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Originally from Lincoln, Nebraska, Christine Conradt is an L.A.-based screenwriter, producer, director, and script consultant. After earning a BFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California's Cinematic Arts program, she worked briefly in development before launching her screenwriting career. She later went back to grad school and received an MCJ from Boston University where she focused on cybercrime and juvenile delinquency.- Teraisa J. Goldman is known for Phases of Mahina (2015) and Motormouth (2004).
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Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name "King," under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.
Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue. Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".
King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk." He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf/Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away.
He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.
On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.
In June 1999 King was severely injured in an accident, he was walking alongside a highway and was hit by a van, that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations, he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.- Writer
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Mr. Karaszewski is known for unusual true stories written in tandem with Scott Alexander. Their feature film credits include the Oscar-winning Ed Wood, The People vs.Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, Big Eyes, & Dolemite is My Name. Mr. Karaszewski co-chairs the International Feature Film category & won the Emmy, Golden Globe, PGA & WGA Award for The People v O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Mr. Karaszewski is a governor of the Writers Branch.- Writer
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Jeffrey Boam was born on 30 November 1946 in Rochester, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Dead Zone (1983) and The Phantom (1996). He was married to Paula M. Boam. He died on 26 January 2000 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Producer
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Akiva Goldsman was born on 7 July 1962 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for A Beautiful Mind (2001), Batman & Robin (1997) and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022).- Actor
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Mitch Hara (Actor/Writer/Director) Raised by speed-freak alcoholics, an experience that shaped his unique voice and eccentric view of the world. Drugs, cookies and chaos also helped inform his artistic flare. He escaped to New York City at age 19, when he was invited to join the acclaimed Actors Studio. There, he performed in several plays off-Broadway as well as comedy clubs, Studio 54 and a few rehabs. While pole dancing on 42nd Street, he was called to L.A. to do a burp-and-it-was-gone pilot, Eddie Dodd with Treat Williams. He's guest-starred on numerous series, including a recurring role on ER as Stanley a suicidal mental patient, several pilots and film roles including a snuff-film producer, Latin Jerry in THE ART OF DYING with Wings Hauser. He scored 11 more indies playing everything from a "Harley-hitman" to a "bipolar nurse." Hara's got a unique talent for infusing humor and humanity into the darkest characters. He's written, directed and performed in 5 critically acclaimed plays, winning an "Outstanding Performance" award from Backstage for his portrayal of "Sister Coco Call-Me-Ishmael," a mental-patient-drag-queen-nun, in The Tragic and Horrible Life of the Singing Nun. More acting credits include a co-starring role in the pilot I RUN HOT for AMC/Peacock directed by Ilana Glazer and the pilot, "SUNNY'S CLOSET" as TayTay, the gas lighting, scheming, executive assistant. His short form series, SMOTHERED Season 1, co-written with and co-starring Jason Stuart, went viral on Amazon Prime and voted "Top 10 to Binge." SMOTHERED Season 2 just dropped on AMAZON, REVRY, YouTube & internationally. The premiere was held at Sony Pictures in the John Singleton theatre. Mitch is on stage in Hollywood doing his award-winning solo show MUTANT OLIVE 2.0 gaining rave reviews and getting ready to tour NYC, Chicago, London & Edinburgh. Directed by the fabulous Carlyle King, who also directed SMOTHERED Season 2. Other projects currently in development, include his screenplay, CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? a gay Aunty Mame meets Rain Man meets Kramer vs. Kramer (about his relationship with his amazing 11-year-old nephew with Aspergers), the black comedy PARTY TIME (about destiny, annoying angels and cancer) and the TV series version of MUTANT OLIVE, currently called SWEET DREAMS. He's also pitching SMOTHERED to studios as a full-on series. Hara worked, directed or had sex with John Travolta, Maura Tierney, Susan Luccci, Sally Kirkland, John Savage, Angela Lansbury, Doris Roberts, Joe Manganiello, Karen Black, Marlon Wayans, Eliot Glazer, Colton Haynes, and half of NYC. Mitch says, "I never take 'no' for an answer. For me, everything is YES. So 'no' is just a slow yes." His inner child is alive & well and ready to play!- Director
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Byron Howard was born on 26 December 1968 in Misawa, Japan. He is a director and producer, known for Zootopia (2016), Encanto (2021) and Tangled (2010).- Producer
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Jennifer Lee was born on 22 October 1971 in Barrington, Rhode Island, USA. She is a producer and writer, known for Frozen (2013), Frozen II (2019) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012). She has been married to Alfred Molina since August 2021. She was previously married to Robert Joseph Monn.- Writer
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Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in December 1928, along with a twin sister, Jane. Jane died less than eight weeks later, allegedly from an allergy to mother's milk. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Dick became a published author in 1952. His first sale was the short story "Roog." His first novel, "Solar Lottery," appeared in 1955. Dick produced an astonishing amount of material during the 1950s and 1960s, writing and selling nearly a hundred short stories and some two dozen or so novels during this period, including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," "Time Out Of Joint," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," and the Hugo-award winning "The Man In The High Castle." A supremely chaotic personal life (Dick was married five times) along with drug experimentation, sidetracked Dick's career in the early 1970s. Dick would later maintain that reports of his drug use had been greatly exaggerated by sensationalistic colleagues. In any event, after a layoff of several years, Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning novel "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said." Perhaps more importantly, though, this same year Dick would have a profound religious experience that would forever alter his life. Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. Dick spent the rest of his life writing copious journals regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the event. At times, Dick seemed to regard it as a divine revelation and, at other times, he believed it to be a sign of extreme schizophrenic behaviour. His final novels all deal in some way with the entity he saw in 1974, especially "Valis," in which the title-character is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick. Despite his award-winning novels and almost universal acclaim from within the science-fiction community, Dick was never especially financially successful as a writer. He worked mainly for low-paying science-fiction publishers and never seemed to see any royalties from his novels after the advance had been paid, no matter how many copies they sold. In fact, one of the reasons for his extreme productivity was that he always seemed to need the advance money from his next story or novel in order to make ends meet. But towards the very end of his life, he achieved a measure of financial stability, partly due to the money he received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based. Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works (incuding Total Recall (1990)) and several unpublished novels have been published posthumously.- Producer
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Award-winning American writer and producer Frank Spotnitz is the Chief Executive of Big Light Productions Ltd., a London-and Paris-based production company he founded in 2013 with a vision to create distinctive and ambitious TV drama series, and has become one of the fastest-growing independent production companies in Europe. Big Light Productions creates and produces a diverse slate of international television series, including drama, comedy and documentaries.
Under the Big Light banner, most recently, Spotnitz co-created and executive produced the drama series Leonardo, starring Aidan Turner, Freddie Highmore and Matilda De Angelis, for RAI, France Télévisions, RTVE and Sony, and is co-produced by Big Light Productions alongside Lux Vide.
Previously, under Spotnitz's stewardship, Big Light has produced a number of high-end drama productions including Amazon's Emmy award-winning The Man in the High Castle, based on the classic Philip K. Dick novel. Spotnitz created, executive produced and wrote several episodes of the acclaimed series, which launched in the UK, US, Germany and Austria in 2015 and quickly became Amazon's most viewed drama series ever. Series also included Medici: Masters of Florence, starring Richard Madden and Dustin Hoffman, two seasons of Medici: The Magnificent, starring Daniel Sharman and Sean Bean, both for RAI in Italy, SFR Play in France and Netflix; Ransom for CBS in the US, Corus's Global in Canada, TF1 in France and RTL in Germany; and the comedy-drama series The Indian Detective, starring international comedian Russell Peters, for Bell Media/CTV and Netflix.
Spotnitz's other credits include: Crossing Lines season 3 (2015) with Tandem/Studio Canal; Transporter: The Series season 2 (2014) for the U.S.'s TNT, Germany's M6 and HBO Canada; Hunted (2012); Strike Back (2011); Samurai Girl (2008); Night Stalker (2005); Michael Mann's Robbery Homicide Division (2002); The Lone Gunmen (2001); Harsh Realm (2000); and Millennium (1997-1999). In 2006, Spotnitz co-wrote and created (with Vince Gilligan) a pilot for Spike TV called A.M.P.E.D. Spotnitz directed two episodes and wrote or co-wrote more than 40 episodes of The X-Files television series. He served as a producer and co-writer of both The X-Files feature films, Fight the Future (1998) and I Want to Believe (2008). Spotnitz shares three Golden Globes for Best Dramatic Series and a Peabody Award for his work on The X-Files. He was also nominated for an Emmy Award for writing and three times for Outstanding Drama Series.
In 2013 Spotnitz helped establish and began teaching at Serial Eyes, a postgraduate training programme in Berlin to help prepare the next generation of European TV writer-producers. With the writers' room experience at the core of the programme, twelve participants are given the opportunity to learn from industry experts and develop a European model of show-running. Each year one participant is also selected to do a three-month placement with Big Light Productions.
Born in Japan, Spotnitz received a B.A. in English literature from UCLA and an M.F.A. in screenwriting from the American Film Institute. He began his career as a newspaper and magazine writer, working for the Associated Press, United Press International and Entertainment Weekly, among others.- Writer
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Patrick Süskind was born on 26 March 1949 in Ambach, Bavaria, Germany. He is a writer and actor, known for Kir Royal (1986), Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) and Rossini (1997).- Producer
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Born in Puducherry, India, and raised in the posh suburban Penn Valley area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, M. Night Shyamalan is a film director, screenwriter, producer, and occasional actor, known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots.
He is the son of Jayalakshmi, a Tamil obstetrician and gynecologist, and Nelliate C. Shyamalan, a Malayali doctor. His passion for filmmaking began when he was given a Super-8 camera at age eight, and even at that young age began to model his career on that of his idol, Steven Spielberg. His first film, Praying with Anger (1992), was based somewhat on his own trip back to visit the India of his birth. He raised all the funds for this project, in addition to directing, producing and starring in it. Wide Awake (1998), his second film, he wrote and directed, and shot it in the Philadelphia-area Catholic school he once attended--even though his family was of a different religion, they sent him to that school because of its strict discipline.
Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sense (1999), which was a commercial success and later nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Shyamalan team up again with Bruce Willis in the film Unbreakable (2000), released in 2000, which he also wrote and directed.
His major films include the science fiction thriller Signs (2002), the psychological thriller The Village (2004), the fantasy thriller Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), After Earth (2013), and the horror films The Visit (2015) and Split (2016).- Producer
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Victor Fresco is a television writer, producer and show creator. He is credited with creating the critically acclaimed television series "Better Off Ted" which ran for two seasons on ABC, and the FOX show "Andy Richter controls the Universe", for which he was nominated for a writing Emmy. Fresco wrote for three years on NBC's "My Name is Earl," and created the FOX series "Life on a Stick" and the ABC series "Trouble with Normal." He was nominated for an Emmy for his work on "Mad About You" and was an executive producer on the Burt Reynolds CBS series "Evening Shade." His first writing break was in 1989 when his freelance script was accepted by the hit television comedy, "Alf." He joined "Alf" as a staff writer in 1990. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Victor received his Bachelors degree in film and political science from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. After graduating, Victor returned to Los Angeles where he worked in television commercials as a production assistant and prop master.- Producer
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Clay Graham is known for Who's the Boss? (1984), The Drew Carey Show (1995) and All-American Girl (1994).- Actor
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Gary and his wife Glenda moved to Los Angeles in 1977 for Gary to pursue a writing career. He went on an open call as an actor, got the part, and now two hundred parts later Gary is still acting. Gary and Glenda now have a home in Mississippi and an apartment in Los Angeles, and Gary works both the southern and L.A. markets.
In the last few years Gary has devoted much of his time to writing and has successfully sold two pilot scripts to CBS, two screenplays and had his first full length Equity play, "As the Crow Flies", receive its world premier. The production was both a creative and financial success and received many positive reviews. Currently he has a project in development at Warner Horizon.
In 2008 Gary can be seen in "In the Electric Mist" with Tommie Lee Jones, "Deal" with Burt Reynolds, "Good Intentions" with Elaine Hendrix, "Major Movie Star" with Jessica Simpson, and "My Mom's New Boyfriend" with Meg Ryan and Antonio Banderas.
Gary has worked as an actor for some of the most distinguished film directors of our time in a number of motion pictures, including "JFK" (Oliver Stone), "Silkwood" (Mike Nichols), "Nadine" (Robert Benton), "Honkytonk Man" (Clint Eastwood), and "The Border" (Tony Richardson). Other feature credits include "The X-Files," "Doubletake," and "The Astronaut's Wife".
On television, Grubbs made a name for himself by portraying attorneys in two of the highest rated programs in television history, "The Burning Bed" and "Fatal Vision". He has also starred in numerous movies-of-the-week and miniseries, including "Canal Street Brothel", "For One Night", "Foxfire", and many others. Gary's recent series and episodic work includes appearances on "ER", "Angel", "NCIS", "K-ville", "Will & Grace" and "The O.C."
Gary and Glenda have a daughter Molly who is employed at Team One Advertising in Los Angeles, and their son Logan is a grad student at The University of Southern Mississippi.- Actor
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David Morse, a 6' 4" tall blue-eyed blond who performed on stage for 10 years before breaking into film, has become established as a respected supporting, character actor and second lead.
He was born the first of four children of Charles, a sales manager, and Jacquelyn Morse, a schoolteacher, on October 11, 1953, in Beverly, Massachusetts. He grew up with three younger sisters. After graduating from high school, Morse studied acting at the William Esper Studio. In 1971, he began his professional acting career appearing in over 30 productions with the Boston Repertory Company from 1971 to 1977. In the late 1970s, Morse continued his stage career with the Circle Repertory Company in New York before moving into television and film. In the late 1990s, he returned to the Off-Broadway stage starring in Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize winning drama, "How I Learned to Drive" (1997), for which he won the Drama Desk Award and the Obie.
Morse made his big screen debut in 1980 co-starring as "Jerry Maxwell", a cheerful bartender turned basketball player, opposite John Savage and Diana Scarwid in Inside Moves (1980), written by Barry Levinson and directed by Richard Donner. Although Inside Moves (1980) was nominated for an Oscar, Morse had to wait a few years until his career took off. His big break came in 1982 when he was cast as Dr. Jack "Boomer" Morrison, a young doctor who struggles as a single parent after the death of his wife, in St. Elsewhere (1982), a medical drama that ran for six seasons. He co-starred as opposite Jodie Foster and young Jena Malone in the Oscar nominated Sci-Fi drama Contact (1997). In 1999, he appeared in Stephen King's The Green Mile (1999), with Tom Hanks. A year later, he played a supporting role as a kidnapped husband of Meg Ryan in Proof of Life (2000). In 2002, Morse became the first English-speaking actor nominated for the Golden Horse Award, the Chinese equivalent of the Oscars, for his superb performance as FBI expert "Kevin Richter" in Double Vision (2002). From 2002 to 2004, Morse had a regular gig starring as "Mike Olshansky", an ex-Philadelphia policeman turned cab driver, in the TV series Hack (2002) which ran three seasons and was filmed in Philadelphia, close to his home. In 2006-2007, he has a recurring role on season 3 of an Emmy award-winning medical drama House (2004).
David Morse has been married to fellow actress Susan Wheeler Duff since 1982. They have three children, one daughter and twin sons. In 1994, after the the Northridge earthquake destroyed his home in Sherman Oaks, Morse moved from LA to Philadelphia with his family, and resides in his wife's hometown.- Additional Crew
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Robert Graysmith was born on 17 September 1942 in Pensacola, Florida, USA. He is a writer, known for Zodiac (2007), Auto Focus (2002) and Trailside. He was previously married to Melanie Krakower and Margaret Ann Womack.- Producer
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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
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Shane Salerno is the co-screenwriter of the forthcoming Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Avatar 3 (2025), Avatar 4 (2029), Avatar 5 (2031) produced and directed by Oscar winner James Cameron. He has been a professional screenwriter since the age of 19. In the years that have followed Detour Magazine has named Salerno as "one of Hollywood's true shapers of popular culture" and Fade In magazine selected him as one of the "100 people you need to know in Hollywood". His diverse screenwriting is distinguished by the quality of directors who have chosen him to write their films including Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, Ron Howard, Oliver Stone, William Friedkin and Michael Bay among many others.
Salerno produced and directed the documentary film Salinger, a documentary on the mysterious life of Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger. The film was released theatrically and was also an American Masters television special. The film features interviews with friends, colleagues and members of Salinger's inner circle that have never spoken on the record before as well as film footage, photographs and other material that has never been seen.
Salerno is also a New York Times bestselling author. He co-wrote the biography Salinger about J.D. Salinger with David Shields. The book was a New York Times bestseller and a #1 national bestseller. The book also made bestseller list for NPR, Independent Booksellers, Barnes & Noble and The Los Angeles Times. It was also named an Amazon Best Book of the Month and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.
He was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up in Memphis, Maryland, Washington, D.C. and San Diego. He attended ten schools in twelve years on both coasts of the United States.
His film debut happened when he was in high school. At 17 he wrote, produced and directed the award winning documentary film Sundown: The Future of Children and Drugs. The film debuted on Larry King Live in September 1991. Sundown won several notable "best documentary of the year" honors and was showcased on major talk shows and news programs around the world. Shane was also honored individually, in separate ceremonies, in both houses of Congress.
The critical acclaim Sundown received led nine-time Emmy winner Gregory Hoblit to invite a then 19 year old Shane to apprentice on the first season of NYPD Blue as a writer-director. Shane has credited the backstage pass to the brilliant, gritty series during a year when they were honored with a record 26 Emmy nominations as a front line film school.
Salerno is the co-writer and executive producer of Savages, directed by three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone, based on the acclaimed crime novel by Don Winslow which the New York Times voted as one of the "top ten books of 2010". The all-star cast includes Taylor Kitsch, John Travolta, Blake Lively, Uma Thurman, Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Aaron Johnson, Emile Hirsch and Mia Maestro. Universal Pictures will release the film in the fall of 2012.
Salerno one of the few screenwriters to have found success in both film and television: he's the co-writer of #1 blockbusters Armageddon and Shaft, and served as one of the writer/producers of Hawaii Five O during its Golden Globe-nominated first season.
Salerno is also one of the select screenwriters to have sold both pitches and spec scripts to studios for over $1 million.
By the age of 22 he was consistently writing the highest rated episodes of the hit Fox TV series New York Undercover. Shane's gritty, street wise episodes attracted the attention of film producers. At the end of the first season, Shane asked Universal television to be let out of his three-year contract in order to pursue the feature film opportunities that he was being offered.
The first feature screenwriting job Salerno accepted was the adaptation of the World War II submarine thriller Thunder Below for producer-director Steven Spielberg and the newly formed Dreamworks Pictures. Shane next sold the spec script A Season in Hell for $600,000 to Dino DeLaurentiis who also asked him to polish the screenplay of Breakdown starring Kurt Russell. Breakdown was released by Paramount Pictures to critical acclaim.
Salerno experienced his breakthrough at the age of 24 when director Michael Bay recruited Shane to rewrite the Jerry Bruckheimer produced Armageddon based on an original screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh. The blockbuster film debuted at #1 on July 1, 1998 and was the highest grossing film of the year, earning over $570 million worldwide.
In 1998, at the age of 25, Variety selected Shane as one of the "hottest new creatives on the film scene." Based on Thunder Below and Armageddon, John Singleton, the youngest director ever nominated for an Oscar, telephoned Shane and asked him to serve as his writing partner on "Shaft" which Paramount Pictures was mounting. The Singleton-Salerno collaboration (aided by novelist Richard Price) resulted in Shane's second #1 film when "Shaft" debuted at the top of the box office on June 16, 2000.
That year, Shane (now 27) returned to television by co-creating (with acclaimed novelist Don Winslow), executive producing and serving as show-runner, head writer, and music supervisor for the NBC television series UC: Undercover starring Vera Farmiga (Martin Scorsese's "The Departed"), Oded Fehr (Showtime's "Sleeper Cell") and Golden Globe winner Ving Rhames. The series won and was nominated for awards in acting, cinematography and sound.
Salerno is also the co-writer of the 3-D re-imagining of Fantastic Voyage, produced by James Cameron, Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini for Twentieth Century Fox.
On January 29, 2010, the website Deadline Hollywood broke an exclusive story and review of Salinger, a feature-length documentary about reclusive author J. D. Salinger that Salerno directed, produced and financed himself. The documentary was kept secret for five years. The film features interviews with 150 subjects including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Danny DeVito, John Guare, Martin Sheen, David Milch, Robert Towne, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow, Pulitzer Prize winners A. Scott Berg and Elizabeth Frank, Gore Vidal, and "many other fans, journalists, filmmakers, playwrights, and artists inspired by Salinger's work." Michael Fleming, the first journalist in the world to view the film, said Salerno's picture was "arrestingly powerful and exhaustively researched." Additionally, Fleming announced that Salerno had co-written a 700 page biography on Salinger with New York Times bestselling author David Shields. The Salinger film was profiled in Entertainment Weekly and Newsweek and is scheduled for release in 2012.
In 2010, Salerno joined the writing-producing team of Hawaii Five-0. In its first season, Hawaii Five-0 also won the "Favorite New TV Drama" at the 37th People's Choice Awards on January 5, 2011. Series star Scott Caan was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Series, Miniseries or Television Film for his role as Danny on Hawaii Five-0. In addition to his producing duties, Salerno was credited for writing the episode "Po'ipu" (Episode 9) on November 15, 2010, co-writing "El Malama" (Episode 16) on February 7, 2011 and "Ho'op'i" (Episode 20) on April 18, 2011 which featured a special guest appearance by Sean Combs.
In addition to his own writing, Salerno also runs The Story Factory a company that produces the work of screenwriters and authors. The company has had six New York Times bestsellers.
In 2004 Salerno became the youngest "Guest of Honor" speaker in the history of the Los Angeles Screenwriting Expo. He made follow up appearances in 2005, 2006 and 2011.- Writer
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Daniel Waters was born on 10 November 1962 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Heathers (1988), Hudson Hawk (1991) and Sex and Death 101 (2007).- Producer
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Jane Goldman was born on 11 June 1970 in England, UK. She is a producer and writer, known for Kick-Ass (2010), Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and Stardust (2007). She has been married to Jonathan Ross since August 1988. They have three children.- Writer
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Harry MacLean is known for In Broad Daylight (1991) and The Generation Why Podcast (2012).- Sold, produced, Award-Winning writer Sean Mick grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.
He studied film and art at Sonoma State University in Northern California, then continued his training through seminars with many of the top screenwriting "gurus" in Hollywood... including John Truby, Christopher Vogler & Robert McKee.
His influences include Howard Hawks, William Goldman, and Michael Mann.
A confirmed Bruce Lee "geek," he has trained in a variety of martial arts and has a black belt in Nippon Kempo Karate. Sean and his lovely wife Gina reside in Nevada not far from Lake Tahoe. They have two kids and three cats.
"The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. But we must never tell the sons of bitches." Irving J. Thalberg - Writer
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Writer, born in Bromley, Kent. He was apprenticed to a draper, tried teaching, studied biology in London, then made his mark in journalism and literature. He played a vital part in disseminating the progressive ideas which characterized the first part of the 20th-c. He achieved fame with scientific fantasies such as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898), and wrote a range of comic social novels which proved highly popular, notably Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Both kinds of novel made successful (sometimes classic) early films. A member of the Fabian Society, he was often engaged in public controversy, and wrote several socio-political works dealing with the role of science and the need for world peace, such as The Outline of History (1920) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind- Actor
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Dan Fogelman was born on 19 February 1976 in River Vale, Bergen County, New Jersey, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for This Is Us (2016), Life Itself (2018) and Tangled (2010). He has been married to Caitlin Thompson since 13 June 2015. They have one child.- Producer
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Born November 9, 1965 in Indianapolis, Indiana, US as Ryan Patrick Murphy, he is an American writer, director, and producer, responsible for creating such hits as Nip/Tuck (2003), Glee (2009) and American Horror Story (2011). His mother, J. Andy Murphy, was a writer and communications worker and his father was a circulation director in the newspaper industry. He has one brother. He attended a Catholic school till the eighth grade and graduated from Warren Central High School. He went on to study journalism at the Indiana University Bloomington, where he was also a member of a vocal ensemble, and went on to intern in the style section of the The Washington Post in 1986. In 1990 he got into screenwriting, but only in 1999 was his first story produced: it was Popular (1999), a teen comedy show, which he co-created with Gina Matthews and which run for two seasons. In 2003 he created Nip/Tuck (2003), which brought him his first Emmy nomination. He won the award six years later, when in 2009 he directed the pilot of his hit series Glee (2009) which he co-created with Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk. In 2011 he and Falchuk co-crated another highly popular series, American Horror Story (2011). in 2015 he was awarded the Award for Inspiration from amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. In 2018 Murphy signed a five-year $300 million development deal with Netflix. He is a pan equal opportunities activist, both through his movies and television projects which very often focus on the LGBTQ+ community, and as a creator of the Half Initiative, which aims at making Hollywood more inclusive for women and minorities. He's been married to photographer David Miller since 2012. They have three sons, Logan Phineas, Ford, and Griffin Sullivan.- Writer
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Bobby Miller is a writer/director known for making genre-bending comedies. His short film Tub and feature debut The Cleanse add horror and fantasy to the mix. The films' world premiered at Sundance and Sxsw, respectively, and have screened at film festivals worldwide. The Cleanse was released in theaters by Sony Pictures in 2018 and made RottenTomatoes Top 10 Best-reviewed horror films of 2018 list. He followed it up with directing Critters Attack!, a reboot of the cult horror/comedy franchise, for Warner Brothers Home Video in 2019. He currently voice directs for Rockstar Games and is working on his debut novel.