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Vincent Gallo. American-born, Buffalo, New York, 1961. Left home, moved to New York City in 1978, and began playing in the experimental musical group, Gray, with artist Jean Michel Basquiat. After leaving Gray, he formed the band, Bohack, and recorded the highly regarded avant-garde industrial noise album, "It Took Several Wives".
During the same period, Gallo also became known in New York City for his very unusual street performances, which were spontaneously executed in public and also witnessed by invited guests in the know. The One-Armed Man, The Man with No Face, Sandman, Boy Hit by a Car, and Boy Cries in Restaurant Window, to name a few. These radical public performances were upsetting and disturbing and were meant to provoke thought, self-reflection and consciousness. Gallo's invited guests could witness his performance's impact in this larger public context.
One invited guest, New York Underground filmmaker, Eric Mitchell, cast Gallo as the lead in his film, The Way It Is (1985), alongside newcomer Steve Buscemi. The Way It Is (1985) was Gallo's first appearance in a feature-length film, though previously he had directed himself in several short films, including If You Feel Froggy, Jump (1980), The Gunlover (1986) and Rocky 10, as well as the collaborations with filmmaker Michael Holman, Vincent Gallo as "Jesus Christ" (used in Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1996)) and Vampire LeStat.
Since his early performance art days, Gallo has continued to create very conceptual performance pieces. Examples are a series of protesting of protests. Gallo has also created his own website, which upon closer examination, is actually a highly conceptual artwork resonating with his early performance work.
On his website www.vincentgallo.com in the merchandise section, Gallo is selling his sperm and sexual fantasies as conceptual works. Gallo's Internet art questions celebrity, procreation, ego, social agenda, and views of religion, race and sexuality. These public offerings are motivated by extreme sensitivity, concept and thoughtfulness, however their presentation appears crude and offensive. Misinterpretation of this work is common and Gallo is often incorrectly categorized as a racist, sexist, homophobe. Gallo has had over 25 one-man shows of his paintings, including several with famed New York art dealer, Annina Nosei, and 4 museum shows including one at the Hara Museum in Tokyo, Japan.
Gallo has also released several musical albums including 2 on the prestigious Warp Records label-When and Recordings of Music for Film. Gallo wrote, composed and performed the original music for the films Buffalo '66 (1998), The Agent (1990) and Promises Written in Water (2010).
In the 1980s, Gallo reached the professional level of Grand Prix motorcycle racing, though he did not win a national championship. Gallo is one of the actual motorcycle riders in his feature film, The Brown Bunny (2003).
For many years, Gallo has been known and highly respected in hi-fi and music recording circles and is considered by many professionals in the field as having world-class knowledge and experience. He has been published many times by specialty magazines focused on high fidelity designs and equipment as well as music recording techniques and equipment. His collection of vintage hi-fi and recording gear, as well as musical instruments, is amongst the largest and most refined in the world. Gallo is also a fanatic record collector, owning over 35,000 vinyl LP's.
Gallo has no agent, manager, assistant or intern and he makes his films without producers, and with extremely scaled down crews. He has self-distributed his movies and is directly involved in his films' sales for distribution. Gallo has also created all of his films' trailers and posters.
Gallo is one of the most misunderstood, misquoted, misrepresented talents in the past 25 years and a brief review of his IMDb page suggests he has also been incredibly prolific.- Director
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- Camera and Electrical Department
Francis Lawrence is an American filmmaker. He started directing over sixty music videos before he directed the cult classic Keanu Reeves film Constantine, I Am Legend and Water for Elephants. He also directed The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2, and Red Sparrow, which all starred Jennifer Lawrence.- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Eli Raphael Roth was born in Newton, Massachusetts, to Cora (Bialis), a painter, and Sheldon H. Roth, a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and clinical professor. His family is Jewish (from Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Poland). He began shooting Super 8 films at the age of eight; after watching Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and vomiting, and deciding he wanted to be a producer/director. With his brothers and friends, ketchup for blood, and his father's power tools, he made over 50 short films before attending film school at NYU, where he won a student Academy Award and graduated summa cum laude in 1994.
Eli worked in film and theater production in New York City for many years, doing every job from production assistant to assistant editor to assistant to the director. At the age of 20, Roth was development head for producer Fred Zollo, a position he soon left to write full time. To earn a living, Roth did budgets and schedules for the films A Price Above Rubies (1998) and Illuminata (1998), and often worked as a stand-in, where he could watch directors work with the actors. In 1995, Roth co-wrote the script that would eventually become Cabin Fever (2002) with friend Randy Pearlstein, and the two spent many years unsuccessfully trying to get the film financed. Roth left New York in 1999 to live in Los Angeles, and within four months got funding for his animation series Chowdaheads (1999). Roth and friend Noah Belson (Cabin Fever (2002)'s Guitar Man) wrote and voiced the episodes, which Roth produced, directed, and designed. The episodes were due to run on WCW's #1 rated series WCW Monday Nitro (1995) but the CEO was fired a day before they were scheduled to air, and the episodes never ran. Roth used the episodes to set up a stop motion series called The Rotten Fruit (2003) which he produced, directed, and animated, as well as co-wrote and voiced with friend Belson. Between the two animated series, Roth worked closely with director David Lynch, producing content for the website davidlynch.com.
In 2001, Roth filmed Cabin Fever (2002) on a shoestring budget of $1.5 million, with private equity he and his producers raised from friends and their family. The film was the subject of a bidding war at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, eventually won by Lion's Gate, instantly doubling their investors' money. It went on to not only be the highest-grossing film for Lion's Gate in 2003, but the most profitable horror film released that year, garnering critical acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Empire Magazine, and such filmmakers as Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, and Tobe Hooper. Roth used the film's success to launch a slew of projects, including The Box (2009), a horror thriller he co-wrote with Richard Kelly. In May 2003, Roth joined forces with filmmakers Boaz Yakin, Scott Spiegel, and Greenestreet Films in New York to form Raw Nerve, LLC, a horror film production company.
In 2014, Eli married Chilean model and actress Lorenza Izzo.- Director
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- Cinematographer
Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on April 13, 1944, Charles Burnett moved with his family to the Watts area of Los Angeles at an early age. He describes the community of having a robust mythical connection with the South as a result of having so many Southern transplants, an atmosphere which has informed much of his work. Burnett went to UCLA, where he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Filmmaking. There, he was greatly influenced by professors Elyseo Taylor-creator of the Ethno-Communications department-and Basil Wright-the English documentarian famous for Night Mail and Songs of Ceylon. He became fast friends with fellow future greats like Haile Gerima (Sankofa), and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), collaborating with them and others on many projects. Burnett cites Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, and Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker) as important influences. In 1988, Burnett received the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the "genius grant"), which helped him support his young family and concentrate on his then, newest script. With Danny Glover parlaying his success in Lethal Weapon, they wrangled funding for the production of Burnett's To Sleep With Anger. Glover, playing a vaguely supernatural Southern trickster overstaying his welcome while visiting family, found perhaps his most critically acclaimed role. It won the 1991 Independent Spirit Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay for Burnett and Best Actor for Glover. The Library of Congress selected Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger to be inducted into the National Film Registry. The National Society of Film Critics honored Burnett for best screenplay for To Sleep With Anger, making him the first African-American to win in this category in the group's 25year history. While the Los Angeles Times reported that Burnett's movie reminded viewers of Anton Chekov, Time magazine wrote: "If Spike Lee's films are the equivalent of rap music - urgent, explosive, profane, then Burnett's movie is good, old urban blues." The film also received a Special Jury Recognition Award at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival and a Special Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Both Burnett and Glover were nominated for New York Film Critics Circle Awards. In 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival honored Burnett with a retrospective, Witnessing For Everyday Heroes, presented at New York's Walter Reade Theater of Lincoln Center. Burnett has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the J. P. Getty Foundation. He is also the winner of the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award, and one of the very few people ever to be honored with Howard University's Paul Robeson Award for achievement in cinema. The Chicago Tribune has called him "one of America's very best filmmakers" and the New York Times named him "the nation's least known great filmmaker and most gifted black director." Burnett has even had a day named after him - the mayor of Seattle declared February 20, 1997, as Charles Burnett Day. Burnett directed a documentary on Nat Turner and one chapter (Warming by The Devil's Fire) of the six part documentary, The Blues, a production of Martin Scorsese's CPA Productions with OffLine Entertainment and in November of 2017 Charles Burnett received an Academy Award for his life's work. His latest film is entitled, "The Power To Heal", a documentary about the integration of hospitals during the Civil Rights Era.