father, who hosted a late night horror show in Cleveland. His father knew a number of oddball celebrities such as Robert Ridgely, an actor who often appeared in Mel Brooks' films and would later play "The Colonel" in Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997). Anderson was also very much shaped by growing up in "The Valley", specifically the suburban San Fernando Valley of greater Los Angeles. The Valley may have been immortalized in the 1980s for its mall-hopping "Valley Girls", but for Anderson it was a slightly seedy part of suburban America. You were close to Hollywood, yet you weren't there. Would-bes and burn-outs populated the area. Anderson's experiences growing up in "The Valley" have no doubt shaped his artistic self, especially since three of his four theatrical features are set in the Valley.
Anderson got into film-making at a young age. His most significant amateur film was The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), a sort of mock-documentary a la This Is Spinal Tap (1984), about a once-great pornography star named Dirk Diggler. After enrolling in N.Y.U.'s film program for two days, Anderson got his tuition back and made his own short film, Cigarettes & Coffee (1993). He also worked as a production assistant on numerous commercials and music videos before he got the chance to make his first feature, something he liked to call Sydney, but would later become known to the public as Hard Eight (1996). The film was developed and financed through The Sundance Lab, not unlike Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). Anderson cast three actors whom he would continue working with in the future: Altman veteran Philip Baker Hall, the husky and lovable John C. Reilly and, in a small part, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who so far has been featured in all four of Anderson's films. The film deals with a guardian angel type (played by Hall) who takes down-on-his-luck Reilly under his wing. The deliberately paced film featured a number of Anderson trademarks: wonderful use of source light, long takes and top-notch acting. Yet the film was reedited (and retitled) by Rysher Entertainment against Anderson's wishes. It was admired by critics, but didn't catch on at the box office. Still, it was enough for Anderson to eventually get his next movie financed. "Boogie Nights" was, in a sense, a remake of "The Dirk Diggler Story", but Anderson threw away the satirical approach and instead painted a broad canvas about a makeshift family of pornographers. The film was often joyous in its look at the 1970s and the days when pornography was still shot on film, still shown in theatres, and its actors could at least delude themselves into believing that they were movie stars. Yet "Boogie Nights" did not flinch at the dark side, showing a murder and suicide, literally in one (almost) uninterrupted shot, and also showing the lives of these people deteriorate, while also showing how their lives recovered.
Anderson not only worked with Hall, Reilly and Hoffman again, he also worked with Julianne Moore, Melora Walters, William H. Macy and Luis Guzmán. Collectively, Anderson had something that was rare in U.S. cinema: a stock company of top-notch actors. Aside from the above mentioned, Anderson also drew terrific performances from Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg, two actors whose careers were not exactly going full-blast at the time of "Boogie Nights", but who found themselves to be that much more employable afterwards.
The success of "Boogie Nights" gave Anderson the chance to really go for broke in Magnolia (1999), a massive mosaic that could dwarf Altman's Nashville (1975) in its number of characters.
Anderson was awarded a "Best Director" award at Cannes for Punch-Drunk Love (2002).- Writer
- Producer
- Music Department
Loren Bouchard was born in 1970 in the USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Bob's Burgers (2011), The Bob's Burgers Movie (2022) and Central Park (2020). He has been married to Holly Kretschmar since 3 September 2006.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Actor
Born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, Richard Burton Matheson first became a published author while still a child, when his stories and poems ran in the "Brooklyn Eagle". A lifelong reader of fantasy tales, he made his professional writing bow in 1950 when his short story "Born of Man and Woman"? appeared in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction"; Matheson turned out a number of highly regarded horror, fantasy and mystery stories throughout that decade. He broke into films in 1956, adapting his novel "The Shrinking Man" for the big-screen The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Giuseppe Tornatore was born on 27 May 1956 in Bagheria, Sicily, Italy. He is a director and writer, known for The Best Offer (2013), Cinema Paradiso (1988) and The Legend of 1900 (1998). He is married to Roberta Pacetti.- Additional Crew
- Actor
- Writer
John Guy is known for Mary Queen of Scots (2018), Seven Ages of Britain (2010) and Royal Deaths and Diseases (2003).- Additional Crew
- Writer
- Director
The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature Andrei Rublev (1966), which was banned by the Soviet authorities for two years. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival at four o'clock in the morning on the last day, in order to prevent it from winning a prize - but it won one nonetheless, and was eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to save face. Solaris (1972), had an easier ride, being acclaimed by many in Europe and North America as the Soviet answer to Kubrick's '2001' (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of his own film nor Kubrick's), but he ran into official trouble again with Mirror (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Nostalghia (1983), shot in Italy (with official approval), Tarkovsky defected to Europe. His last film, The Sacrifice (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman's regular collaborators, and won an almost unprecedented four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. He died of lung cancer at the end of the year. Two years later link=Sergei Parajanov dedicated his film Ashik Kerib to Tarkovsky.- Writer
- Producer
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Alex Garland is an English novelist, screenwriter, film producer and director. He is best known for the films Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018).
Garland's others works as a writer includes The Beach (2000), 28 Days Later (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2011) and Dredd (2012).
He is also the co-writer on the video game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
In 2015, Garland made his directorial debut with Ex Machina and was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Writing, Original Screenplay category.- Actor
- Writer
- Additional Crew
James Arthur Lovell Jr. is an American retired astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot and mechanical engineer. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he became, with Frank Borman and William Anders, one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon. He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, circled the Moon and returned safely to Earth.- Director
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- Animation Department
Grew up on a shrimp farm in southern Australia together with two brothers, one sister and two parrots. He discerned his artistic abilities at an early age and spent five years studying photography, painting, pottery etc. In 1996 he began his studies at the Victorian College of the Arts where Uncle (1996), the first part of his trilogy, was made. After he graduated in 1997, the trilogy was completed with Cousin (1999) and Brother (2000).- Actor
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An actor for all seasons and all kinds of roles (from dark, difficult characters to more loving ones) Paul Dano has an extensive body work that includes working with directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Steve McQueen, Dayton & Ferris, Ang Lee, Denis Villenueve and Paolo Sorrentino; acting with heavyweights such as Harrison Ford, Daniel Day-Lewis, Alan Arkin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Toni Collette, Michael Caine, Kevin Kline - just to mention a few names; and easily making a fine transition in between independent cinema, art-house films and mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.
Paul Franklin Dano was born on 19 June, 1984 in New York City, the son of Gladys (Pipp) and Paul Dano. He is of Rusyn, Slovenian/Czech, and Swedish descent. At an early age he was already appearing in community plays and by his early teens he got his first TV appearance on an episode of Smart Guy (1998). His first major role was as Howie Blitzer, a trouble teenager who gets involved with an older man, played by Brian Cox, in the controversial and acclaimed L.I.E. (2001). For the role, Dano was awarded an Independent Spirit Award in the Best Debut Performance category, along with some other awards from Indie cinema. From the on, he moved on to supporting roles in The Girl Next Door (2004), Taking Lives (2004), The King (2005), Fast Food Nation (2006) and The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005).
Dano's rise to stardom came in consecutive films that showcased his talents and made him an important name in the business: as Dwayne, a rebel teen who copes with his teen angst by refusing to speak to everyone in his family, only using of his cold expressions and a notepad in Little Miss Sunshine (2006), he was praised by critics and audiences, a role that earned him among other awards the Screen Actors Guild as Best Ensemble Cast. The following year, he appeared on a dual role as twin brothers Paul and Eli Sunday - the latter character, a devoted preacher, is more extensive and challenging than the mysterious Paul, in Paul Thomas Anderson critically acclaimed There Will Be Blood (2007). The role was given to Dano after a recommendation from Daniel Day-Lewis who had worked with the young actor in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) and found him a very talented and interesting role. Anderson followed Day-Lewis suggestion, and the result was another hit for Dano, who received several awards nominations, including the Bafta as Best Supporting Actor.
After that, he went on with his career with Taking Woodstock (2009), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), Ruby Sparks (2012) - in which he appears alongside his girlfriend Zoe Kazan, Looper (2012), as the tortured suspect in Prisoners (2013); the Oscar winning 12 Years a Slave (2013); as a young Method actor in Youth (2015); the freak comedy Swiss Army Man (2016); Okja (2017); and the miniseries War & Peace (2016) and Escape at Dannemora (2018), the latter being a role completely the opposite he ever played in previous years, as an inmate who escapes jail, a very physical work for him. In between those films and projects, he gained notoriety by playing the young Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy (2014), the Beach Boys leader who suffers a nervous breakdown while trying to compose an epic album. That role gave Paul Dano plenty of buzz during awards season, some deserved recognition and his first Golden Globe nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category.
His career seems to always be going further each year goes by, always promising. He made his directorial debut in Wildlife (2018), which was co-written with Zoe Kazan. They're living together for a decade and have one daughter.
In the 2020's, he provided the voice from a character in the thriller The Guilty (2021) and played the Riddler in the box-office hit The Batman (2022), in one of his most challenging roles. During 2022/2023 awards season he received a lot of praise and attention for his role in the acclaimed The Fabelmans (2022) where he plays a version of Steven Spielberg's father.- Actress
- Producer
- Director
Actress and activist Olivia Wilde is a modern day renaissance woman, starring in many acclaimed film productions, while simultaneously giving back to the community.
She was born on March 10, 1984 in New York City. Her parents are Leslie Cockburn (née Leslie Corkill Redlich) and Andrew Cockburn. Her mother is American-born and her father was born in London, England to an upper-class British family; he also later became a citizen of Ireland. Wilde is the middle child, having an older sister, Chloe Cockburn, and, a younger brother, Charlie Cockburn. She is of English, Irish, Scottish, German, and Manx descent.
She was raised in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., and spent her summers in Ardmore, County Waterford, Ireland. She attended the private Georgetown Day School, as well as, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, graduating in 2002. She was accepted to Bard College, another highly selective private school in Duchess County, New York but deferred her enrollment three times in order to pursue an acting career. She later studied at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Ireland.
Wilde is known for her television roles as Alex Kelly in The O.C. (2003) from 2004-2005 and Dr. Remy "Thirteen" Hadley in the medical-drama television series, House (2004) when she joined the cast in 2007 and appeared on the show until the series end in 2012.
Wilde is a board member of the organization "Artists for Peace and Justice," which supports communities in Haiti through programs in education, health care, and dignity through the performing arts. She has served as executive producer on several documentary short films, including, Sun City Picture House (2010), which is about a community in Haiti that rallies to build a movie theater after the disastrous 2010 earthquake and Baseball in the Time of Cholera (2012), which explored the cholera epidemic in Haiti.
Wilde is known for her roles in Year One (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), In Time (2011), People Like Us (2012), Her (2013), Rush (2013), Drinking Buddies (2013), The Longest Week (2014), Love the Coopers (2015), and Meadowland (2015).
Since 2011, Wilde had been in a relationship with Jason Sudeikis. They have two children together, Otis Alexander Sudeikis (born April 20, 2014) and Daisy Josephine Sudeikis (born October 11, 2016). In November 2020, they announced that they had ended their relationship.
Wilde made her Broadway debut in the play "1984" at the Hudson Theatre in New York City in 2017. She has recently starred in Life Itself (2018) and A Vigilante (2018).- Writer
- Producer
Kevin Brodbin was born in 1964. He is a writer and producer, known for The Siege of Jadotville (2016), Constantine (2005) and Mindhunters (2004).- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Writer
Brian O'Malley is film and television Director. He has directed the TV series 'The Cuckoo', 'Alex Rider', 'The Ex Wife' and 'That Dirty Black Bag', as well as the feature films 'The Lodgers' and 'Let Us Prey'. He Directed 4 episodes of the upcoming third season of Alex Rider for Eleventh Hour Films and Sony/Amazon FreeVee. Prior to this he was series Director of the 4 part thriller 'The Ex Wife' for Paramount+ starring Celine Buckens, Tom Mison, Janet Montgomery and Jordan Stephens. He directed 4 episodes of 'That Dirty Black Bag', the AMC+ Spaghetti Western TV series produced by MediawanEU Palomar and Bron Studios. The 8 part series, shot in Italy, Spain and Morocco in 2020/2021 was created by Mauro Aragoni. Stars Douglas Booth, Dominic Cooper, Niv Sultan, Guido Caprino, Rose Williams, Christian Cooke, Paterson Joseph, Zoe Boyle, Ivan Shaw, Eugene Brave Rock, Daniel Caltagirone, Anna Chancellor, Aidan Gillen and Travis Fimmel. He is also known for the gothic horror movies 'Let Us Prey' and 'The Lodgers'. 'Let Us Prey', starring Liam Cunningham, won the Méliès d'Argent for Best European Fantastic Feature Film at its world premiere at the Belgium International Fantastic Film Festival in 2014. His 2nd feature film 'The Lodgers', an elegantly gothic ghost story set in rural Ireland in 1920, premiered at TIFF 2017 and was released theatrically February 23rd 2018. He wrote and Directed the short films 'Crossing Salween' (2010) and 'Screwback' (2005). In 2005 he won the Hartley Merrill Screenwriting award for his feature films script 'SISK', co-written with Terry McMahon and Mark O'Rowe. Brian studied Fine Art, specializing in Sculpture, before moving into music video and short film direction. He began Directing TV commercials in 2001 before moving into Drama.- Director
- Cinematographer
- Producer
Richard Pearce was born on 25 January 1943 in San Diego, California, USA. He is a director and cinematographer, known for Heartland (1979), Food, Inc. (2008) and Hair (1979). He has been married to Lynzee Klingman since 5 January 1980. They have two children.- Director
- Producer
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He grew up in Versailles with a family who was very influenced by pop music. When he was young, Gondry wanted to be a painter or an inventor. In the 80s he entered in an art school in Paris where he could develop his graphic skills and where he also met friends with whom he created a pop-rock band called Oui-Oui. The band released 2 albums ('Chacun tout le monde' and 'Formidable') and several singles until their separation in 1992. Gondry was the drummer of the band and also directed their video clips in which it was possible to see his strange world, influenced by the 60s and by his childhood. One of his videos was shown on MTV and when Björk saw it, she asked him to make her first solo video for 'Human Behaviour'. The partnership is famous: Gondry directed five other Björk's videos, benefiting by the huge budgets. This led to commissions for other artists around the world, including Massive Attack. He also made a lot of commercials for Gap, Smirnoff, Air France, Nike, Coca Cola, Adidas, Polaroid and Levi - the latter making him the most highly-awarded director for a one-off commercial.
Hollywood became interested in Gondry's success and he directed his first feature movie Human Nature (2001), adapting a Charlie Kaufman's scenario, which was shown in the 2001 Cannes Festival. Although it wasn't a big success, this film allowed him to direct Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he again collaborated with Charlie Kaufman. The movie became a popular independent film and he and his co-writers won an Oscar for it.- Animation Department
- Director
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Cordell Barker was born in 1956 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is a director and writer, known for Strange Invaders (2001), Runaway (2009) and The Cat Came Back (1988).- Animation Department
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- Art Department
Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan's greatest animation directors. The entertaining plots, compelling characters, and breathtaking visuals in his films have earned him international renown from critics as well as public recognition within Japan.
Miyazaki started his career in 1963 as an animator at the studio Toei Douga studio, and was subsequently involved in many early classics of Japanese animation. From the beginning, he commanded attention with his incredible drawing ability and the seemingly endless stream of movie ideas he proposed.
In 1971, he moved to the A Pro studio with Isao Takahata. In 1973, he moved to Nippon Animation, where he was heavily involved in the World Masterpiece Theater TV animation series for the next 5 years. In 1978, he directed his first TV series, Future Boy Conan (1978). Then, he moved to Tokyo Movie Shinsha in 1979 to direct his first movie, the classic Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). In 1984, he released Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), which was based on the manga of the same title he had started 2 years before. The success of the film led to the establishment of a new animation studio, Studio Ghibli. Since then, he has since directed, written, and produced many other films with Takahata. More recently, he has produced with Toshio Suzuki. All enjoyed critical and box office success, in particular Princess Mononoke (1997). It received the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Film and was the highest-grossing (about USD $150 million) domestic film in Japan's history at the time of its release.
In addition to animation, he also draws manga. His major work was Nausicaä, an epic tale he worked on intermittently from 1982 to 1984 while he was busy making animated films. Another manga Hikotei Jidai, later evolved into Porco Rosso (1992).- Producer
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Scott Derrickson is an American filmmaker who is known for directing horror films such as Deliver Us from Evil, Hellraiser: Inferno, Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. He also directed the superhero film Doctor Strange starring Benedict Cumberbatch. He decided not to direct Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which resulted in Sam Raimi directing the sequel.- Director
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Duncan Jones was born on 30 May 1971 in Bromley, Kent, England, UK. He is a director and writer, known for Moon (2009), Source Code (2011) and Mute (2018). He has been married to Rodene Ronquillo since 6 November 2012. They have two children.- Director
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Andrew Patterson is known for The Vast of Night (2019), The Rivals of Amziah King and Team Deakins (2020).- Craig W. Sanger is known for The Vast of Night (2019).
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Victor Fleming entered the film business as a stuntman in 1910, mainly doing stunt driving - which came easy to him, as he had been a mechanic and professional race-car driver. He became interested in working on the other side of the camera, and eventually got a job as a cameraman on many of the films of Douglas Fairbanks. He soon began directing, and his first big hit was The Virginian (1929). It was the movie that turned Gary Cooper into a star (a fact Cooper never forgot; he and Fleming remained friends for life). Fleming's star continued to rise during the '30s, and he was responsible for many of the films that would eventually be considered classics, such as Red Dust (1932), Bombshell (1933), Treasure Island (1934), and the two films that were the high marks of his career: Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ironically Fleming was brought in on both pictures to replace other directors and smooth out the troubled productions, a feat he accomplished masterfully. His career took somewhat of a downturn in the '40s, and most of his films, with the exception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), weren't particularly successful. He ended his career with the troubled production Joan of Arc (1948), which turned out to be a major critical and financial failure.- Writer
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Melvin Frank was half of a famous screenwriting partnership. The other half of the collaborative effort was Norman Panama. The two men became close friends while attending the University of Chicago. Frank had initially pursued a degree in engineering, but was persuaded by Panama to switch to English instead. In 1938 he and Panama moved to Hollywood and embarked on a career writing radio scripts and gags for Bob Hope and Milton Berle. Specializing in light comedy, they came up with the original story line for Hope's My Favorite Blonde (1942). This opened the door for a joint screenwriting contract with Paramount (1941-46), their prolific work together culminating in an Oscar nomination for the popular Bob Hope-Bing Crosby vehicle, Road to Utopia (1945).
Continuing their run of witty comedies, Frank and Panama next wrote and produced the Cary Grant-Myrna Loy box-office hit Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), adapted from a satirical novel by Eric Hodgins (about a couple whose dream of home ownership turns into a nightmare). From then on Frank and Panama alternated as directors and producers, first at MGM (1950-52), then at Paramount (1954-59). Of some ten top-grossing collaborations, their most rewarding effort was the highly entertaining medieval adventure spoof, The Court Jester (1955), starring Danny Kaye, lavishly filmed in VistaVision and Technicolor. They also turned out an award-winning Broadway play, "Li'l Abner", based on a comic strip by Al Capp. It premiered in November 1956 and ran for 653 performances over 87 weeks, before closing in July 1958. Frank and Panama brought it to the screen (Li'l Abner (1959)) the following year.
The successful partnership came to an end with the final installment in the Hope-Crosby "road pictures", The Road to Hong Kong (1962). Subsequently, Frank and Panama--cordially--went their separate ways, Frank becoming a solo director and (from 1965) producer, but continuing to write comedy scripts in conjunction with others. In retrospect, his career over the next two decades was by far the more productive of the two, encompassing as producer/director the bittersweet adaptation of a play by Neil Simon, The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975); and as producer/director/writer of the popular sex comedy A Touch of Class (1973), nominated for an Academy Award as Best Picture.- Writer
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- Actor
Neil Simon was born on 4 July 1927 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Odd Couple (1968), Murder by Death (1976) and The Goodbye Girl (1977). He was married to Elaine Joyce, Diane Lander, Marsha Mason and Joan Baim. He died on 26 August 2018 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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- Producer
Norman Panama was born on 21 April 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Knock on Wood (1954), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) and White Christmas (1954). He died on 13 January 2003 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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U.S.-born actor, director, writer, musician, and composer best known for his mockumentaries, poking fun at heavy metal music, small town theatre, dog shows, folk music and film-making itself, Christopher Haden-Guest was born February fifth, 1948, in New York City. His mother, Jean Pauline (Hindes), was a vice president of casting at CBS. His father, Peter Haden-Guest, was a UN diplomat who was a member of the British House of Lords, and was the fourth Baron of Saling in the County of Essex. Christopher's mother, who was American, was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Christopher's father, who was British, had English and Dutch-Jewish ancestry. Christopher's paternal great-grandfather, Colonel Albert Goldsmid, was a British officer.
He received his dramatic arts training at New York City's High School of Arts and Music and at Bard College, and Guest first appeared in minor film roles in a mixture of film genres, including The Hot Rock (1972), Death Wish (1974), Lemmings (1973), and The Long Riders (1980). However, he was also dabbling in writing for several T.V. shows, and when filming Million Dollar Infield (1982), Guest became acquainted with writer-director Rob Reiner and the two collaborated, along with Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, to pen the script and music for the sleeper hit This Is Spinal Tap (1984).
The mockumentary also starred Guest as dizzy lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, whose most famous line is surely, "These go to eleven," when referring to the volume settings on the band's rather unique Marshall amplifiers!
Guest then busied himself for several years in the 1980s as a regular performer on Saturday Night Live (1975) and, along with fellow Spinal Tap band members lead singer David St. Hubbins, aka Michael McKean; and bassist Derek Smalls, aka Harry Shearer, they regularly appeared as Spinal Tap. In 1992, they released Spinal Tap: Break Like the Wind - The Videos (1992), plus A Spinal Tap Reunion: The 25th Anniversary London Sell-Out (1992).
Guest had a minor acting role in the courtroom drama of A Few Good Men (1992), before returning to poke fun at wannabe actors in the howlingly funny Waiting for Guffman (1996) with Guest taking center stage as high-strung choreographer Corky St. Clair. He made a return to heavy metal with Spinal Tap: The Final Tour (1998) and Catching Up with Marty DiBergi (2000) before turning his comedic pen to the world of championship dog shows for the sensational comedy Best in Show (2000). The latest mockumentary from Guest and co-writer-actor Eugene Levy was again met with critical praise, and movie fans just loved it, too! In 2003, Guest and Eugene Levy took aim at the folk-music world, and successfully collaborated to write the comedy A Mighty Wind (2003) about the reunion of the Folksmen, a fictional 1960s folk music group.
Guest is married to well-known actress Jamie Lee Curtis with two children, daughter Annie Guest and son Ruby Guest, plus he is the brother of actor Nicholas Guest.- Producer
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Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan, but grew up in a New York suburb in a creative, supportive Italian-American family. His father, Carmine Coppola, was a composer and musician. His mother, Italia Coppola (née Pennino), had been an actress. Francis Ford Coppola graduated with a degree in drama from Hofstra University, and did graduate work at UCLA in filmmaking. He was training as assistant with filmmaker Roger Corman, working in such capacities as sound-man, dialogue director, associate producer and, eventually, director of Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola's first feature film. During the next four years, Coppola was involved in a variety of script collaborations, including writing an adaptation of "This Property is Condemned" by Tennessee Williams (with Fred Coe and Edith Sommer), and screenplays for Is Paris Burning? (1966) and Patton (1970), the film for which Coppola won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. In 1966, Coppola's 2nd film brought him critical acclaim and a Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1969, Coppola and George Lucas established American Zoetrope, an independent film production company based in San Francisco. The company's first project was THX 1138 (1971), produced by Coppola and directed by Lucas. Coppola also produced the second film that Lucas directed, American Graffiti (1973), in 1973. This movie got five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. In 1971, Coppola's film The Godfather (1972) became one of the highest-grossing movies in history and brought him an Oscar for writing the screenplay with Mario Puzo The film was a Best Picture Academy Award-winner, and also brought Coppola a Best Director Oscar nomination. Following his work on the screenplay for The Great Gatsby (1974), Coppola's next film was The Conversation (1974), which was honored with the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and brought Coppola Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar nominations. Also released that year, The Godfather Part II (1974), rivaled the success of The Godfather (1972), and won six Academy Awards, bringing Coppola Oscars as a producer, director and writer. Coppola then began work on his most ambitious film, Apocalypse Now (1979), a Vietnam War epic that was inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1993). Released in 1979, the acclaimed film won a Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and two Academy Awards. Also that year, Coppola executive produced the hit The Black Stallion (1979). With George Lucas, Coppola executive produced Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980), directed by Akira Kurosawa, and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), directed by Paul Schrader and based on the life and writings of Yukio Mishima. Coppola also executive produced such films as The Escape Artist (1982), Hammett (1982) The Black Stallion Returns (1983), Barfly (1987), Wind (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), etc.
He helped to make a star of his nephew, Nicolas Cage. Personal tragedy hit in 1986 when his son Gio died in a boating accident. Francis Ford Coppola is one of America's most erratic, energetic and controversial filmmakers.- Director
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- Editor
An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding a job at Gaumont British Studios in 1927. He worked as tea boy, clapper boy, messenger, then cutting room assistant. By 1935, he had become chief editor of Gaumont British News until in 1939 when he began to edit feature films, notably for Anthony Asquith, Paul Czinner and Michael Powell. Amongst films he worked on were Pygmalion (1938), Major Barbara (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942).
By the end of the 1930s, Lean's reputation as an editor was very well established. In 1942, Noël Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war film In Which We Serve (1942). Shortly after, with the encouragement of Coward, Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and producer 'Anthony Havelock-Allan' launched a production company called Cineguild. For that firm Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Coward: the chronicle This Happy Breed (1944), the humorous ghost story Blithe Spirit (1945) and, most notably, the sentimental drama Brief Encounter (1945). Originally a box-office failure in England, "Brief Encounter" was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946), where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.
From Coward, Lean switched to Charles Dickens, directing two well-regarded adaptations: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The latter, starring Alec Guinness in his first major movie role, was criticized by some, however, for potential anti-Semitic inflections. The last two films made under the Cineguild banner were The Passionate Friends (1949), a romance from a novel by H.G. Wells, and the true crime story Madeleine (1950). Neither had a significant impact on critics or audiences.
The Cineguild partnership came to an end after a dispute between Lean and Neame. Lean's first post-Cineguild production was the aviation drama The Sound Barrier (1952), a great box-office success in England and his most spectacular movie so far. He followed with two sophisticated comedies based on theatrical plays: Hobson's Choice (1954) and the Anglo-American co-production Summertime (1955). Both were well received and "Hobson's Choice" won the Golden Bear at the 1954 Berlin film festival.
Lean's next movie was pivotal in his career, as it was the first of those grand-scale epics he would become renowned for. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was produced by Sam Spiegel from a novel by 'Pierre Boulle', adapted by blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. Shot in Ceylon under extremely difficult conditions, the film was an international success and triumphed at the Oscars, winning seven awards, most notably best film and director.
Lean and Spiegel followed with an even more ambitious film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), based on "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", the autobiography of T.E. Lawrence. Starring relative newcomer Peter O'Toole, this film was the first collaboration between Lean and writer Robert Bolt, cinematographer Freddie Young and composer Maurice Jarre. The shooting itself took place in Spain, Morocco and Jordan over a period of 20 months. Initial reviews were mixed and the film was trimmed down shortly after its world première and cut even more during a 1971 re-release. Like its predecessor, it won seven Oscars, once again including best film and director.
The same team of Lean, Bolt, Young and Jarre next worked on an adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel "Dr. Zhivago" for producer Carlo Ponti. Doctor Zhivago (1965) was shot in Spain and Finland, standing in for revolutionary Russia and, despite divided critics, was hugely successful, as was Jarre's musical score. The film won five Oscars out of ten nominations, but the statuettes for film and director went to The Sound of Music (1965).
Lean's next movie, the sentimental drama Ryan's Daughter (1970), did not reach the same heights. The original screenplay by Robert Bolt was produced by old associate Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Lean once again secured the collaboration of Freddie Young and Maurice Jarre. The shooting in Ireland lasted about a year, much longer than expected. The film won two Oscars; but, for the most part, critical reaction was tepid, sometimes downright derisive, and the general public didn't really respond to the movie.
This relative lack of success seems to have inhibited Lean's creativity for a while. But towards the end of the 1970s, he started to work again with Robert Bolt on an ambitious two-part movie about the Bounty mutiny. The project fell apart and was eventually recuperated by Dino De Laurentiis. Lean was then approached by producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin to adapt E.M. Forster's novel "A Passage to India", a book Lean had been interested in for more than 20 years. For the first time in his career; Lean wrote the adaptation alone, basing himself partly on Santha Rama Rau's stage version of the book. Lean also acted as his own editor. A Passage to India (1984) opened to mostly favourable reviews and performed quite well at the box-office. It was a strong Oscar contender, scoring 11 nominations. It settled for two wins, losing the trophy battle to Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984).
Lean spent the last few years of his life preparing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's meditative adventure novel "Nostromo". He also participated briefly in Richard Harris' restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia" in 1988. In 1990, Lean received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement award. He died of cancer on April 16, 1991 at age 83, shortly before the shooting of "Nostromo" was about to begin.
Lean was known on sets for his extreme perfectionism and autocratic behavior, an attitude that sometimes alienated his cast or crew. Though his cinematic approach, classic and refined, clearly belongs to a bygone era, his films have aged rather well and his influence can still be found in movies like The English Patient (1996) and Titanic (1997). In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 favorite British films of the 20th century. Five by David Lean appeared in the top 30, three of them in the top five.- Writer
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- Writer
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Guillermo del Toro was born October 9, 1964 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Raised by his Catholic grandmother, del Toro developed an interest in filmmaking in his early teens. Later, he learned about makeup and effects from the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist (1973)) and worked on making his own short films. At the age of 21, del Toro executive produced his first feature, Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1985). Del Toro spent almost 10 years as a makeup supervisor, and formed his own company, Necropia in the early 1980s. He also produced and directed Mexican television programs at this time, and taught film.
Del Toro got his first big break when Cronos (1992) won nine Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars), then went on to win the International Critics Week Prize at Cannes. Following this success, del Toro made his first Hollywood film, Mimic (1997), starring Mira Sorvino.
Del Toro had some unfortunate experiences working with a demanding Hollywood studio on Mimic (1997), and returned to Mexico to form his own production company, The Tequila Gang.
Next for del Toro, was The Devil's Backbone (2001), a Spanish Civil War ghost story. The film was hailed by critics and audiences alike, and del Toro decided to give Hollywood another try. In 2002, he directed the Wesley Snipes vampire sequel, Blade II (2002).
On a roll, Del Toro followed up Blade II (2002) with another successful comic-book inspired film, Hellboy (2004), starring one of Del Toro's favorite actors, Ron Perlman.
Del Toro is divorced, has a daughter and a son and lives in Los Angeles and Toronto.- Director
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The main part of his few movies were filmed in the quarter of a century in which he worked closely together with the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the German writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. His first films are all set in India and are very much influenced by the style of Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir. After this period, he filmed three stories in New York and then dedicated his work to the great works of the English literature which made him internationally famous. Examples of this period are The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984) by Henry James, Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980) by Jane Austen, Quartet (1981) by Jean Rhys or A Room with a View (1985) and Maurice (1987) by E.M. Forster.- Animation Department
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- Art Department
John Lounsbery was an American animator and animation director from Cincinnati, Ohio. He eventually became one of "Disney's Nine Old Men", a group of senior animators who were in charge of the Walt Disney Animation Studios from c. 1945 to 1977. Lounsbery died in 1976, with his death leading to the dissolution of the group. He was the first of the Nine to die, and also had the shortest lifespan among them.
Lounsbery was born in Ohio, but spend much of his childhood in Colorado. He attended the East Denver High School, then received art lessons at the Art Institute of Denver. He continued his art education in Los Angeles, taking lessons at the ArtCenter College of Design. The College was a private art school established in 1930, and initially only trained visual artists and designers. The curriculum later expanded to include lessons in photography and technical illustrations.
One of Lounsbery's college instructors arranged a job interview for him, as a prospective animator for the Disney studios. Lounsbery was hired in early July 1935. He was put to work as an uncredited assistant animator for the animated feature film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937).
Lounsbery quickly became one of Disney's "star animators", because he was considered unusually skilled as a draftsman. His first major assignment was animating two of the villains in "Pinocchio" (1940), the conman duo of J. Worthington Foulfellow and Gideon. He served as one of the main animators in a ballet-themed segment of "Fantasia" (1940), the "Dance of the Hours". He was tasked with animating one of the main dancers of the segment, Ben Ali Gator.
Lounsbery made his debut as a directing animator in the feature film "Song of the South" (1946), an adaptation of the "Uncle Remus" stories of Joel Chandler Harris. His subsequent credits as a directing animator included the feature films "Fun and Fancy Free" (1947)., "Melody Time" (1948), "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad" (1949), "Cinderella"" (1950), "Alice in Wonderland" (1951), "Peter Pan" (1953), "Lady and the Tramp" (1955), "Sleeping Beauty" (1959), "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961), "The Sword in the Stone" (1963), "The Jungle Book" (1967), "The Aristocats" (1970), and "Robin Hood" (1973). He was often tasked with animating key supporting characters of these films. His most memorable work as an animator included animating the allied kings Huber and Stefan in "Sleeping Beauty", the villainous tiger Shere Khah in "The Jungle Book", and the heroic fox Robin Hood in "Robin Hood".
Lounsbery co-directed the anthology feature film "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" (1977), which was released a year following his death. It was his debut as a director. In the film, he was also the main animator for the depressed donkey Eeyore. At the time of his death in 1976, Lounsbery was working in the upcoming feature film "The Rescuers" (1977). He was one of the three credited directors of the film, though he did live not long enough to complete it.
On February 13, 1976, Lounsbery suffered a sudden heart attack while working. He died shortly after, at the age of 64. He died about a month before his 65th birthday. At the time, most of the other "Nine Old Men" were considering retirement and a new generation of animators were in training. Lounsbery was buried at the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.
Lounsbery was posthumously awarded with a "Winsor McCay Award" in 1986. and was named a "Disney Legend" in 1989. His work is still highly regarded by fans of classic animation, though he is possibly the least famous among "Disney's Nine Old Men". Relatively little is known about Lounsbery's personal life.- Actor
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Keegan-Michael Key was born in Southfield, Michigan and raised in Detroit. He was adopted as a child by a black father and a white mother. In 1989, he graduated from Shrine Catholic High School in Royal Oak, Michigan. Key attended the University of Detroit Mercy as an undergraduate and earned his Master of Fine Arts in Theater at Pennsylvania State University. While at The University of Detroit Mercy, he was a brother of Phi Kappa Theta.- Director
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Jordan Peele is an Oscar- and Emmy-winning director, writer, actor, producer, and founder of Monkeypaw Productions. Peele's first feature film, "Get Out," was a critically acclaimed blockbuster, recognized with four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. The film would earn Peele the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. His second feature, "Us," broke numerous box-office records, becoming the biggest opening for an R-rated original film in history when released in March of 2019 to widespread critical praise. Peele's third feature, the original horror epic, "Nope," opened in the summer of 2022 to rave reviews, the No. 1 slot at the box office, and once again becoming a widely discussed cultural phenomenon. Five years in the making, Peele produced and co-wrote Henry Selick's stop-motion animated feature, "Wendell & Wild," to which he also lent his voice as one of the title characters. Under the Monkeypaw banner, Peele co-wrote and produced Nia DaCosta's "Candyman" which made history as the first film helmed by a Black woman director to open at No. 1 at the box office. He also produced Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," which earned a nomination for Best Picture and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He has also served as executive producer for numerous television series, including "Hunters" (Amazon), "Lovecraft Country" (HBO), and "The Twilight Zone" (CBS). Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Peele was a celebrated comedian who was the co-star and co-creator of "Key & Peele" on Comedy Central.- Director
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John Hillcoat was born on 14 August 1961 in Queensland, Australia. He is a director and producer, known for The Proposition (2005), The Road (2009) and Lawless (2012).- Writer
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- Script and Continuity Department
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.
While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.
In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.
Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.- Producer
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- Actor
Mike Judge is an American actor, animator, film director, screenwriter, and television producer.
In 1962, Judge was born in Guayaquil, the largest city of Ecuador and the country's main port. His parents were expatriate Americans. His father was archaeologist William James Judge and his mother was librarian Margaret Yvonne Blue. At the time of Mike's birth, William Judge was working for a non-profit organization which promoted agricultural development in Ecuador.
Around 1969, the Judge family returned to the United States, and settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mike spend most of his school years in Albuquerque. He received his secondary education at St. Pius X High School, a private, Roman Catholic high school located in Albuquerque. The school was named after Pope Pius X (1835-1914, term 1903-1914), who is venerated as a saint,
Following his graduation from high school, Judge enrolled at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The UCSD is a public land-grant research university, located in San Diego, California. Judge was interested in a science career, and followed science studies. In 1985, Judge graduated with a Bachelor of Science in physics. From 1985 to 1987, Judge held various jobs relating to either physics or mechanical engineering. He was dissatisfied with his work life, because he found that these jobs were boring.
In 1987, Judge was hired by Parallax Graphics, a startup video card company. Its headquarters were located in Santa Clara, California. Santa Clara is located at the center of Silicon Valley, and houses the headquarters of several high-tech companies. Parallax only had about 40 employees. Judge quit following only 3 months of work, because he disliked the company's corporate culture and his co-workers. In later interviews, Judge claimed that his co-workers reminded him of the Stepford Wives. His negative experiences contributed to his unflattering portrayal of Silicon Valley in his television career.
Judge next attempted to start a new career as a musician, serving as bass player in a blues band. For a couple of years, Judge was part of a music group headed by blues guitarist Anson Funderburgh (1954-). In the early 1990s, Judge worked alongside singer and drummer Doyle Bramhall (1949-2011). Bramhall was a well-known figure in the Texas music scene. During his musical career, Judge was taking graduate math classes at the University of Texas at Dallas.
In 1989, Judge was shown animation cels on display, and became fascinated with animation. Judge purchased a Bolex 16 mm film camera, and started working on his own animated short films. The amateur animator worked from his home at the time, located in Richardson, Texas. His short films were initially on display in local animation festivals.
In 1991, Judge developed "Milton", a series of short films satirizing the typical life of office workers. Judge voiced all the characters. The films were acquired by Comedy Central, and showcased Judge's talents to a wider audience. In 1992, Judge created the animated short "Frog Baseball", depicting two cruel and stupid teenagers. The short film was featured in the television series "Liquid Television" (1991-1995), which showcased works by independent animators. The network MTV was sufficiently impressed with the short film to order an animated television series featuring its main characters.
Judge's first work as a television producer was the animated series "Beavis and Butt-Head" (1993-1997), a satirical, scathing commentary on modern society. Besides producing the series, Judge voiced the two protagonists. He also wrote and directed most of its episodes. The series was considered quite controversial in its own era, but was commercially successful. In its initial incarnation, it lasted for 7 seasons, and 200 episodes. Judge gave permission for the use of supporting character Daria Morgendorffer in the spin-off series "Daria" (1997-2002), which was also successful. Judge was otherwise not involved in the production of the spin-off.
In 1997, Judge directed the animated feature film "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America". It featured the protagonists in a road trip across the United States. It earned about 63 million dollars in the North American box office, and was critically well-received as a satire of youth culture.
Judge's next television series was the animated sitcom "King of the Hill" (1997-2010), which was broadcast by the Fox Broadcasting Company. For this series, Judge's partner and co-creator was the experienced comedy writer Greg Daniels (1963-). Daniels was previously a screenwriter on the popular animated sitcom "The Simpsons". Daniels had written several episodes in seasons 5 to 7 (1993-1996), and some of them were considered among the highlights of the series. For "King of the Hill", the duo of creators decided to maintain a relatively realistic depiction of modern life. Much of the humor derived from depicting the frustrations and absurdities of an otherwise mundane existence. "King of the Hill" was both a critical and commercial hit, and commercial hit. It lasted for 13 seasons and 259 episodes.
In the late 1990s, Judge wrote and directed the live-action film "Office Space" (1999). It was loosely based in his own "Milton" series of animated short films,, but featured additional characters. The film under-performed at the box office, only earning about 12 million dollars from its worldwide release. However the film sold surprisingly well in the home video market, and became a cult hit.
In 2003, Judge and fellow animator Don Hertzfeldt (1976-) co-founded the annual film festival "The Animation Show". It showcased animated short films from various eras, with its initial goal being to cover "everything from forgotten classics to the very latest in computer animation". In its first year, the touring festival visited over 200 movie theaters in North America.
Judge's third feature film was the dystopian science fiction comedy "Idiocracy" (2006). It depicted a soldier from the early 21st century who spends 500 years in suspended animation. He awakes in the 26th century, in a future world which has fully embraced anti-intellectualism. The film never received a wide theatrical release, and only earned 495,000 dollars at the box office. However it sold very well in the home video market, and became a cult film.
In 2008, Fox decided to cancel "King of the Hill" despite the series' decent ratings. At the time it was the 105th most watched series on American television. The final group of episodes were broadcast over the following 2 years.
In 2009, Judge directed his fourth (and so far last) feature film. It was the live-action comedy film "Extract". It features a successful flavoring-extracts company who has to deal with a lawsuit by an injured employee, with the schemes of a female con-artist, and with the sexual frustration and impaired judgment of its owners. The film earned about 11 million dollars at the box office, and was critically well-received.
In 2009, Judge developed his third television series, the animated comedy "The Goode Family" (2009) for ABC. Compared to "King of the Hill", this series contained more political satire. The series failed to find an audience, and some critics considered that its humor more properly belonged in the 1990s than the 2000s. It only lasted 1 series and 13 episodes, canceled by ABC due to its low ratings. It was the first series created by Judge to be considered a failure.
In 2011, "Beavis and Butt-Head" was revived for another season, with Judge as a producer and an updated setting. The 8th season only lasted for 2 months (October 27-December 29, 2011) and 2011. The opening audience attracted an audience of 3,3 million viewers. Ratings fell during the season, and the final episode only had 900,000 viewers. MTV decided not to order a 9th season.
Judge next developed his fourth television series, the live-action comedy "Silicon Valley" (2014-2019). The original premise was to focus on the competitive business environment of the Silicon Valley. Following the first season's success, "Silicon Valley" continued in the long-term. The series lasted for 6 seasons and 53 episodes. The series received critical acclaim for its "hilarious" take on the business world and modern technology, and was nominated for several awards. Conversely, a number of critics felt that a number of its characters were stereotypical nerds, and lacked proper character development.
While "Silicon Valley" was still ongoing, Judge developed his fifth television series. It was the animated documentary series "Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus" (2017-2018), which focused on the oral history of professional musicians and their associated musical genres. It presented anecdotes concerning the featured musicians, "as told by their families, band-mates, and close associates". The series lasted 2 seasons and 16 episodes .The series was critically acclaimed, but never attracted a large audience.
In its relatively short run, this series featured biographies of (in order of presentation): Johnny Paycheck (1938-2003), Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-), George Jones (1931-2013), Tammy Wynette (1942-1998), Billy Joe Shaver (1939-2020), Waylon Jennings (1937-2002), Blaze Foley (1949-1989), George Clinton (1941-), Rick James (1948-2004), Bootsy Collins (1951-), James Brown (1933-2006), Morris Day (1957-), and Betty Davis (1945-).
In 2021, Judge was 58-years-old. He has never fully retired, though he has yet to make a television comeback. His professional career in television has lasted 30 years so far, and he has gained a reputation for innovative series concepts.- Writer
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Jeff Baena was born on 29 June 1977 in Miami, Florida, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for The Little Hours (2017), Life After Beth (2014) and Joshy (2016). He has been married to Aubrey Plaza since 7 May 2021.- Director
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Scott Stewart is a writer, director, and producer of both film and television. He most recently directed and executive produced the pilot episode of the young-adult supernatural drama series "Siren" which premiered in March, 2018 on Freeform to critical and ratings success and was renewed for an extended second season.
Previously, Stewart wrote and directed "Christmas" starring Seth Green as part of the horror-comedy anthology feature film "Holidays" for XYZ Films which premiered as an opening night selection at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. In 2014, Stewart directed the pilot episode and served as executive producer on "Dominion", a supernatural action television series for the Syfy Channel based on Stewart's own 2010 Sony/Screen Gems hit feature film "Legion".
In 2013, Stewart wrote and directed the supernatural thriller "Dark Skies" starring Keri Russell and JK Simmons for producer Jason Blum ("Get Out", "Split", "Insidious.") Also in 2013, Stewart directed and executive produced the two-hour pilot of "Defiance", an innovative multi-platform sci-fi television series for Universal Cable Productions and the Syfy Channel. The show premiered to record ratings for the network and ran for three seasons.
In 2011, Stewart directed the film adaptation of the Tokyopop comic book "Priest" for Sony/Screen Gems, starring Paul Bettany, Maggie Q, and Christopher Plummer for producers Mike DeLuca ("The Social Network", "Moneyball", "Fifty Shades of Grey") and Josh Donen ("Gone Girl", "House of Cards.") In 2010, Stewart co-wrote and directed the hit Sony/Screen Gems supernatural thriller "Legion" starring Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, Kate Walsh, and Lucas Black. Stewart also co-wrote the comic book prequel "Legion: Prophets" for IDW Publishing.
An accomplished visual effects artist and technologist, Stewart co-founded the well-regarded visual effects company, The Orphanage, which created visual effects for more than two dozen major films including such blockbusters as "Iron Man", "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", "Blade Runner: the Final Cut", "Sin City", "The Day After Tomorrow", "The Host", and "Hellboy".
Before co-founding The Orphanage, Stewart was a visual effects artist at George Lucas' Industrial Light + Magic where he created visual effects for numerous blockbuster films, including "Star Wars - Episode One: The Phantom Menace" and "Lost World: Jurassic Park." He graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1991 with a degree in Motion Picture Production. He grew up in Marin County, California.- Writer
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Born in his ancestral palazzo, situated in the same Milanese square as both the opera house La Scala and the Milan Cathedral, Luchino Visconti (1906 - 1976) was raised under the auspices of aristocratic privilege, theater and Catholicism. This triangulation of monuments would create an equally titanic filmmaker whose work remained stylistically sui generis through arguably the most impressive decades of 20th century filmmaking. The quietude of La Terra Trema (1948) is managed with an operatic virtuosity, and the baroque period pieces-for which he is best known today-clearly point to a noble upbringing. However, there is also a Gothic character to Visconti-embodied in the spired cathedral that overshadowed his childhood-that has remained largely unsung. The relationship between the Visconti family and Gothic architecture stretches back to the Medieval Era. In 1386, Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti envisioned a cathedral in the heart of Milan, though it was fated to remain under construction for almost half a millennium until Napoleon ordered its completion in the 19th century. Just as his ancestor brought Northern Gothic architecture to Italy, so, in 1943, did Luchino introduce the groundbreaking cinematic genre of Italian neorealism to the peninsula. Doing away with sets, neorealist cinema was set in the raw environment of postwar Italy. In one sense anti-architectural in its desire to transcend the bonds of interior space, this same ambition is what makes the style a perfect cinematic analog to the Gothic. The Gothic is an architecture of exteriority: Throwing ceilings to the sky and opening walls onto the outside with large windows, the Gothic presents light as the manifestation of divinity within a place of worship. The mysticism of light, dating back to the pseudo-Dionysian theology of Abbot Suger of St. Denis Cathedral, translates well to the medium of light that is the cinema. In any Visconti work, lighting is intimately connected to set design: It is often seen in the gleam of curtains, the radiance of starlight or the glow of Milanese fog, where the director carries the religiosity of Gothic architecture into his realism. Visconti's religion (or should we say religions? For he was also a Marxist) adds an ethical weight, powerful and challenging, to his works. The term decadence, often associated with Visconti, only attains meaning through being in excess of contemporary mores. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Italian communists could accept Visconti's homosexuality, and a resultant displaced angst is plainly worn by his protagonists-monumental individuals who bear the full weight of their social milieus. While neorealism has come to be packaged with its own mythology-a new cinema for a liberated nation, the idea of a new "Italian" style-re-centering our historical gaze on the Gothic Visconti allows one's imagination to spread across a much larger plane of geography and time. From his cinematic apprenticeship with Jean Renoir in France-the very cradle of Gothic architecture-to his German trilogy, Visconti's style has always been one of cosmopolitan effort. This international flavor also matches the deeper etymological referent of the Gothic-the Goths, those barbarian invaders who toppled the Roman Empire. Among Visconti's formal signatures are many borrowings from foreign directors, including the particularly pronounced influence of Jean Renoir, Josef Von Sternberg and Elia Kazan. Global in scope, timeless in influence and architectural in spirit: This is the legacy of Luchino Visconti.- Writer
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Lisa Lutz grew up in Southern California. After graduating high school, she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, University of Leeds in England and San Francisco State University, although she still does not have a bachelor's degree.
Lisa spent most of the 1990s hopping from a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting a mob comedy called Plan B. After it was made in 2000, Lisa vowed she would never write another screenplay.
She began working on The Spellman Files in January of 2004. In the fall of that year, she drove across the country and moved into a 200-year-old house in the town of Westernville, New York (pop. 300). It was there Lisa shoveled snow and wrote the bulk of her first novel. Though she's not on the lam, Lisa has not had a permanent residence in over two years. She's calling Seattle home, for now.- Producer
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Greg Yaitanes is a visionary, Emmy-winning director and producer known for his ability to build new worlds through technical ingenuity while preserving his refined artistic aesthetic on-screen.
Yaitanes currently serves as Executive Producer and Director on Apple TV+'s "Presumed Innocent," the upcoming limited series from David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot and Warner Bros. TV, which is currently in production. The series, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga, is based upon Scott Turow's 1987 courtroom thriller and was turned into a 1990 feature starring Harrison Ford.
Yaitanes served as the Co-Executive producer of HBO's "Game of Thrones" prequel, "House of the Dragon," for which he also directed three episodes including the critically acclaimed season finale. The final episode "The Black Queen" drew in HBO's largest global audience, surpassing the international viewership of "Game of Thrones." The series won Best Drama Series at the 2023 Golden Globes and was nominated for Best Drama Series at this year's Critics Choice Awards.
Prior to that, Yaitanes Executive Produced and Directed "Castle Rock" for J.J. Abrams and Stephen King, as well as for Jordan Peele's "The Twilight Zone." Additionally, Yaitanes served as Showrunner, Executive Producer, and sole director for Netflix's "Manhunt: Unabomber", Cinemax's revered series "Quarry" as well as the rave-reviewed cult favorite "Banshee." It was his work on the global phenomenon "House" that earned him a Primetime Emmy® Award in 2008 for 'Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series.' Between "House" and "Banshee," Greg has led his team to 29 Emmy nominations and six wins. His 30-year career includes a myriad of acclaimed episodes for "The Old Man", "Snowfall", "Grey's Anatomy", "Genius: Picasso" "Lost" and the pilot episode of "Bones" which ran for 13 seasons.
Yaitanes is also known for his technological foresight and is a respected name in Silicon Valley. An early angel investor in Twitter, Square, and Pinterest, Greg continues to advise, invest and give talks around the world on his directorial process, the symbiosis of technology & storytelling and his passion for efficiency. In 2015 Yaitanes co-founded and launched the popular clean cosmetics brand Kosas.
Yaitanes currently resides in Los Angeles with his three kids; Van, Leo, and Electra and his fiancé Eve.- Actress
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Victoria Redel is known for Loverboy (2005) and World Gone Water (2015).- Producer
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Steve Franke is known for Adventures of Bailey: A Night in Cowtown (2013), Serum (2006) and Adventures of Bailey: The Lost Puppy (2010).- Producer
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- Writer
- Animation Department
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Burny Mattinson's helmed the Academy Award-nominated 1983 animated featurette "Mickey's Christmas Carol." In 1986, wrote, produced and directed "The Great Mouse Detective." Mattinson's worked on"Sleeping Beauty," "101 Dalmatians," "The Sword in the Stone," "The Jungle Book," "The Aristocats" and "The Rescuers." He was a key story team member on Disney's contemporary classics: "Aladdin," "Beauty & the Beast," "The Lion King, "Pocahontas," "Mulan," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Tarzan." Mattinson joined Disney in 1953 at age 18 without formal art training, and started work as an in-betweener for "Lady and the Tramp" less than 6 months later.- Animation Department
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David Michener was born on 5 November 1932 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a writer, known for The Great Mouse Detective (1986), Oliver & Company (1988) and Robin Hood (1973). He was married to Donna Roberta Burke. He died on 15 February 2018 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Animation Department
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Ken Anderson was born on 17 March 1909 in Seattle, Washington, USA. He was a writer, known for Cinderella (1950), Robin Hood (1973) and The Aristocats (1970). He was married to Polly Anderson. He died on 13 December 1993 in La Cañada Flintridge, California, USA.- Margery Sharp was born on 25 January 1905 in Wiltshire, England, UK. She was a writer, known for The Rescuers (1977), The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and The Forbidden Street (1949). She was married to Geoffrey Lloyd Castle. She died on 14 March 1991 in Suffolk, England, UK.
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- Animation Department
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Larry Clemmons was born on 25 November 1906 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Rescuers (1977), The Aristocats (1970) and The Jungle Book (1967). He was married to Carletta (Cassie) Clarinda Hatch. He died on 22 July 1988 in Friday Harbor, Washington, USA.- Animation Department
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Frank Thomas was born on 5 September 1912 in Santa Monica, California, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004) and The Aristocats (1970). He was married to Jeanette A. Thomas. He died on 8 September 2004 in La Cañada Flintridge, California, USA.- Writer
- Animation Department
- Art Department
Vance Gerry was born on 21 August 1929 in Pasadena, California, USA. He was a writer, known for The Great Mouse Detective (1986), Hercules (1997) and Oliver & Company (1988). He was married to Mary. He died on 5 March 2005 in Pasadena, California, USA.- Writer
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Ted Berman was born on 17 December 1919 in East Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The Fox and the Hound (1981), The Black Cauldron (1985) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). He was married to Jacqueline. He died on 15 July 2001 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Art Department
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- Animation Department
Fred Lucky was born on 25 January 1938 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was a writer, known for No Way Out (1987), Rambo III (1988) and The Black Hole (1979). He was married to Shelly ?. He died on 8 October 1999 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.- Actor
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Nick Kroll is a stand-up comedian, actor, director, writer, producer, voice artist, and comedian. He is known for "Big Mouth (2017)," "The Oh, Hello Show (2008)," portraying Rodney Ruxin in "The League (2009)," and for creating and starring in "Kroll Show (2013)." As a film actor, Kroll has had supporting roles in "I Love You, Man (2009)," "Date Night (2010)," "Get Him to the Greek (2010)," and "Dinner for Schmucks (2010)," as well as more prominent roles in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2011)," "Sausage Party (2016)," "Loving (2016)," "Sing (2016)," "Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)," "The House (2017)," "Uncle Drew (2018)," and "Operation Finale (2018)." He portrayed the role of Nick in "Cavemen (2007)."- Director
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Delbert Mann, the Oscar-winning film director, was born Delbert Martin Mann Jr. in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1920. His father moved the family to Nashville, Tennesse, after taking a teaching position at Scarritt College. The young Mann graduated from Vanderbilt University, where he met his future wife, Ann Caroline Gillespie. He developed a lifelong friendship with Fred Coe, whom he met at the Nashville Community Playhouse, that would prove critical in his professional life.
After his 1941 graduation from Vanderbilt, Mann joined the Army and was assigned to the Air Corps, eventually becoming a pilot with the 8th Air Force. As a B-24 pilot with the "Mighty Eighth," Mann flew 35 bombing missions in the European Theater of Operations. After being demobilized at the end of the war, his interest changed to another type of theater, and he attended the Yale Drama School. From Yale he moved on to a directing job with the Town Theatre of Columbia, South Carolina.
His old friend Fred Coe, a producer at NBC, offered Mann the opportunity to direct live television drama on the network's The Philco Television Playhouse (1948). Mann accepted the job offer and moved to New York in 1949. For NBC he directed many dramas for the "Philco Playhouse," which later alternated its broadcasting weeks on the network with the Goodyear Playhouse (1951) and Producers' Showcase (1954) (television programs in the early days typically had one major commercial sponsor; thus, many programs from the early days bore the name of that primary sponsor). Mann directed episodes for all three showcases, including "October Story" with Julie Harris and Leslie Nielsen, "Middle of the Night" with Eva Marie Saint and E.G. Marshall, a remake of The Petrified Forest (1936) with the inevitable Humphrey Bogart (who created the role of Duke Mantee on the Broadway stage and played it in the classic 1935 film), and even two productions of William Shakespeare's "Othello" (one of which featured the unlikely Walter Matthau as Iago!).
Mann was one of the best-known graduates of "The Golden Age of Television," when live original drama was a staple of network TV. Other showcases he worked for included NBC Repertory Theatre (1949), Ford Star Jubilee (1955) and Playwrights '56 (1955). In 1953 he directed a live teleplay written by another WWII vet, Paddy Chayefsky. The episode of "Goodyear Television Playhouse" starring another vet, the up-and-coming Method actor Rod Steiger, as a lonely butcher named "Marty."
Delbert Mann's name will always be linked to the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that was "Marty," but it was as a film, not as television program, that Chayevsky's 1953 script became legendary, the first blockbuster hit of independent cinema. However, Mann's first recognition from the culture industry didn't come from Chayevsky's "Marty," either on television or film, but from Thornton Wilder's theatrical warhorse about a small burg in New Hampshire, "Our Town."
In 1954, Mann won a Best Director Emmy nomination for the "Producers' Showcase" episode "Our Town," a musical adaptation featuring the young Paul Newman and the singing talents of swinging Frank Sinatra. Ironically, the TV play of "Marty," considered the summit of TV's Golden Age in retrospect, went unrecognized during the nascent industry's awards season, though it did receive an excellent buzz via word of mouth. (The live "Marty" was captured via kinescope, a method of reproduction that involved shooting a 16-mm copy of the broadcast off of a TV monitor for rebroadcast to the West Coast in the days before coast-to-coast TV hookups, let along videotape; such programs were seldom rebroadcast after the initial showing due to the poor quality of the 'scope.) That situation would change once "Marty" moved from New York to Hollywood.
It's said that superstar Burt Lancaster and his producing partner Ben Hecht were looking for a property to generate a tax write-off for their successful indie production company, Hecht-Lancaster. That property was Marty, shot in B+W in the standard Academy ratio of 4:3 in an era when the blockbuster, like Cecil B. DeMIlle's epic remake of "The Ten Commandments," shot in color in the wide-screen processes of CinemaScope, Cinerama and VistaVision, were all the rage. (The box office gross of the 1956 "Ten Commandments," if adjusted for inflation, would rival the grosses generated by the top block busters of the present era.) Color, widescreens and spectacle were considered to be the necessary ingredients to get people out of the house where they were planted in front of the TV and back into the theaters. And here was a low-budget, B+W film with no production values and no stars based on a TV play that had appeared free on TV (Hollywood's great enemy) just two years before!
Remaking "Marty" seemed an honorable way to generate a tax-write off, so the story goes, while associating the company with quality, but Hecht-Lancaster refused to spend much money on it. The budget was limited to just under $350,000. (It's said that "Marty" was the first Oscar-winning film in which the advertising costs exceeded the budget.) Rod Steiger, who did not want to be bound contractually to Hecht-Lancaster, refused to reprise the eponymous title role, so it was turned over to Burt Lancaster's "From Here to Eternity" co-star, 'Ernest Borginine' . Having assayed Fatso Judson and other screen heavies in his brief cinema career, Borgnine had never played a sympathetic supporting character, let alone a lead, on film before.
Possibly due to its unpromising prospects, Burt Lancaster didn't bother putting his name on the picture as a producer, leaving that honor (and the Oscar that lay in "Marty's future) to Hecht. No wonder the success of "Marty" caught everyone flat-footed! It's perhaps the supreme case in Hollywood's checkered flirtation with "quality" cinema that quality not only won out, but more importantly, paid off (and paid off handsomely at that!).
The movie "Marty" was a critical success before it was a commercial success. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955, it was the first American film to win the Golden Palm (an award which, in the French manner, is shared by its director). In release, the film returned $3 million in rentals ($21 million in 2005 dollars), which was a considerable amount in the mid-1950s. More importantly for Hecht-Lancaster, its low-budget made "Marty" one of the most profitable movies ever made.
The critical recognition and boffo box office made "Marty" a sleeper at the 1956 Academy Awards, at which Mann won the Oscar as Best Director of 1955 and Chayevsky copped the Best Adapted Screenplay trophy. In addition to the original "auteurs," Ernest Borgnine won the Best Actor Oscar and Harold Hecht picked up the gong for Best Picture. Betsy Blair and Joe Mantell also received nominations in Best Supporting Acting categories, and on the technical side, "Marty" was nominated for Best B+W Cinematography (Joseph LaShelle) and Best B+W Art Direction-Set Decoration ( Ted Haworth, Walter M. Simonds, Robert Priestley). Until Sam Mendes duplicated the feat in 2000, Mann was the only director to win an Oscar for his first film.
Though he could not know it then, "Marty" was the highpoint of Mann's career. While Chayevsky went on to win two more Oscars, Mann never won another Oscar nomination, though he did pick up two more Emmy nominations in 1972 and 1980 during his productive career. More significantly, Delbert Mann had the respect of his peers: in addition to his three subsequent Directors Guild of America nominations to go along with his win for "Marty," the DGA honored him with its Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award in 1997 and an Honorary Life Membership in 2002.- Writer
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Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in London on June 10, 1911, the son of a career diplomat and serial philanderer whose indiscretions resulted in his being cashiered by the Foreign Office. As a member of the lower upper-middle class in the inter-war period, the young Rattigan received a first-rate education at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford. His was a privileged, intellectual background that is reflected in his plays. For a decade after the Second World War, he was one of England's leading playwrights, but the eruption of the "kitchen-sink" school of English drama in the mid-1950s scuttled his critical reputation.
Rattigan achieved his first success as a playwright at age 25 with the light comedy "French Without Tears" (1936), which was a smash in the West End. Determined to do more serious work, he wrote the satirical social drama "After the Dance" in 1939, which skewered the failure of the class of "Bright Young Things" to prevent another war. The advent of World War II truncated the play's run, but Rattigan would continue to taste sweet success for a full generation, alternating between comedies and dramas.
In the post-war period, he established himself as a major English dramatist with "The Winslow Boy", "The Browning Version", "The Deep Blue Sea", and "Separate Tables", all of which were made into successful motion pictures. A Rattigan play displayed keen craftsmanship and finely-structured plots; emotion was hidden in the best English middle-class tradition, but was lurking in the depths. The typical Rattigan play was a sympathetic, witty study of middle-class people in emotional distress. There was often a love triangle or a general conflict in which decent people found themselves embroiled. These characters sublimated their emotions and passions; the psychic cost of repression was a focus and theme of Rattigan's work.
Rattigan's themes were personal: the illogicality of love; the conflict between idealized love and love as realized in the here and now; the pain of lost promise; and the defeat of potential greatness by human weakness. The themes and leitmotifs in Rattigan's plays were found beneath the surface; nothing was worn on the sleeve. They were elucidated by the playwright's craft, through a well-constructed story and skillfully-observed characters.
According to Rattigan's biographer Geoffrey Wansell, he had learned how to mask his feelings from his father, whose multiple love affairs, carried on in secret behind his wife's back, appalled his son. Also, Terence was a homosexual in an era rife with anti-gay sentiment; the persecution of those suffering from what was once termed "inversion" was all too real.
Rattigan lived behind a mask (he was very discreet about his own same-sex affairs), as did the characters in his plays. Emotions were buried lest their display cause even more pain, or scandal. Wansell believes that his reticence stemmed from a deeply-rooted aversion to emotional engagement. "Behind the apparently carefree mask lived a man crying out to be loved and appreciated," Wansell wrote, "but a man who was also incapable of demonstrating that need."
For a run of almost five straight years in the 1940s, Rattigan had plays appearing simultaneously on the boards of three adjacent West End theaters. In 1956 the English stage was revolutionized by John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," in which emotions were (in the parlance of a later generation) allowed to "all hang out." Overnight, Rattigan's dreams of emotional repression were deemed old-fashioned. Dramatists, directors, and actors who stuck with the old "well-crafted", more subtle paradigm of drama were also deemed "old-fashioned" and suffered a professional eclipse. (Laurence Olivier, who had starred in Rattigan plays and movies made from his work, kept himself relevant by offering himself to Osborne, who crafted "The Entertainer" for him. It would be many years before his contemporaries John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson would make it out of the woods, outside of Shakespeare, in terms of contemporary drama. They appeared together in Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land" 20 years after the changing of the guard).
"Look Back in Anger" was a cultural broadside against everything the Establishment represented, and Rattigan was very much part of that Establishment. In the introduction to his collected plays, published in 1959, Rattigan wrote of an archetypal playgoer, "Aunt Edna," whom he characterized as a "nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maiden lady" to whom playwrights had to be responsive as she was the person who spent her money to go to the theater. What Rattigan was trying to say is that the theater must be responsive to its audience; to the new Turks, many of whom would later thrive in non-commercial, state-subsidized theater. Rattigan was a shameless old fart, pandering to the very class of people, the Aunt Ednas and the Miss Grundys, whom they despised and whose tastes, and the drama and comedies written to suit those tastes, debased the theater as an art form.
Rattigan's reputation declined and, overnight, his plays were derided by the critics. A very sensitive man who had a terrible fear of failure, Rattigan's confidence declined along with his critical reputation. He retaliated the new kitchen-sink school in interviews and via dialogue in his new plays, with the result that he underscored the new generation's contempt of him. Rattigan transformed himself into a caricature of the kind of playwright the new English theater was rebelling against: conservative, staid, old-fashioned, valuing craft above feeling, with no empathy for the modern world or for the majority of Britons. To them, he represented the complacency of a moribund Tory- and toff-dominated Britain that was no longer relevant after the Suez debacle of 1956.
Truthfully, among the post-1956 Rattigan plays are some of his finest work, including "Ross," "Man and Boy," and "Cause Celebre," but it didn't matter to the critics: he was considered hopelessly passé. Like the post- "The Night of the Iguana" Tennessee Williams, he was cruelly discarded as a contemporary artist of any relevance. He was a phantom of a past that vanished with Britain's world-power status after Suez.
Rattigan was first diagnosed with leukemia in 1962; it went into remission in 1964, but he suffered a relapse in 1968. Despising the "Mod" Britain of the 1960s, he moved to Bermuda. In that decade he supported himself by writing screenplays, and for a while he enjoyed the status as the world's highest-paid screenwriter. He was knighted in 1972 and moved back to England. His critical reputation saw a minor revival shortly before his death from cancer in 1977, and a major revival in the early 21st century after Karel Reisz staged a revival of "The Deep Blue Sea." Although he was never as successful in the United States as he was in Britain, Rattigan is increasingly being viewed in his homeland as one of the 20th century's finest playwrights.- Writer
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John Gay was born on 1 April 1924 in Whittier, California, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Separate Tables (1958), Lux Video Theatre (1950) and Run Silent Run Deep (1958). He was married to Barbara (Bobbie) Elizabeth Meyer. He died on 4 February 2017 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Writer
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Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, John Michael Hayes began his writing career as a newspaper reporter. Following service with the US Army during WWII, he moved to California where he wrote for such radio dramas as Sam Spade and Inner Sanctum. Moving to film in 1952, he has amassed credits which span over 40 years and include such enduring titles as Rear Window (1954) and Peyton Place (1957). For the last several years, Mr. Hayes has taught film writing to a new generation of artists at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, but has now (2000) retired.- Visual Effects
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When it comes to motion-picture special effects, there is only one name that personifies movie magic: Ray Harryhausen. From his debut films with George Pal to his final film, Harryhausen imbued magic and visual strength to motion-picture special effects as no other technician has, before or since.
Born in Los Angeles, the signature event in Harryhausen's life was when he saw King Kong (1933). So awed was the 13-year-old Harryhausen that he began researching the film's effects work, ultimately learning all he could about Willis H. O'Brien and stop-motion photography--he even contacted O'Brien and showed an allosaur short he made, which caused O'Brien to quip to his wife, "You realize you're encouraging my competition, don't you?" Harryhausen tried to make a stop-motion epic titled "Evolution," but the time required to make it resulted in it being cut short. The footage he completed--of a lumbering apatosaurus attacked by a belligerent allosaurus--made excellent use as a demo reel, and as a result, Harryhausen's first film job came with George Pal, working on the Puppetoon shorts for Paramount. A stint in the army utilized Harryhausen's animation skills for training films.
After World War II, Harryhausen acquired over 1,000 feet of unused military film and made a series of Puppetoon-flavored fairy tale shorts, which helped him land a job with Willis H. O'Brien and Marcel Delgado on Mighty Joe Young (1949). Although O'Brien received credit for it, 85% of the actual animation was done by Harryhausen. His real breakthrough, however, came when he was hired to do the special effects for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The film's $200,000 budget meant that Harryhausen was forced to improvise to get the kinds of quality effects he wanted, and to that end, he learned a technique called split-screen (rear projection on overlapping miniature screens) to insert dinosaurs and other fantastic beasts into real-world backgrounds. The result was eventually picked up for release by Warner Bros. and was one of the most influential sci-fi films of the 1950s.
From there, Harryhausen went over to Columbia and teamed with producer Charles H. Schneer, which became synonymous among sci-fi and fantasy film aficionados with top-notch special-effects work during the remainder of their respective careers. After three sci-fi monster films and work with Willis O'Brien on an Irwin Allen documentary, Harryhausen did the effects work for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), his first split-screen film shot entirely in color, which was highlighted by Harryhausen's mythological monsters interacting with Kathryn Grant, Torin Thatcher's flavorful performance as the villain, and the rousing score of Bernard Herrmann.
Because Harryhausen worked alone on his stop-motion animation sequences, the filming of these could often take as long as two years, the most famous example of the kind of patience required being the exciting skeleton sword fight sequence in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) (his most popular film), in which Harryhausen often shot no more than 13 frames of film (just over one-half second of elapsed time) per day.
The 1960s were Harryhausen's best years, among the highlights being his reunions with dinosaurs in Hammer Films' One Million Years B.C. (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969). His pace slowed in the 1970s, but he produced three of his masterworks during that period: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973); Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977); and Clash of the Titans (1981). It was not until 1992 that Harryhausen finally achieved film immortality with an honorary Oscar, a long-overdue tribute to the one name that personifies visual magic.- Art Department
- Director
- Producer
Peter Ramsey is the director of Dreamworks Animation's 2012 feature film "Rise Of The Guardians". He also directed the Halloween TV special, "Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space" as well as serving as a story artist on several of Dreamworks Animation's feature films. Prior to joining Dreamworks, he worked as a storyboard artist on a notable number of live action feature films, including "Backdraft", "Boyz n the Hood", "Bram Stoker's Dracula", "Minority Report", "Cast Away", "Independence Day," "Being John Malkovich", "Fight Club" and "Hulk", among many others. Ramsey's directing skills were honed early, as Second Unit Director on live action feature films including "Godzilla," "Tank Girl," "Higher Learning," and "Poetic Justice." A lifelong resident of Los Angeles, California, Peter grew up in the Crenshaw area, and graduated from Palisades High School before attending UCLA.- Writer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
David Lindsay-Abaire was born on 30 November 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is a writer, known for Rabbit Hole (2010), Poltergeist (2015) and Rise of the Guardians (2012).- Producer
- Writer
- Art Department
William Joyce was born on 11 December 1957 in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for Epic (2013), The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011) and Rolie Polie Olie (1998).- Director
- Writer
- Actor
British film director Anthony Asquith was born on November 9, 1902, to H.H. Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his second wife. A former home secretary and the future leader of the Liberal Party, H.H. Asquith served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1908-1916 and was subsequently elevated to the hereditary peerage. His youngest child, Anthony, was called Puffin by his family, a nickname given him by his mother, who thought he resembled one. Puffin was also the name his friends called him throughout his life.
Asquith was active in the British film industry from the late silent period until the mid-1960s. As a director he was highly respected by his contemporaries and had a long and successful career; by the 1960s he was one of only three British directors (the others being David Lean and Carol Reed) who were directing major international motion picture productions. However, Asquith's proclivity for adapting plays for the screen caused an erosion in his critical reputation as a filmmaker after his death. He was faulted for what was perceived as his failure to focus, like his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, on the cinematic. Asquith was known as an actor's director, and solicited some of the finest film performances from Britain's greatest actors, including Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave.
Although Asquith's first love was music, he lacked musical talent. He channeled his artistic ambitions toward the nascent motion picture, and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society to promote artistic appreciation of film. Asquith traveled to Hollywood in the 1920s to observe American film production techniques, and after returning to England, he became a director.
Among his best-known films is Pygmalion (1938), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's stage play, which he co-directed with its star, Leslie Howard. The film was a major critical success, even in the United States, winning multiple Academy Award nominations. Nobel Prize-winner Shaw, who had been a co-founder of the London Film Society along with Asquith, won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the film. Asquith had a long professional association with playwright Terence Rattigan, and two of Asquith's most famous and successful pictures were based on Rattigan plays, The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951). Asquith directed the screen version of Rattigan's first successful play, French Without Tears (1940), in 1940.
Asquith's most successful postwar film was, arguably, his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). More than a half-century after it was made, Asquith's film remains the best adaptation of Wilde's work. Ironically, Asquith's father H.H., while serving as Home Secretary, ordered Wilde's arrest for his homosexual behavior. Wilde's arrest, for "indecent behavior", led to his incarceration in the Reading jail and destroyed the great playwright, personally. The Wilde incident stifled gay culture in Britain for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Another irony of the situation is that H.H.'s youngest son, Anthony, himself was gay.
By the 1960s Asquith was directing Hollywood-style all-star productions, including the episodic The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), once again from a screenplay by Rattigan, and the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor potboiler The V.I.P.s (1963), also with a screenplay by Rattigan. It is based in an incident in the life of Laurence Olivier, a frequent Asquith collaborator. In 1967 Asquith was tipped to direct the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling novel The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) set to co-star Olivier and Anthony Quinn, but he had to drop out of the production due to ill heath. He died on February 20, 1968, at the age of 65.
The British Academy Award for best music is named the Anthony Asquith Award in his honor.- Actor
- Writer
- Music Department
Nicholas Phipps was born on 23 June 1913 in London, England, UK. He was an actor and writer, known for Maytime in Mayfair (1949), Doctor in the House (1954) and Doctor at Sea (1955). He died on 11 April 1980 in London, England, UK.- Producer
- Writer
- Production Manager
Stanley Haynes was born on 14 November 1906 in Birmingham, Warks, England, UK. He was a producer and writer, known for Carnival (1946), Madeleine (1950) and Dangerous Cargo (1954). He was married to Rosalyn Boulter. He died in 1958 in London, England, UK.- Producer
- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
James Vanderbilt was born in 1975 in the USA. He is a producer and writer, known for Zodiac (2007), Scream (2022) and Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). He has been married to Amber Freeman since 7 May 2005.- Producer
- Director
- Writer
David Fincher was born in 1962 in Denver, Colorado, and was raised in Marin County, California. When he was 18 years old he went to work for John Korty at Korty Films in Mill Valley. He subsequently worked at ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) from 1981-1983. Fincher left ILM to direct TV commercials and music videos after signing with N. Lee Lacy in Hollywood. He went on to found Propaganda in 1987 with fellow directors Dominic Sena, Greg Gold and Nigel Dick. Fincher has directed TV commercials for clients that include Nike, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Heineken, Pepsi, Levi's, Converse, AT&T and Chanel. He has directed music videos for Madonna, Sting, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith, George Michael, Iggy Pop, The Wallflowers, Billy Idol, Steve Winwood, The Motels and, most recently, A Perfect Circle.
As a film director, he has achieved huge success with Se7en (1995), Fight Club (1999) and, Panic Room (2002).- Art Department
- Director
- Producer
Vincenzo Natali was born on 6 January 1969 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Cube (1997), In the Tall Grass (2019) and Cypher (2002).- American author Clarence Day was born in New York City in 1874. He came from a wealthy family (his father had his own brokerage firm on Wall Street and was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and his grandfather founded the "New York Sun" newspaper), and he graduated from Yale University--where he was the editor of the school's humor magazine, "The Yale Record"--in 1896. The next year he joined his father's brokerage firm, but left a year later to enlist in the US Navy. Unfortunately, he developed crippling arthritis while in the service, resulting in his spending the rest of his life as a semi-invalid.
His most famous work is his memoir, "Life with Father" (1935), which humorously recounted the Day family life in the 1890s under the rule of his domineering father. The book was quite successful, and was turned into a smash-hit play in 1939, then into a critically and financially successful film, Life with Father (1947)). The film received Oscar nominations for best cinematography, best art direction, best musical score and best actor (William Powell). It was also turned into a short-lived (two seasons) TV series, Life with Father (1953).
Clarence Day died of pneumonia in New York City in 1935. - Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Howard Lindsay was born on 29 March 1889 in Waterford, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Sound of Music (1965), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Swing Time (1936). He was married to Dorothy Stickney and Maria Virginia Frolich. He died on 11 February 1968 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Richard Lanni is known for Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero (2018), The Americans in the Bulge (2010) and Road to Victory (2011).- Additional Crew
- Actor
- Writer
Michael Stokey is a combat veteran and film technician who consults for motion pictures and television primarily as the Executive Officer of Warriors Inc. Over the years with Warriors he has served in virtually every advisory capacity & has been the principal advisor and/or assistant for Warriors in all military endeavors from major motion pictures to videogames. He has broad experience including research, planning, staging and on-set advisory for Directors & other key production personnel. In civilian pursuits, he has worked as an Associate Producer for "Stump The Stars" (aka "Pantomime Quiz"), and has written more than 60 half-hour television shows for children. As a Marine Noncommissioned Officer, he volunteered for three tours in Vietnam during which he was involved in some of that conflict's most brutal fighting, including the TET Offensive at Hue and the siege at Khe Sanh. He is highly decorated as a result of line combat & was wounded in action. He acquired extensive experience in infantry, communications & supporting arms branches of the United States Marine Corps including operations with South Vietnamese & Korean forces. During these tours of duty he forged a close & lasting relationship with Dale Dye (Capt. USMC Ret) & volunteered to help Dye in the formation & functioning of Warriors Inc. His invaluable efforts in this formative period led Dye to commission Mike Stokey as Warriors' first Mustang officer & second in command. Warriors Inc. First Lieutenant Mike Stokey is a dynamic trainer with outstanding success in demonstrating the technologies & psychologies of professional soldiers for performers.- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Following a two-year apprenticeship under Cecil B. DeMille as assistant director, Samuel Grosvenor Wood had the good fortune to have assigned to him two of the biggest stars at Paramount during their heyday: Wallace Reid (between 1919 and 1920) and Gloria Swanson (from 1921 to 1923). By the time his seven-year contract with Paramount expired, the former real estate dealer had established himself as one of Hollywood's most reliable (if not individualistic) feature directors. Not bad for a former real estate broker and small-time theatrical thesp. In 1927, Wood joined MGM and remained under contract there until 1939. During this tenure he was very much in sync with the studio's prevalent style of production, reliably turning out between two and three films a year (of which the majority were routine subjects).
Most of his films in the 1920s were standard fare and it was not until he directed two gems with The Marx Brothers, A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937) that his career picked up again. Looking at the finished product it is difficult to reconcile this to Groucho Marx finding Wood "rigid and humorless". Maybe, this assessment was due to Wood being vociferously right-wing in his personal views which would not have sat well with the famous comedian. His testimonies in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee certainly gained Wood more enemies than friends within the industry.
Regardless of his personality or his habitually having to shoot each scene twenty times over, Wood turned out some very powerful dramatic films during the last ten years of his life, beginning with Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). This popular melodrama earned him his first Academy Award nomination. At RKO, he coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Ginger Rogers (and was again nominated himself) for Kitty Foyle (1940). Ronald Reagan gave, arguably, his best performance in Kings Row (1942) under Wood's direction. His most expensive (and longest, at 170 minutes) assignment took him back to Paramount. This was Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War drama For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), bought for $150,000 (De Mille was originally slated as director). In spite of editorial incongruities and the relatively uneven pace, the picture turned out to be the biggest (and last) hit of Wood's career.
Sam Wood died of a heart attack on September 22 1949. He has a star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.- Writer
- Actor
British novelist James Hilton was born in Leigh, Lancashire, England, in 1900. His father was a schoolmaster. Hilton graduated from Cambridge University in 1921, having already written his first novel, "Catherine Herself" (written in 1918, it wasn't published until 1920). After graduation he wrote a twice-weekly column for "The Dublin Irish Independent", which he continued to do for several years. In 1931 he wrote the novel "And Now Good-Bye", which was quite successful and brought him, as he once said, "a good return". In 1933 he was approached by the editor of "The British Weekly" magazine and asked to write a short-story for the magazine's Christmas issue, for which he had a deadline of just two weeks. As the deadline approached he still hadn't a clue as to what kind of story to write, so one night he decided to take a bicycle ride to clear his head. When he came back he had the inspiration to write what eventually became the international best-seller "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (a story based on the career of his father). He finished the story in four days. His editor at the magazine was so impressed with it that he recommended the magazine's parent company, a major publishing house, publish the story in the American market, which was much more profitable than the British market. The company arranged for the story to be published in the American magazine "The Atlantic Monthly" in its April 1934 issue. It garnered such attention from both readers and reviewers--noted critic Alexander Woollcott effusively praised it in his "New Yorker" column and on his radio show--that just two months later it was published in book form and became a huge international hit, and was later made into a movie now regarded as one of the classics of modern cinema, Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939).
Hilton turned out a string of highly regarded novels that were turned into highly regarded films--Knight Without Armor (1937), Lost Horizon (1937), Random Harvest (1942)--and eventually moved to the US. He died in Long Beach, CA, in 1954 of liver cancer.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Visual Effects
Stanley Cortez was born Samuel Krantz in New York City, New York, the son of Sarah (Lefkowitz) and Moses/Morris Krantz, Austrian Jewish immigrants. His famous actor brother, born Jacob Krantz, changed his name to Ricardo Cortez in order to acquire a more suitably romantic Hollywood image. Stanley changed his name accordingly. After studies at New York University he embarked on a photographic career, first as assistant to noted portrait photographers Streichan and Bachrach (he designed many of their lavish background sets), then as camera assistant for Pathé Revue and for various Manhattan-based film companies. Grabbing the chance to join Gloria Swanson Productions, Stanley then spent a lengthy apprenticeship in the 1920s and early 1930s learning the intricacies of his craft from such established Hollywood cinematographers as Lee Garmes and Hal Mohr. After moving from studio to studio, either as a camera assistant or shooting screen tests, he was signed to a seven-year contract by Universal in 1936, albeit consigned to its "B" unit. His first film as full director of photography was Four Days Wonder (1936). During World War II, he was assigned to the Army Pictorial Service of the Signals Corps.
Much of his subsequent career was spent on fairly routine and undistinguished second features and it was not until he started working for charismatic filmmakers like Orson Welles and David O. Selznick that he was able to fully develop some of his experimental techniques. One of his low-budget outings, a gothic old-dark-house horror/comedy entitled The Black Cat (1941), rather impressed the genial Mr. Welles who promptly hired him for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). This was the first of two Cortez films generally regarded as visual masterpieces, with beautiful lighting effects, clever angles and lingering close-ups. Of particular note are the staircase scene and the famous long shot -- via hand-held camera -- of the abandoned mansion. Despite critical plaudits, "Ambersons" was a financial disaster for RKO (it cost $1,1 million and lost $624,000 at the box office) and Cortez was partly blamed for costly delays and extravagant scenes, some 40-50 minutes of which were cut by direct orders from studio boss George Schaefer without consulting either Welles or Cortez. The latter ended up being indirectly censured by receiving lesser assignments. What remained of "Ambersons" has become more appreciated as a sublime visual experience with the passing of time.
The second outstanding Cortez contribution was the chillingly dark, haunting thriller The Night of the Hunter (1955)--a brilliant allegory of good versus evil masterminded by Charles Laughton in his sole directorial effort. Cortez's lighting and use of irises are reminiscent of German expressionist cinema, or, at least, the work of Karl Struss and Charles Rosher on Sunrise (1927). Among many indelible images are the flowing hair of drowned Shelley Winters in the underwater current and the lights flickering across the water in what is an almost surreal nightly landscape.
A third Cortez effort deserving of mention is the superior psychological drama The Three Faces of Eve (1957), his differential lighting for the face of schizophrenic Eve White (Joanne Woodward) effectively contrasting the multiple personalities within her psyche. Sadly, by the end of the decade Cortez's career went into a decline. It continued that way through the 1960s, the quality of his assignments fluctuating wildly between the occasional "A" picture (The Bridge at Remagen (1969)) and Z-grade turkeys like The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966).- Anya Seton was born on 23 January 1906 in New York City, New York, USA. She was a writer, known for Dragonwyck (1946) and Foxfire (1955). She died on 8 November 1990 in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, USA.
- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Animation Department
Peter Sohn joined Pixar Animation Studios in September 2000, and began working in both the art and story departments for the Academy Award®-winning "Finding Nemo." Sohn continued on to work on "The Incredibles" in the art, story, and animation departments. He focused on animating members of the Parr family and worked on many memorable scenes from the film. He also worked as a story artist on another Oscar® winner, the 2008 feature film, "WALL.E."
Sohn worked with producer Kevin Reher on the Pixar short "Partly Cloudy," which was also his directorial debut at Pixar. Sohn directed Disney.Pixar's original feature "The Good Dinosaur," which opened in theaters in 2015.
In addition to his contributions as a filmmaker, Sohn has lent his voice talents to Pixar's feature films. In "Ratatouille" he voiced the character of Emile, and in "Monsters University," he is the voice of Scott "Squishy" Squibbles.
Prior to Pixar, Sohn worked at Warner Bros. with "Ratatouille" director Brad Bird on "The Iron Giant," as well as at Disney TV. He grew up in New York and attended California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts). He currently lives in the Bay Area.- Art Department
- Writer
- Director
Erik Benson is known for The Good Dinosaur (2015), Toy Story 4 (2019) and Go! Go! Cory Carson (2020).- Producer
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Jack Clayton was born on 1 March 1921 in Brighton, East Sussex, England, UK. He was a producer and director, known for The Innocents (1961), Our Mother's House (1967) and The Great Gatsby (1974). He was married to Haya Harareet, Katherine Kath and Christine Norden. He died on 26 February 1995 in Slough, Berkshire, England, UK.- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, was born October 10, 1930, in London's working-class Hackney district to Hyman and Frances Pinter, Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to the United Kingdom from Portugal. Hyman (known as "Jack") was a tailor specializing in women's clothing and Frances was a homemaker. The Pinters, whose families hailed from Odessa and Poland in the Russian Empire, were part of a wave of Jewish emigration to the UK at the turn of the last century. It was a community that revered learning and culture. The Pinter family was close, and young Harold was traumatized when, at the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated from London to Cornwall with other London children for a year to avoid becoming casualties of German aerial bombing.
Pinter has said that his encounter with anti-Semitism while growing up was the fuse that ignited the organic process leading him to becoming a playwright. As the Nobel Prize citation attests, Pinter developed into the greatest English dramatist of the post-World War II era. The young Pinter studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1950 he published several poems and began working as a professional actor. Under the stage name David Baron, he toured the Republic of Ireland with Anew McMaster's Shakespearean repertory company in 1951-52. Significantly for Pinter's future, 1951 not only marked the debut of his career as a professional actor but also marked the first performance of future Nobel Literature Laureate Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece "Waiting for Godot." He next appeared with Sir Donald Wolfit's theatrical company at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, for the 1953- 54 season before becoming a player with various provincial repertory companies, including the Birmingham Rep, until he gave himself over full-time to playwriting in 1959.
Two significant events that would change Great Britain forever occurred during his apprenticeship in provincial rep: (1) the Suez Crisis of 1955 that shattered the UK's pretensions to empire in a post-colonial world and doomed the imperial generations represented by Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his mentor Winston Churchill, and (2) the 1956 premiere of John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger." The shattering of the United Kingdom's complacency over imperialism meant that many successful people of Pinter's generation, who normally would have become Tories upon achieving some modicum of success, were disillusioned and drifted towards Labour and the left. No longer would a working- class person, if he so chose, have to be ashamed or stymied if \eschewing becoming middle-class or bourgeois. Osborne's play was the seminal work of the "kitchen-sink" school of drama that would dominate English theater for a decade, in which working-class life and struggles were dramatized. The hegemony of this school of theater was such that for the first time, a working-class or provincial accent became something treasured, something to be proud of, as the former world was set firmly upon its head. Even the great Laurence Olivier turned his back on the commercial theater to assay Osbourne's Archie Rice, a down-at-the-heels music hall performer, in "The Entertainer" (1957).
The kitchen-sink drama was a movement that Pinter would not be a part of, though it did open the doors for working-class writers who, unlike the working class-born Noël Coward, had no interest in becoming bourgeois. The other major element in the cultural milieu that forged Pinter was the Cold War, the absurdity of facing doomsday everyday under the threat of The Bomb (the USSR had acquired the means to produce a bomb through its atomic spy ring and exploded its first A-bomb in 1949, thus ending the US monopoly on nuclear weapons and making the Korean war, the suppression of an East Berlin uprising and the squashing of the Hungarian Revolution practical, if not possible). The Cold War gave legitimacy to the rise of the police state, not in totalitarian countries but in the use of police-state tactics in the western industrial democracies. To quote American poet' Charles Bukowski', this was an era marked by "War All The Time," not between two superpower behemoths but in everyday human relations, poisoned as they were by the Cold War climate of absurdity, paranoia and imminent holocaust.
In 1953 the accused "atomic spies" Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the United States when President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who had overseen the liberation of Europe as Supreme Allied Commander fighting the Nazi totalitarian menace, had refused clemency for even Ethel, the mother of two small boys. It was a domestic drama -- a woman's loyalty to her husband, her loss of not only her life but the Issac-like evocative sacrifice of any normal life for her two children when Eisenhower-Jehovah refused to stay the executioner's hand -- that had combined with the felicities of affairs of state and world power politics. The question of whether they were guilty or innocent--not proven beyond a doubt in 1951, when they had been convicted in a trial that was compared by many to the Stalinist show-trials that had occurred in the Soviet Union and still occurred in the satellite countries of the Warsaw Pact after World War II - gave rise to an overwhelming fundamental question: What is real? Reality, as Hannah Arendt had put it in "The Human Condition," is socially defined; that is a given. But how about when that reality no longer makes sense, when the individual cannot partake of the consensus demanded of him in the 1950s, whether conservative, middle-class, haute bourgeoisie or radical left as dictated by some flaming Red party boss - a person struggling with his own life? How does he answer the question: What is real? It is a question that Pinter took upon himself to answer, and answered by showing us there is no answer. In this quest, a genius arrived on the world stage in the form of a player who decided to craft his own words, for himself and his post-Holocaust, pre-Holocaust audience. When life stops making sense, as it did in the 1940s when the global war against fascism left 50 million dead and the modern industrial state was tasked with the exigencies of mass- murder, and as it did in the 1950s when, under the aegis of combating another totalitarian system a domestic fascism in kind if not degree arose in the Anglo-Saxon countries with their great gravital pull towards conformity within a shell of consumerism, it still behooves a human being to try to understand the human condition.
In 1957 Bristol University staged Pinter's first play "The Room." He had told a friend who worked in Bristol University's drama department an idea he had for a play. The friend was so enamored of the idea that he commissioned the work, with the proviso that a script be ready within a week. Though he didn't believe he could meet his friend's demands, Pinter wrote the one-act play in four days. "The Room" had all the hallmarks of what would become known as "Pinteresque," in that it had a mundane situation that gradually filled with menace and mystery through the author's deliberate omission of an explanation or motivation for the action on stage. It is ironic perhaps that an actor would rid his script of motivation as "motivation" is the Holy Grail of inwardly-directed actors such as those tutored in "The Method" in America, but it was emblematic of the times that stated motivations frequently masked other, starker, more id-like drives in people or in nation-states that were beyond human comprehension in terms of being rational. Modern society had become irrational, and motivations post-Freud could be understood as a manifestation of Thanatos, the Death Instinct. Imminent violence and power plays would become other leitmotifs of Pinter's oeuvre.
Pinter wrote a second one-act play in 1957, "The Dumb Waiter," an absurdist drama concerning two hit men employed by a secret organization to kill an unknown victim. It was with this play that Pinter added an element of black comedy, mostly through his brilliant use of dialog, which not only elucidated the killers' growing anxiety but underscored the very absurdity of their situation. The play would not be performed until 1960, after the staging of his first two full-length plays, one a flop, and one a hit. His first full-length play, "The Birthday Party," debuted at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in 1958. In the play the apathetic Stanley, the denizen of a dilapidated boarding house, is visited by two men. The audience never learns their motivation, but knows that Stanley is terrified of them. They organize a birthday party for Stanley, who insists that it is not his birthday. Pinter is following in the footsteps of the great absurdist Samuel Beckett in that he steadfastly refuses to give clear motivations to his characters, or rational explanations for the sake of his audience (Pinter and Beckett became friends). The play, now considered a masterpiece, flopped on its initial London run after being savaged by critics. It was revived after Pinter's second full-length play, 1960's "The Caretaker," established him as a major force in the English-language theater.
His early plays were rooted in the absurdism that became the major theatrical paradigm on the European stage in the third quarter of the 20th century, after the horrors of the war and the Holocaust. The early plays that made his reputation such as "The Homecoming" (1964) and his middle-period work such as "No Man's Land" (1976) have been called "comedies of menace." Typically, they use what at first seems like an innocent situation and develop it into an absurd and threatening environment through actions that usually are inexplicable to the audience and sometimes even to the other characters in the play. A Pinter drama is dark and claustrophobic. His language is full of menacing pauses. The lives of Pinter's characters usually are revealed to be stunted by guilt and horror. The duality and absurdity of Pinter's theatrical world-view gave rise to the adjective "Pinteresque," which took its place next to "Kafkaesque," a product of the horrors of the first quarter of the century (Pinter would write the screenplay for an adaption of Franz Kafka's "The Trial".)
Beginning in the 1960s, Pinter further enhanced his reputation as a writer with his screenplays, particular his work with Joseph Losey in The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967) (Losey planned an adaptation of Marcel Proust's "Le Temps Retrouve" and commissioned Pinter to write the screenplay. The film was never made by Losey, but Pinter's screenplay was subsequently published to great acclaim). His later screenplays, including his last produced work with Losey, The Go-Between (1971), are, ironically, noted for their clarity. He was twice nominated for the Academy Award as a screenwriter, for his adaptation of John Fowles' labyrinthine novel into the film The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and for Betrayal (1983), his adaptation of his own play. Such was the respect that Pinter was held that Elia Kazan, one of the great film directors, complained in his autobiography "A Life" (1988) that The Last Tycoon (1976) producer Sam Spiegel had such reverence for Pinter that he would not let Kazan change his script.
After the great plays of his early and mid-period, Pinter became more overtly political. His later plays, which generally are shorter than the plays from the period in which he made his reputation, typically address political subjects and often are allegories on oppression. In the late 1970s Pinter became more outspoken on political issues and is decidedly of the left. He is passionately committed to human rights and is not shy about bringing examples of oppression from client states sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon democracies to the public's attention. In 2002 Pinter experienced what he described as a "personal nightmare" when he had to undergo chemotherapy to treat a case of cancer of the esophagus. The ordeal, which has been ongoing for three years, triggered a personal metamorphosis in the man. "I've been through the valley of the shadow of death," Pinter explained about his quickening. "While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm also a very changed man."
In early 2005 Pinter declared in a radio interview that he was retiring as a dramatist in favor of writing poetry: "I think I've stopped writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems. I've written 29 plays. Isn't that enough?" Pinter has become an outspoken critic of war. He was a bitter critic of the US-led intervention against Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia during President Bill Clinton's administration and an even harsher critic of the US-led war in Iraq. The fiercely anti- war Pinter has accused President George W. Bush of being a "mass-murderer" and has called British Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" for supporting US foreign policy. Pinter claimed immediately after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon that they were a requited revenge for the destruction wrought on Afghanistan and Iraq by US imperialism and its anti-Taliban policies and sanctions on Iraq. He has publicly denounced the retaliatory U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq. Pinter likens the Bush administration and Bush's America to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, claiming the US is bent on world hegemony. Controversially, he has declared that the only difference between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union is that the US is more hypocritical and has better public relations.
One cannot fault Pinter, in the political ring, for being inconsistent or for jumping on a bandwagon. The man, as well as the artist, is a person that sticks to his convictions. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Pinter just after he celebrated his 75th birthday was completely unexpected by pundits handicapping the award. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and Syrian poet Adonis were considered the front-runners, as European writers recently had dominated the award (Pinter's Nobel Prize makes it nine out of ten times in the past ten years that a European writer has won, and the second time in the past five years an English writer has banged the gong), and it was felt the Academy would recognize a writer from another continent, particularly one from Asia Minor. Thus, the award can be seen as a not-so-veiled criticism of the United States in general and President George W. Bush in particular by the Swedish Academy. Because of Pinter's renouncing of the form of which he was a master and his anointment of himself as a poet, in light of his volume of poetry, "War" (2003) that denounces the Iraq War frequently in vulgar, raw and unrythmic poetry that poses no threat to William Butler Yeats or W.H. Auden or Robert Frost or Stevens, one must consider that the Swedish Academy was giving the world's highest prize for literature at least in part to a poet whose latest work was fiercely anti-American and anti-imperialist.
Despite being highly controversial, Pinter -- who was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1966 (one step down from a knighthood, an honor he subsequently turned down) -- was named a Companion of Honour in 2002, an honor that does not carry a title. In addition to writing poetry, acting and directing in the theater, Pinter serves as the chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, an affiliate of he Club Cricket Conference. He also is active in the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that supports Fidel Castro, who remains the #1 bugaboo of the United States after Islamic terrorists, just slightly ahead of fellow hemispheric boogeyman Hugo Chávez, a recent arriviste on the world stage. He also is a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, an organization that appeals for the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic on the grounds that NATO's war against Milosevic's Yugoslavia was unjustified under international law.- Additional Crew
- Producer
- Art Department
Dan Scanlon joined Pixar Animation Studios in September 2001 as a storyboard artist on Pixar's award-winning feature films "Cars" and "Toy Story 3." During the initial production stages for both films, he worked closely with the directors to bring their ideas to the screen.
Scanlon went on to co-direct the original short film, "Mater and the Ghostlight," which is included as one of the bonus features on the "Cars" DVD. In addition to his work at Pixar, Scanlon simultaneously wrote and directed the live action film "Tracy," released in 2009.
Scanlon made his animated feature directorial debut in 2013 with "Monsters University," which grossed over $738.9 million worldwide at the box office, and received the 2013 "Hollywood Animation Award" from the Hollywood Film Awards. Scanlon's latest Pixar feature, "Onward," releases March 6, 2020.
In his role as Vice President, Creative, Scanlon is involved in key creative decision-making at the studio and consults on films in both development and production. Scanlon will serve as the Executive Producer on two upcoming unannounced Pixar films.
As a child growing up in Clawson, Michigan, Scanlon possessed a love for Warner Bros. cartoons, animated Disney films, and as fate would have it, Pixar short films. His passion inspired him to study film and animation in high school and in college, where he focused on illustration at Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD).
Upon graduating from CCAD, Scanlon began working as an animator and story artist for Character Builders, a 2D animation company that produced feature and commercial work in Columbus, Ohio.- Additional Crew
- Writer
- Animation Department
Phillip Bradley "Brad" Bird is an American director, screenwriter, animator, producer and occasional voice actor, known for both animated and live-action films. Bird was born in Kalispell, Montana, the youngest of four children of Marjorie A. (née Cross) and Philip Cullen Bird. His father worked in the propane business, and his grandfather, Francis Wesley "Frank" Bird, who was born in County Sligo, Ireland, was a president and chief executive of the Montana Power Company. On a tour of the Walt Disney Studios at age 11, he announced that someday he would become part of its animation team, and soon afterward began work on his own 15-minute animated short. Within two years, Bird had completed his animation, which impressed the cartoon company. By age 14, barely in high school, Bird was mentored by the animator Milt Kahl, one of Disney's legendary Nine Old Men. Bird recalls Kahl's criticisms as ideal: Kahl would point out shortcomings by gently delivering thoughts on where Bird could improve. After graduating from Corvallis High School in Corvallis, Oregon in 1975, Bird took a three-year break. He was then awarded a scholarship by Disney to attend California Institute of the Arts, where he met and befriended another future animator, Pixar co-founder and director John Lasseter.- Producer
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Born in Russian Empire in 1904, Lewton moved with his mother and sister to Berlin in 1906, then to USA in 1909. He wrote for newspapers, magazines, novels, pornography, etc.- often using pseudonyms to disguise their origin (the name Val Lewton was one such pseudonym, used first for some novels in the 1930's, then revived later in his career to take writing credit for two movies). In 1933, he got a job with David O. Selznick where he spent many years as a story editor and jack-of-all-trades. Then in 1942, RKO hired him to head their new horror unit, where he made many famous and well-respected B-movies, for very low costs and high profits. In 1946, he "graduated" to A-movies, but increasing health problems, trouble working with big-money Hollywood, and other factors combined to force him to produce only three more movies before his death in 1951.- Actor
- Music Department
- Composer
Born on September 30, 1947 in London, England, Mark Bolan was always destined to be a star. Even as a teenager, he was already seeking fame. Well known as a sharp dresser, he was employed by a modeling agency and became a "John Temple Boy", wearing John Temple suits in their catalogs as well as becoming a cardboard cutout displayed in their shop windows. Many initial attempts to get into the music business failed, and so he turned to acting, landing several character roles in some television series including a juvenile delinquent on the Sam Kydd series Orlando (1965). His first recording, "The Wizard", was released in 1965 and resulted in an appearance on the music show Ready, Steady, Go! (1963). He briefly became a member of the 1960s group John's Children before forming his own group, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The group's first single was "Debora", also a track on the album "My People Were Fair", released in July 1968. Although not a hit the first time around, on its re-release in 1972, when Bolan was at his peak, "Debora" made the UK top 10. In July 1969, the group dropped its folksy, hippie sound to go electric with the single "King of the Rumbling Spires". Unfortunately, like his other singles, it failed to take off, only reaching #44. The group shortened its name to T. Rex and finally broke through with the single "Ride a White Swan" in 1970. This opened the door to a whole series of hit singles, including "Bang a Gong, Get It On"--on which Elton John played keyboards--which reached the US top 10 in 1971, as well a series of highly acclaimed albums.
At the height of his popularity, Bolan had a string of #1 hit singles in the United Kingdom and became a teen idol as well as a leader of the glam rock movement. He appeared in Ringo Starr's movie Born to Boogie (1972), a documentary showing a concert at Wembley Empire Pool. However by 1975, on account of the rise of 1970s soul music, Bolan's career was in decline, at least sales-wise. As a leading figure of the punk rock movement in the United Kingdom, he provided a forum for new acts to appear on television via his own music program. Just when he was on the rebound, Marc Bolan cruelly died in a car crash on September 16, 1977, two weeks before his 30th birthday.- Writer
- Producer
- Director
Bryan Bertino was born on 17 October 1977 in Crowley, Texas, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for The Strangers (2008), The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015) and The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018).- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Dave Barry, author of numerous books and a weekly syndicated column with the Miami Herald, is well known for his scathing wit and deep insight into current political issues, exploding toilets, current economic trends, exploding whales, the future of America, exploding pop-tarts, and international relations.- Director
- Animation Department
- Writer
Bill Plympton was born on 30 April 1946 in Portland, Oregon, USA. He is a director and writer, known for Cheatin' (2013), I Married a Strange Person! (1997) and Idiots and Angels (2008).- Writer
- Actor
- Music Department
Small started learning guitar at 15, and graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 1997. During his music studies he concurrently took several writing and comedy classes at Emerson College. After graduating, he began performing stand-up at The Comedy Studio in Harvard Square, where he was spotted by Loren Bouchard, who at the time was casting for the central character for a UPN pilot produced by Tom Snyder Productions which eventually evolved into Home Movies.
Small was the co-creator, writer, voice actor, composer and musician for Home Movies, a cartoon initially aired on the UPN television network and then moved to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. The final episode of Home Movies aired on April 4, 2004, after running four seasons, although the show is periodically rerun on Adult Swim. In the series, he voiced the show's protagonist, 8-year-old aspiring filmmaker Brendon Small, as well as a number of other characters.
Small's latest claim to fame is as co-producer, co-writer, composer, and actor for the Adult Swim series Metalocalypse, which premiered on August 6, 2006. The series focuses on a fictional death metal band named Dethklok, and each episode features a song "performed" by the band. In addition to all of the behind-the-scenes work he does for the series, he also provides voice talent for the characters Skwisgaar Skwigelf, Pickles the Drummer, and Nathan Explosion, three of the five members of Dethklok. The song "Thunderhorse" was also featured on the hit video game Guitar Hero II.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Ron Lynch was born on 1 February 1953 in Bethpage, New York, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Home Movies (1999), RVC: The Lone Shopping Network (2012) and Too Late (2021).