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- Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke his will and caused insecurity and guilt, that affected his whole life. Their tensions come out in "The Trial" and in "The Castle" in form of a hopeless conflict with an overwhelming force. His mother, Julie Lowy, came from an intellectual, spiritual family of the Jewish merchant and brewer Jakob Lowy. Although her influence was diminished by his dominating father, she shared her son's delicate nature. Kafka had a few relationships with women and was engaged, but never made a family.
He finished the German National Gymnasium in 1901, and graduated from the German University in Prague as Doctor of Law in 1906. He worked for insurance companies for the rest of his life. His profession shaped the formal, cold language of his writings which avoided any sentimental interpretations, leaving it to the reader. In 1908 Kafka published eight short stories compiled under the title "Meditation". In 1911 he became interested in Yiddish theater, that absorbed him more than abstract Judaism. In 1912 he began writing "The Judgment", which was more than an autobiography, providing a therapeutical outlet for his wrecked soul. The same year he started "Metamorphosis" about a traveling salesman, who transformed into a giant bug. In 1914 he wrote "In the Penal Colony" and "The Trial", which is regarded to be his best work. His style remains unique, though literary connections may be traced to Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolay Gogol, as well as to Chinese parables, to the Bible and Talmud.
As a Jew Kafka experienced social tensions and isolation from the German community, so very few of his writings could find readers during his life. His three sisters later died in the Nazi concentration camps. He suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, insomnia, and tuberculosis, complicated by laryngitis, that caused him the loss of his voice before his death in 1924. He was comforted by his girlfriend Dora Diamant, who had broken away from her Hasidic shtetl in Poland. She was 19 when they met in 1923 and Kafka wrote to her parents, asking for their permission to marry her. Their answer was negative, because Kafka presented himself as a non-religious Jew. He asked Dora to destroy his manuscripts after his death, but she kept about 20 notebooks of his writings and 35 private letters, that were reportedly confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 and are not yet recovered. His university friend Max Brod became his editor, biographer and literary agent, who preserved and published most of Kafka's works posthumously, including the unfinished novels "The Trial", "The Castle", and "America". - Writer
- Producer
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Director, writer, and producer Lilly Wachowski was born in 1967 in Chicago, the daughter of Lynne, a nurse and painter, and Ron, a businessman. Lilly was educated at Kellogg Elementary School in Chicago, before moving on to Whitney M. Young High School. After graduating from high school, she attended Emerson College in Boston but dropped out.
Lilly teamed up with her older sibling, Lana Wachowski, and began working on films. Their first script was optioned and formed the basis for the film Assassins (1995). The Wachowskis went on to make their directorial debut with the self-written Bound (1996), which was well-received. They followed this with the smash hit The Matrix (1999) and went on to produce two successful sequels, The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003).
Other projects include scripting and producing the cult hit V for Vendetta (2005), a live-action version of a Japanese anime series; Speed Racer (2008); Cloud Atlas (2012); and the ambitious epic Jupiter Ascending (2015).- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
A graduate of Mississippi State University and Ole Miss Law School, John Grisham obtained his law degree in 1981 and practiced law for about 10 years, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. He was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1983 and served until 1990. He gave up his law practice to write full-time. He began writing in 1984, and three years later finished his first novel, "A Time To Kill", published by Wynwood Press in June 1988. He is the best-selling author of "A Time to Kill", "The Firm", "The Pelican Brief" and "The Client". He lives with his wife and their two children on a farm in Oxford, Mississippi.- Writer
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William Monahan was born on 3 November 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for The Departed (2006), London Boulevard (2010) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005).- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the toothbrush mustache, bowler hat, bamboo cane, and a funny walk.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, England on April 16, 1889, to Hannah Harriet Pedlingham (Hill) and Charles Chaplin, both music hall performers, who were married on June 22, 1885. After Charles Sr. separated from Hannah to perform in New York City, Hannah then tried to resurrect her stage career. Unfortunately, her singing voice had a tendency to break at unexpected moments. When this happened, the stage manager spotted young Charlie standing in the wings and led him on stage, where five-year-old Charlie began to sing a popular tune. Charlie and his half-brother, Syd Chaplin spent their lives in and out of charity homes and workhouses between their mother's bouts of insanity. Hannah was committed to Cane Hill Asylum in May 1903 and lived there until 1921, when Chaplin moved her to California.
Chaplin began his official acting career at the age of eight, touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads. At age 18, he began touring with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, joining them on the troupe's 1910 United States tour. He traveled west to California in December 1913 and signed on with Keystone Studios' popular comedy director Mack Sennett, who had seen Chaplin perform on stage in New York. Charlie soon wrote his brother Syd, asking him to become his manager. While at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in and directed 35 films, starring as the Little Tramp in nearly all.
In November 1914, he left Keystone and signed on at Essanay, where he made 15 films. In 1916, he signed on at Mutual and made 12 films. In June 1917, Chaplin signed up with First National Studios, after which he built Chaplin Studios. In 1919, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists (UA).
Chaplin's life and career was full of scandal and controversy. His first big scandal was during World War I, at which time his loyalty to England, his home country, was questioned. He had never applied for American citizenship, but claimed that he was a "paying visitor" to the United States. Many British citizens called Chaplin a coward and a slacker. This and other career eccentricities sparked suspicion with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who believed that he was injecting Communist propaganda into his films. Chaplin's later film The Great Dictator (1940), which was his first "talkie", also created a stir. In the film, Chaplin plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler. Some thought the film was poorly done and in bad taste. However, the film grossed over $5 million and earned five Academy Award Nominations.
Another scandal occurred when Chaplin briefly dated 22 year-old Joan Barry. However, Chaplin's relationship with Barry came to an end in 1942, after a series of harassing actions from her. In May 1943, Barry returned to inform Chaplin that she was pregnant and filed a paternity suit, claiming that the unborn child was his. During the 1944 trial, blood tests proved that Chaplin was not the father, but at the time, blood tests were inadmissible evidence, and he was ordered to pay $75 a week until the child turned 21.
Chaplin also was scrutinized for his support in aiding the Russian struggle against the invading Nazis during World War II, and the United States government questioned his moral and political views, suspecting him of having Communist ties. For this reason, HUAC subpoenaed him in 1947. However, HUAC finally decided that it was no longer necessary for him to appear for testimony. Conversely, when Chaplin and his family traveled to London for the premier of Limelight (1952), he was denied re-entry to the United States. In reality, the government had almost no evidence to prove that he was a threat to national security. Instead, he and his wife decided to settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin was married four times and had a total of 11 children. In 1918, he married Mildred Harris and they had a son together, Norman Spencer Chaplin, who lived only three days. Chaplin and Harris divorced in 1920. He married Lita Grey in 1924, who had two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin. They were divorced in 1927. In 1936, Chaplin married Paulette Goddard, and his final marriage was to Oona O'Neill (Oona Chaplin), daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1943. Oona gave birth to eight children: Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Josephine Chaplin, Victoria Chaplin, Eugene Chaplin, Jane Chaplin, Annette-Emilie Chaplin, and Christopher Chaplin.
In contrast to many of his boisterous characters, Chaplin was a quiet man who kept to himself a great deal. He also had an "un-millionaire" way of living. Even after he had accumulated millions, he continued to live in shabby accommodations. In 1921, Chaplin was decorated by the French government for his outstanding work as a filmmaker and was elevated to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1952. In 1972, he was honored with an Academy Award for his "incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century". He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. No formal reason for the honour was listed. The citation simply reads "Charles Spencer Chaplin, Film Actor and Producer".
Chaplin's other works included musical scores that he composed for many of his films. He also authored two autobiographical books, "My Autobiography" (1964) and its companion volume, "My Life in Pictures" (1974).
Chaplin died at age 88 of natural causes on December 25, 1977 at his home in Vevey, Switzerland. His funeral was a small and private Anglican ceremony according to his wishes. In 1978, Chaplin's corpse was stolen from its grave and was not recovered for three months; he was re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement.
Six of Chaplin's films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress: The Immigrant (1917), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940).
Charlie Chaplin is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, whose movies were and still are popular throughout the world and have even gained notoriety as time progresses. His films show, through the Little Tramp's positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos, that the human spirit has and always will remain the same.The Kid (1921); The Gold Rush (1925); Modern Times; City Lights; The Great Dictator
Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Writer
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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.Notable Screenplays: The Odd Couple; The Goodbye Girl- Writer
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The women who both attracted and frightened him and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII - inspired the dreams that Fellini started recording in notebooks in the 1960s. Life and dreams were raw material for his films. His native Rimini and characters like Saraghina (the devil herself said the priests who ran his school) - and the Gambettola farmhouse of his paternal grandmother would be remembered in several films. His traveling salesman father Urbano Fellini showed up in La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963). His mother Ida Barbiani was from Rome and accompanied him there in 1939. He enrolled in the University of Rome. Intrigued by the image of reporters in American films, he tried out the real life role of journalist and caught the attention of several editors with his caricatures and cartoons and then started submitting articles. Several articles were recycled into a radio series about newlyweds "Cico and Pallina". Pallina was played by acting student Giulietta Masina, who became his real life wife from October 30, 1943, until his death half a century later. The young Fellini loved vaudeville and was befriended in 1940 by leading comedian Aldo Fabrizi. Roberto Rossellini wanted Fabrizi to play Don Pietro in Rome, Open City (1945) and made the contact through Fellini. Fellini worked on that film's script and is on the credits for Rosselini's Paisan (1946). On that film he wandered into the editing room, started observing how Italian films were made (a lot like the old silent films with an emphasis on visual effects, dialogue dubbed in later). Fellini in his mid-20s had found his life's work.Greats: 81/2✍; La strada✍
Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Writer
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Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, the son of a priest. The film and T.V. series, The Best Intentions (1992) is biographical and shows the early marriage of his parents. The film Sunday's Children (1992) depicts a bicycle journey with his father. In the miniseries Private Confessions (1996) is the trilogy closed. Here, as in 'Den Goda Viljan' Pernilla August play his mother. Note that all three movies are not always full true biographical stories. He began his career early with a puppet theatre which he, his sister and their friends played with. But he was the manager. Strictly professional he begun writing in 1941. He had written a play called 'Kaspers död' (A.K.A. 'Kaspers Death') which was produced the same year. It became his entrance into the movie business as Stina Bergman (not a close relative), from the company S.F. (Swedish Filmindustry), had seen the play and thought that there must be some dramatic talent in young Ingmar. His first job was to save other more famous writers' poor scripts. Under one of that script-saving works he remembered that he had written a novel about his last year as a student. He took the novel, did the save-poor-script job first, then wrote a screenplay on his own novel. When he went back to S.F., he delivered two scripts rather than one. The script was Torment (1944) and was the fist Bergman screenplay that was put into film (by Alf Sjöberg). It was also in that movie Bergman did his first professional film-director job. Because Alf Sjöberg was busy, Bergman got the order to shoot the last sequence of the film. Ingmar Bergman is the father of Daniel Bergman, director, and Mats Bergman, actor at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theater. Ingmar Bergman was also C.E.O. of the same theatre between 1963-1966, where he hired almost every professional actor in Sweden. In 1976 he had a famous tax problem. Bergman had trusted other people to advise him on his finances, but it turned out to be very bad advice. Bergman had to leave the country immediately, and so he went to Germany. A few years later he returned to Sweden and made his last theatrical film Fanny and Alexander (1982). In later life he retired from movie directing, but still wrote scripts for film and T.V. and directed plays at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre for many years. He died peacefully in his sleep on July 30, 2007.Persona; The Passion of Anna; The Hour of the Wolf; The Seventh Seal
Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Actor
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An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry was English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, distant German and very remote Portuguese. The age-old story goes that the small town of his birth was won by John's grandfather in a poker game. John's father was the equally magnanimous character actor Walter Huston, and his mother, Rhea Gore, was a newspaperwoman who traveled around the country looking for stories. The only child of the couple, John began performing on stage with his vaudevillian father at age 3. Upon his parents' divorce at age 7, the young boy would take turns traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his father and the country with his mother on reporting excursions. A frail and sickly child, he was once placed in a sanitarium due to both an enlarged heart and kidney ailment. Making a miraculous recovery, he quit school at age 14 to become a full-fledged boxer and eventually won the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California, winning 22 of 25 bouts. His trademark broken nose was the result of that robust activity.
John married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Harvey, and also took his first professional stage bow with a leading role off-Broadway entitled "The Triumph of the Egg." He made his Broadway debut that same year with "Ruint" on April 7, 1925, and followed that with another Broadway show "Adam Solitaire" the following November. John soon grew restless with the confines of both his marriage and acting and abandoned both, taking a sojourn to Mexico where he became an officer in the cavalry and expert horseman while writing plays on the sly. Trying to control his wanderlust urges, he subsequently returned to America and attempted newspaper and magazine reporting work in New York by submitting short stories. He was even hired at one point by mogul Samuel Goldwyn Jr. as a screenwriter, but again he grew restless. During this time he also appeared unbilled in a few obligatory films. By 1932 John was on the move again and left for London and Paris where he studied painting and sketching. The promising artist became a homeless beggar during one harrowing point.
Returning again to America in 1933, he played the title role in a production of "Abraham Lincoln," only a few years after father Walter portrayed the part on film for D.W. Griffith. John made a new resolve to hone in on his obvious writing skills and began collaborating on a few scripts for Warner Brothers. He also married again. Warners was so impressed with his talents that he was signed on as both screenwriter and director for the Dashiell Hammett mystery yarn The Maltese Falcon (1941). The movie classic made a superstar out of Humphrey Bogart and is considered by critics and audiences alike--- 65 years after the fact--- to be the greatest detective film ever made. In the meantime John wrote/staged a couple of Broadway plays, and in the aftermath of his mammoth screen success directed bad-girl 'Bette Davis (I)' and good girl Olivia de Havilland in the film melodrama In This Our Life (1942), and three of his "Falcon" stars (Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet) in the romantic war picture Across the Pacific (1942). During WWII John served as a Signal Corps lieutenant and went on to helm a number of film documentaries for the U.S. government including the controversial Let There Be Light (1980), which father Walter narrated. The end of WWII also saw the end of his second marriage. He married third wife Evelyn Keyes, of "Gone With the Wind" fame, in 1946 but it too lasted a relatively short time. That same year the impulsive and always unpredictable Huston directed Jean-Paul Sartre's experimental play "No Exit" on Broadway. The show was a box-office bust (running less than a month) but nevertheless earned the New York Drama Critics Award as "best foreign play."
Hollywood glory came to him again in association with Bogart and Warner Brothers'. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a classic tale of gold, greed and man's inhumanity to man set in Mexico, won John Oscars for both director and screenplay and his father nabbed the "Best Supporting Actor" trophy. John can be glimpsed at the beginning of the movie in a cameo playing a tourist, but he wouldn't act again on film for a decade and a half. With the momentum in his favor, John hung around in Hollywood this time to write and/or direct some of the finest American cinema made including Key Largo (1948) and The African Queen (1951) (both with Bogart), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Moulin Rouge (1952). Later films, including Moby Dick (1956), The Unforgiven (1960), The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962), The Night of the Iguana (1964) and The Bible in the Beginning... (1966) were, for the most part, well-regarded but certainly not close to the level of his earlier revered work. He also experimented behind-the-camera with color effects and approached topics that most others would not even broach, including homosexuality and psychoanalysis.
An ardent supporter of human rights, he, along with director William Wyler and others, dared to form the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947, which strove to undermine the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the Hollywood blacklisting that was killing the careers of many talented folk, he moved to St. Clerans in Ireland and became a citizen there along with his fourth wife, ballet dancer Enrica (Ricki) Soma. The couple had two children, including daughter Anjelica Huston who went on to have an enviable Hollywood career of her own. Huston and wife Ricki split after a son (director Danny Huston) was born to another actress in 1962. They did not divorce, however, and remained estranged until her sudden death in 1969 in a car accident. John subsequently adopted his late wife's child from another union. The ever-impulsive Huston would move yet again to Mexico where he married (1972) and divorced (1977) his fifth and final wife, Celeste Shane.
Huston returned to acting auspiciously with a major role in Otto Preminger's epic film The Cardinal (1963) for which Huston received an Oscar nomination at age 57. From that time forward, he would be glimpsed here and there in a number of colorful, baggy-eyed character roles in both good and bad (some positively abysmal) films that, at the very least, helped finance his passion projects. The former list included outstanding roles in Chinatown (1974) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), while the latter comprised of hammy parts in such awful drek as Candy (1968) and Myra Breckinridge (1970).
Directing daughter Angelica in her inauspicious movie debut, the thoroughly mediocre A Walk with Love and Death (1969), John made up for it 15 years later by directing her to Oscar glory in the mob tale Prizzi's Honor (1985). In the 1970s Huston resurged as a director of quality films with Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Wise Blood (1979). He ended his career on a high note with Under the Volcano (1984), the afore-mentioned Prizzi's Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). His only certifiable misfire during that era was the elephantine musical version of Annie (1982), though it later became somewhat of a cult favorite among children.
Huston lived the macho, outdoors life, unencumbered by convention or restrictions, and is often compared in style or flamboyancy to an Ernest Hemingway or Orson Welles. He was, in fact, the source of inspiration for Clint Eastwood in the helming of the film White Hunter Black Heart (1990) which chronicled the making of "The African Queen." Illness robbed Huston of a good portion of his twilight years with chronic emphysema the main culprit. As always, however, he continued to work tirelessly while hooked up to an oxygen machine if need be. At the end, the living legend was shooting an acting cameo in the film Mr. North (1988) for his son Danny, making his directorial bow at the time. John became seriously ill with pneumonia and died while on location at the age of 81. This maverick of a man's man who was once called "the eccentric's eccentric" by Paul Newman, left an incredibly rich legacy of work to be enjoyed by film lovers for centuries to come.Greats: Sergeant York (1941) (1941)✍; The Maltese Falcon (1941) (1941)✍; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) (1948)✍; The African Queen (1951) (1951)✍
Other Notable Screenplay(s): Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) (1940)✎; The Asphalt Jungle (1950) (1950)✎; Moulin Rouge (1952) (1952); Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) (1957)✎; The Man Who Would Be King (1975) (1975)✎- Producer
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- Director
Joel Daniel Coen is an American filmmaker who regularly collaborates with his younger brother Ethan. They made Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail Caesar and other projects. Joel married actress Frances McDormand in 1984 and had an adopted son.:Representing the Coen brothers
Notable Screenplays:- 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).Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Director
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Mike Leigh is an English film and theatre director, screenwriter and playwright. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and further at the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique. He began his career as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s, before transitioning to making televised plays and films for BBC Television in the 1970s and '80s. Leigh is known for his lengthy rehearsal and improvisation techniques with actors to build characters and narrative for his films. His purpose is to capture reality and present "emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films." His films and stage plays, according to critic Michael Coveney, "comprise a distinctive, homogenous body of work which stands comparison with anyone's in the British theatre and cinema over the same period."
Leigh's most notable works include the black comedy-drama Naked (1993), for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes, the Oscar-nominated, BAFTA- and Palme d'Or-winning drama Secrets & Lies (1996), the Golden Lion-winning working-class drama Vera Drake (2004), and the Palme d'Or-nominated biopic Mr. Turner (2014). Other well-known films include the comedy-dramas Life Is Sweet (1990) Meantime (1983) and Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biographical film Topsy-Turvy (1999) and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). He won great success with American audiences with the female led films, Vera Drake (2004) starring Imelda Staunton, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) with Sally Hawkins, the family drama Another Year (2010), and the historical drama Peterloo (2018). His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy and Abigail's Party.
Leigh has helped to create stars - Liz Smith in Hard Labour, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party, Brenda Blethyn in Grown-Ups, Antony Sher in Goose-Pimples, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in Meantime, Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet, David Thewlis in Naked - and remarked that the list of actors who have worked with him over the years - including Paul Jesson, Phil Daniels, Lindsay Duncan, Lesley Sharp, Kathy Burke, Stephen Rea, Julie Walters - "comprises an impressive, almost representative, nucleus of outstanding British acting talent." His aesthetic has been compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and the Italian Federico Fellini. Ian Buruma, writing in The New York Review of Books in January 1994, commented: "It is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh. Like other original artists, he has staked out his own territory. Leigh's London is as distinctive as Fellini's Rome or Ozu's Tokyo."
Leigh was born to Phyllis Pauline (née Cousin) and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctor. Leigh was born at Brocket Hall in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, which was at that time a maternity home. His mother, in her confinement, went to stay with her parents in Hertfordshire for comfort and support while her husband was serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Leigh was brought up in the Broughton area of Salford, Lancashire. He attended North Grecian Street Junior School. He is from a Jewish family; his paternal grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Manchester. The family name, originally Lieberman, had been anglicised in 1939 "for obvious reasons". When the war ended, Leigh's father began his career as a general practitioner in Higher Broughton, "the epicentre of Leigh's youngest years and the area memorialised in Hard Labour." Leigh went to Salford Grammar School, as did the director Les Blair, his friend, who produced Leigh's first feature film Bleak Moments (1971). There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master, Mr Nutter, supplied the library with newly published plays.
Outside school Leigh thrived in the Manchester branch of Labour Zionist youth movement Habonim. In the late 1950s he attended summer camps and winter activities over the Christmas break all-round the country. Throughout this time the most important part of his artistic consumption was cinema, although this was supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte. His father, however, was deeply opposed to the idea that Leigh might become an artist or an actor. He forbade him his frequent habit of sketching visitors who came to the house and regarded him as a problem child because of his creative interests. In 1960, "to his utter astonishment", he won a scholarship to RADA. Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh started to hone his directing skills at East 15 Acting School where he met the actress, Alison Steadman.
Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, found himself being taught how to "laugh, cry and snog" for weekly rep purposes and so became a sullen student. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (in 1963), the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique on Charlotte Street. When he had arrived in London, one of the first films he had seen was Shadows (1959), an improvised film by John Cassavetes, in which a cast of unknowns was observed 'living, loving and bickering' on the streets of New York and Leigh had "felt it might be possible to create complete plays from scratch with a group of actors." Other influences from this time included Harold Pinter's The Caretaker-"Leigh was mesmerised by the play and the (Arts Theatre) production"- Samuel Beckett, whose novels he read avidly, and the writing of Flann O'Brien, whose "tragi-comedy" Leigh found particularly appealing. Influential and important productions he saw in this period included Beckett's Endgame, Peter Brook's King Lear and in 1965 Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a production developed through improvisations, the actors having based their characterisations on people they had visited in a mental hospital. The visual worlds of Ronald Searle, George Grosz, Picasso, and William Hogarth exerted another kind of influence. He played small roles in several British films in the early 1960s, (West 11, Two Left Feet) and played a young deaf-mute, interrogated by Rupert Davies, in the BBC Television series Maigret. In 1964-65, he collaborated with David Halliwell, and designed and directed the first production of Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre.
Leigh has been described as "a gifted cartoonist ... a northerner who came south, slightly chippy, fiercely proud (and critical) of his roots and Jewish background; and he is a child of the 1960s and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television."
Leigh has cited Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray among his favourite film makers. In addition to those two, in an interview recorded at the National Film Theatre at the BFI on 17 March 1991; Leigh also cited Frank Capra, Fritz Lang, Yasujiro Ozu and even Jean-Luc Godard, "...until the late 60s." When pressed for British influences, in that interview, he referred to the Ealing comedies "...despite their unconsciously patronizing way of portraying working-class people" and the early 60s British New Wave films. When asked for his favorite comedies, he replied, One, Two, Three, La règle du jeu and "any Keaton". The critic David Thomson has written that, with the camera work in his films characterised by 'a detached, medical watchfulness', Leigh's aesthetic may justly be compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Michael Coveney: "The cramped domestic interiors of Ozu find many echoes in Leigh's scenes on stairways and in corridors and on landings, especially in Grown-Ups, Meantime and Naked. And two wonderful little episodes in Ozu's Tokyo Story, in a hairdressing salon and a bar, must have been in Leigh's subconscious memory when he made The Short and Curlie's (1987), one of his most devastatingly funny pieces of work and the pub scene in Life is Sweet..."Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Producer
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Mr. Roth won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Forrest Gump & has been nominated for his screenplays of The Insider, Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, A Star is Born, & Dune. He wrote Mr. Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August, The Horse Whisperer, Ali, & Best Picture Nominee, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He was a producer of the Best Picture Nominee Mank. He received the WGA Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement.Notable Screenplays:- Actor
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His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was orphaned at 15 after his father's death in 1930 and became the ward of Dr. Maurice Bernstein of Chicago. In 1931, he graduated from the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. He turned down college offers for a sketching tour of Ireland. He tried unsuccessfully to enter the London and Broadway stages, traveling some more in Morocco and Spain, where he fought in the bullring.
Recommendations by Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott got him into Katharine Cornell's road company, with which he made his New York debut as Tybalt in 1934. The same year, he married, directed his first short, and appeared on radio for the first time. He began working with John Houseman and formed the Mercury Theatre with him in 1937. In 1938, they produced "The Mercury Theatre on the Air", famous for its broadcast version of "The War of the Worlds" (intended as a Halloween prank). His first film to be seen by the public was Citizen Kane (1941), a commercial failure losing RKO $150,000, but regarded by many as the best film ever made. Many of his subsequent films were commercial failures and he exiled himself to Europe in 1948.
In 1956, he directed Touch of Evil (1958); it failed in the United States but won a prize at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. In 1975, in spite of all his box-office failures, he received the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1984, the Directors Guild of America awarded him its highest honor, the D.W. Griffith Award. His reputation as a filmmaker steadily climbed thereafter.Notable Screenplays: Citizen Kane✍- Writer
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Best known for his cerebral, often nonlinear, storytelling, acclaimed Academy Award winner writer/director/producer Sir Christopher Nolan CBE was born in London, England. Over the course of more than 25 years of filmmaking, Nolan has gone from low-budget independent films to working on some of the biggest blockbusters ever made and became one of the most celebrated filmmakers of modern cinema.
At 7 years old, Nolan began making short films with his father's Super-8 camera. While studying English Literature at University College London, he shot 16-millimeter films at U.C.L.'s film society, where he learned the guerrilla techniques he would later use to make his first feature, Following (1998), on a budget of around $6,000. The noir thriller was recognized at a number of international film festivals prior to its theatrical release and gained Nolan enough credibility that he was able to gather substantial financing for his next film.
Nolan's second film was Memento (2000), which he directed from his own screenplay based on a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan. Starring Guy Pearce, the film brought Nolan numerous honors, including Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. Nolan went on to direct the critically acclaimed psychological thriller, Insomnia (2002), starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank.
The turning point in Nolan's career occurred when he was awarded the chance to revive the Batman franchise in 2005. In Batman Begins (2005), Nolan brought a level of gravitas back to the iconic hero, and his gritty, modern interpretation was greeted with praise from fans and critics alike. Before moving on to a Batman sequel, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced the mystery thriller The Prestige (2006), starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as magicians whose obsessive rivalry leads to tragedy and murder.
In 2008, Nolan directed, co-wrote, and produced The Dark Knight (2008). Co-written with by his brother Jonathan, the film went on to gross more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Nolan was nominated for a Directors Guild of America (D.G.A.) Award, Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.) Award and Producers Guild of America (P.G.A.) Award, and the film also received eight Academy Award nominations. The film is widely considered one of the best comic book adaptations of all times, with Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker receiving an extremely high acclaim. Ledger posthumously became the first Academy Award winning performance in a Nolan film.
In 2010, Nolan captivated audiences with the Sci-Fi thriller Inception (2010), starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, which he directed and produced from his own original screenplay that he worked on for almost a decade. The thought-provoking drama was a worldwide blockbuster, earning more than $800,000,000 and becoming one of the most discussed and debated films of the year, and of all times. Among its many honors, Inception received four Academy Awards and eight nominations, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Nolan was recognized by his peers with a W.G.A. Award accolade, as well as D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards nominations for his work on the film.
As one of the best-reviewed and highest-grossing movies of 2012, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) concluded Nolan's Batman trilogy. Due to his success rebooting the Batman character, Warner Bros. enlisted Nolan to produce their revamped Superman movie Man of Steel (2013), which opened in the summer of 2013. In 2014, Nolan directed, wrote, and produced the Science-Fiction epic Interstellar (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. released the film on November 5, 2014, to positive reviews and strong box-office results, grossing over $670 million dollars worldwide.
In July 2017, Nolan released his acclaimed War epic Dunkirk (2017), that earned him his first Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards, as well as winning an additional 3 Oscars. In 2020 he released his mind-bending Sci-Fi espionage thriller Tenet (2020) starring John David Washington in the lead role. Released during the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie grossed relatively less than Nolan's previous blockbusters, though it did do good numbers compared to other movies in that period of time. Hailed as Nolan's most complex film yet, the film was one of Nolan's less-acclaimed films at the time, yet slowly built a fan-base following in later years.
In July 2023, Nolan released his highly acclaimed biographic drama Oppenheimer (2023) starring Nolan's frequent collaborator Cillian Murphy- in the lead role for the first time in a Nolan film. The movie was a cultural phenomenon that on top of grossing almost 1 billion dollars at the Worldwide Box office, also swept the 2023/2024 award-season and gave Nolan his first Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, D.G.A. and P.G.A. Awards, as well as a handful of regional critics-circles awards and a W.G.A. nomination. Cillian's performance as quantum physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was highly acclaimed as well, and became the first lead performance in a Nolan film to win the Academy Award.
During 2023, Nolan also received a fellowship from the British Film Institute (BFI). In March 2024, it was announced that Nolan is to be knighted by King Charles III and from now on will go by the title 'Sir Christopher Nolan'.
Nolan resides in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Academy Award winner producer Dame Emma Thomas, and their children. Sir Nolan and Dame Thomas also have their own production company, Syncopy.Memento✍; Inception (2010)✍; The Prestige (2006)
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The son of Thomas William Powell and Mabel (nee Corbett). Michael Powell was always a self-confessed movie addict. He was brought up partly in Canterbury ("The Garden of England") and partly in the south of France (where his parents ran a hotel). Educated at Kings School, Canterbury and Dulwich College, he worked at the National Provincial Bank from 1922-25. In 1925 he joined Rex Ingram making Mare Nostrum (1926). He learned his craft by working at various jobs in the (then) thriving English studios of Denham and Pinewood, working his way up to director on a series of "quota quickies" (short films made to fulfill quota/tariff agreements between Britain and America in between the wars). Very rarely for the times, he had a true "world view" and, although in the mold of a classic English "gentleman", he was always a citizen of the world. It was therefore very fitting that he should team up with an émigré Hungarian Jew, Emeric Pressburger, who understood the English better than they did themselves. Between them, under the banner of "The Archers", they shared joint credits for an important series of films through the 1940s and '50s. Powell went on to make the controversial Peeping Tom (1960), a film so vilified by critics and officials alike that he didn't work in England for a very long time. He was "re-discovered" in the late 1960s and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese tried to set up joint projects with him.
In 1980 he lectured at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. He was Senior Director in Residence at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in 1981, and in fact married Scorsese's longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker. He died of cancer in his beloved England in 1990.- Writer
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Dudley Nichols was born on 6 April 1895 in Wapakoneta, Ohio, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Sister Kenny (1946), The Informer (1935) and Stagecoach (1939). He was married to Esther "Esta" Varez. He died on 4 January 1960 in Hollywood, California, USA.- Actress
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When Ruth Gordon convinced her father, a sea captain, to let her pursue acting she came to New York and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She acted in a few silents made at Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1915. She made her Broadway debut in "Peter Pan" as Nibs the same year. The next 20 years she spent on stage, even appearing at the Old Vic in London in the successful run of "The Country Wife" in 1936. Nearly 25 years after her film debut, she returned to movies briefly. Her most memorable role during this period in the early 1940s was as Mary Todd in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940).
She left Hollywood to return to theater. Back in New York, she married Garson Kanin in 1942 (her first husband Gregory Kelly, a stage actor, died in 1927). She began writing plays, and, later, her husband and she collaborated on screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, whose screen relationship was modeled on their own marriage. She returned to film acting during the 1960s. It is during this last period of her career that she became a movie star, with memorable roles in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971). She wrote several books during the mid-1970s and appeared on TV. She won an Emmy for her role on Taxi (1978) in 1979.- Writer
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The most internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel was born in a small town (Calzada de Calatrava) in the impoverished Spanish region of La Mancha. He arrived in Madrid in 1968, and survived by selling used items in the flea-market called El Rastro. Almodóvar couldn't study filmmaking because he didn't have the money to afford it. Besides, the filmmaking schools were closed in early 70s by Franco's government. Instead, he found a job in the Spanish phone company and saved his salary to buy a Super 8 camera. From 1972 to 1978, he devoted himself to make short films with the help of of his friends. The "premieres" of those early films were famous in the rapidly growing world of the Spanish counter-culture. In few years, Almodóvar became a star of "La Movida", the pop cultural movement of late 70s Madrid. His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), was made in 16 mm and blown-up to 35 mm for public release. In 1987, he and his brother Agustín Almodóvar established their own production company: El Deseo, S. A. The "Almodóvar phenomenon" has reached all over the world, making his films very popular in many countries.Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Writer
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Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on February 11, 1909, Joseph Leo Mankiewicz first worked for the movies as a translator of intertitles, employed by Paramount in Berlin, the UFA's American distributor at the time (1928). He became a dialoguist, then a screenwriter on numerous Paramount productions in Hollywood, most of them Jack Oakie vehicles. Still in his 20s, he produced first-class MGM films, including The Philadelphia Story (1940). Having left Metro after a dispute with studio chief Louis B. Mayer over Judy Garland, he then worked for Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, producing The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), when Ernst Lubitsch's illness first brought him to the director's chair for Dragonwyck (1946). Mankiewicz directed 20 films in a 26-year period, successfully attempted every kind of movie from Shakespeare adaptation to western, from urban sociological drama to musical, from epic film with thousands of extras to a two-character picture. A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950) brought him wide recognition along with two Academy Awards for each as a writer and a director, seven years after his elder brother Herman J. Mankiewicz won Best Screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941). His more intimate films like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Barefoot Contessa (1954)--his only original screenplay--and The Honey Pot (1967) are major artistic achievements as well, showing Mankiewicz as a witty dialoguist, a master in the use of flashback and a talented actors' director (he favored English actors and had in Rex Harrison a kind of alter-ego on the screen).- Writer
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Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, arguably the most talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction, Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route. While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company. In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time, he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel, "Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his first screen credit for the B-move Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added, Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly influenced by Captain January (1936), which had been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as Devil's Playground (1937) showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he returned to Warners for The Kid from Kokomo (1939)), and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won his first Oscar nod for RKO's Kitty Foyle (1940), for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war. Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began demonizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too. However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year Victor Fleming's great patriotic war movie A Guy Named Joe (1943), with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story was a separate Oscar category and David Boehm and Chandler Sprague were nominated in that category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin Mission to Moscow (1943), few films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did was Tender Comrade (1943) , which Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien / Edward G. Robinson vehicle, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood "gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years. Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry. Trumbo's screenplay for Tender Comrade (1943), which concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda. However, writer-producer James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry] profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr' , Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, and Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others - refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were communist. As Arthur Miller has pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of $1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10 screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild (John Howard Lawson had been one of the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood. Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked, as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself, characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood 10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic Gun Crazy (1950) (AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953) (with screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as a front), and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) for director Otto Preminger and upon which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original story of 1956 for The Brave One (1956). Rich was not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer. Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning The Brave One (1956), it triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers. In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for the screenplay adapted from his novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English, which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It was - Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus, and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii (1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his famous anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for Papillon (1973), in which he also had a cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (which had supported the black list), Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a belated Oscar to Trumbo for his The Brave One (1956) script, now officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later, AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10, 1976. At his memorial service, Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."- Writer
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Herman J. Mankiewicz, now known primarily as the man who co-wrote Citizen Kane (1941) with Hollywood's greatest wunderkind, Orson Welles, was one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood and the head of Paramount's screen-writing department in the late 1920s and early '30s. He reached the pinnacle of his craft soon after arriving in Hollywood, then started to make a quickening descent as alcoholism and cynicism adversely affected his career by the end of that decade. His collaboration with Welles, which brought both men the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1942, gave his career a boost in the early 1940s, and he garnered another Oscar nod the following year for writing The Pride of the Yankees (1942) about the recently deceased New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig.
Herman was born on November 7, 1897 in New York City, the son of Johanna (Blumenau) and Franz Mankiewicz. His parents were Jewish emigrants from Germany, and after living in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the family, along with Herman's kid brother Joe, moved back to the Big Apple in 1913. Mankiewicz took a degree in philosophy at Columbia and became an editor of the "American Jewish Chronicle" before going to fight the Great War with the Marine Corps.
The hard-drinking Mankiewicz, like so many of the screenwriters of the Talkie period, started out as a newspaperman. After World War One was over, he was hired by the Paris-based American Red Cross News Service, eventually moving on to the "Chicago Tribune" where he covered German politics in Berlin. He served as dancer Isadora Duncan's publicist while in Europe.
A married man who ultimately sired three children with his long-suffering wife, the former Sara Aaronson, Mankiewicz returned to the city of his birth to write for the "New York World". He established himself as a prime wit rivaled only by George S. Kaufman, and pieces he wrote appeared in the top magazines of the time, including "Vanity Fair." He eventually worked at the "New York Times" with Kaufman as a drama critic before moving on to the "New Yorker" magazine, where he served in the same capacity. He also tried his hand as a Broadway dramatist. His comedy "The Good Fellow" was a flop in 1926, closing after seven performances, though his next effort, "The Wild Man of Borneo (1941)" that he co-wrote with Marc Connelly, lasted all of 15 performances before closing in 1927.
In the last years of silent pictures, Mankiewicz heeded the admonition of Horace Greeley to "Go West, young man" and moved to Hollywood. He wrote intertitles, most notably for Josef von Sternberg's classic The Last Command (1928). Paramount made him the chief of their scenario department, where he hired talented writers in his own mold, men like Ben Hecht, another hard-drinking, ink-stained wretch from the newspaper industry. "Mank" was a talented wordsmith and he soon became the highest paid writer in Hollywood, as his position was solidified with the advent of sound and the need for real dialogue that could be spoken onscreen by actors, not read by audiences, many of whom moved their lips while following along, eyes agog. The new Talkies demanded fast, crisp dialogue, and Mank was the man to provide it. His biting wit and taste for satire went down well with the audiences for the new Talkies. He eventually brought his kid brother Joseph L. Mankiewicz to Hollywood. (With four Oscars out of 10 nominations, Joe -- a triple threat as writer-director-producer -- eventually surpassed his elder brother, creating some classics of his own such as All About Eve (1950).)
Herman Mankiewicz produced the The Marx Brothers pictures Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933). His penultimate gig as a producer at Paramount was on W.C. Fields's 1932 Olympics comedy Million Dollar Legs (1932), on which brother Joe worked as a writer. Surprisingly, Herman wold not produce another movie until 1949, but his bad-boy behavior, which included gambling as well as hard partying, apparently was taking its toll. Mankiewicz's career was hampered not just by his alcoholism, but also by his cynicism. He despised Hollywood.
Mankiewicz went back to New York in early 1932 to make his Broadway debut as an actor, playing a waiter, in the play "Blessed Event", which was a modest hit. Eventually, Paramount let him go. By 1934, he was a contact writer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and by the end of the decade, his reputation was suffering, as he had lost the lofty perch he once occupied.
Orson Welles claimed that he had to assign producer John Houseman to keep Mankiewicz sober during the drafting of the "Citizen Kane" screenplay. After that film gave his career a boost, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that he became even more erratic and unreliable due to his drinking. Mankiewicz apparently found it hard to fit into the increasingly hierarchical structure of the movie industry, which was far removed from the far more relaxed days of the early talkies.
He died in Hollywood, a place he despised, at the age of 55 on March 5, 1953.- Director
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Leo McCarey was born on 3 October 1896 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a director and writer, known for An Affair to Remember (1957), Going My Way (1944) and Love Affair (1939). He was married to Virginia Stella Martin. He died on 5 July 1969 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Michael Wilson was born on 1 July 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, USA. He was a writer, known for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and 5 Fingers (1952). He was married to Zelma Wilson. He died on 9 April 1978 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.
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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.- Writer
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Son of a small shopkeeper, he attended Manchester Grammar School. He later said that he made poor uses of his opportunities there. He went to work in an insurance office, but later entered Manchester University, taking a degree in History. A post-graduate year at Exeter University led to a schoolmaster's position, first at a village school in Devon, then for seven years at Millfield. During this time he wrote a dozen radio plays, which were broadcast. Encouraged by the London success of his stage play "Flowering Cherry" he left teaching for full-time writing. 1960 saw two of his plays ("The Tiger And The Horse" and "A Man For All Seasons") running concurrently in the West End.- Writer
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Author, producer, and composer who earned a Bachelor of Science degree from CCNY, then a Purple Heart during World War II while serving in the US Army. Joining ASCAP in 1955, his chief musical collaborators included George Bassman and Harry Warren. His popular-song compositions include "Marty" and "Middle of the Night".Greats: Network (1976)✍
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French director François Truffaut began to assiduously go to the movies at age seven. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He left school at 14 and started working. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped the delinquent Truffaut and also when he was put in jail because he deserted the army. In 1953 Truffaut published his first movie critiques in "Les Cahiers du Cinema." In this magazine Truffaut, and some of his friends as passionate as he was, became defenders of what they call the "author policy". In 1954, as a test, Truffaut directed his first short film. Two years afterwords he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects.
The year 1957 was an important one for him: he married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor, and founded his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse; named after Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952). He also directed The Mischief Makers (1957), considered the real first step of his cinematographic work. His other big year was 1959: the huge success of his first full-length film, The 400 Blows (1959), was the beginning of the New Wave, a new way of making movies in France. This was also the year his first daughter, Laura Truffaut, was born.
From 1959 until his death, François Truffaut's life and films are mixed up. Let's only note he had two other daughters Eva Truffaut (b. 1961) and Josephine (b. 1982, with French actress Fanny Ardant). Truffaut was the most popular and successful French film director ever. His main themes were passion, women, childhood and faithfulness.- Writer
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Writer, director, producer, actor. Born in Los Angeles, California, USA, and raised in the seaport town of San Pedro. Got his start acting and writing for legendary exploitation director/producer Roger Corman. Came into his own during the 1970s when he was regarded as one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood. Began directing with mixed success in 1982. One of the best script doctors in Hollywood, he contributed crucial scenes to such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972).- Writer
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The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.
After moving to Paris, Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs in Paris, including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein. With financial assistance from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film, the 17-minute Un chien andalou (1929), in 1929, and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its shocking imagery (much of which - like the sliced eyeball at the beginning - still packs a punch even today). It made a deep impression on the Surrealist Group, who welcomed Buñuel into their ranks.
The following year, sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first feature, the scabrous witty and violent L'Age d'Or (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes, themes that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career. That career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War he emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros.
Moving to Mexico in the late 1940s, he teamed up with producer Óscar Dancigers and after a couple of unmemorable efforts shot back to international attention with the lacerating study of Mexican street urchins in The Young and the Damned (1950), winning him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
But despite this new-found acclaim, Buñuel spent much of the next decade working on a variety of ultra-low-budget films, few of which made much impact outside Spanish-speaking countries (though many of them are well worth seeking out). But in 1961, General Franco, anxious to be seen to be supporting Spanish culture invited Buñuel back to his native country - and Bunuel promptly bit the hand that fed him by making Viridiana (1961), which was banned in Spain on the grounds of blasphemy, though it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
This inaugurated Buñuel's last great period when, in collaboration with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carrière he made seven extraordinary late masterpieces, starting with Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). Although far glossier and more expensive, and often featuring major stars such as Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve, the films showed that even in old age Buñuel had lost none of his youthful vigour.
After saying that every one of his films from Belle de Jour (1967) onwards would be his last, he finally kept his promise with That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), after which he wrote a memorable (if factually dubious) autobiography, in which he said he'd be happy to burn all the prints of all his films- a classic Surrealist gesture if ever there was one.
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Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood's and Broadway's greatest writers, won an Oscar for best original story for Underworld (1927) at the first Academy Awards in 1929 and had a hand in the writing of many classic films. He was nominated five more times for the best writing Oscar, winning (along with writing partner and friend Charles MacArthur, with whom he wrote the classic play "The Front Page") for The Scoundrel (1935) (the other nominations were for Viva Villa! (1934) in 1935, Wuthering Heights (1939) (shared with MacArthur), Angels Over Broadway (1940) and Notorious (1946), the latter two for best original screenplay). Hecht wrote fast and wrote well, and he was called upon by many producers as a highly paid script doctor. He was paid $10,000 by producer David O. Selznick for a fast doctoring of the Gone with the Wind (1939) script, for which he received no credit and for which Sidney Howard won an Oscar, beating out Hecht and MacArthur's Wuthering Heights (1939) script.
Born on February 28, 1894, Hecht made his name as a Chicago newspaperman during the heady days of cutthroat competition among newspapers and journalists. As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, he wrote the column "1001 Afternoons in Chicago" and broke the "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, which led to the conviction and execution of Army war hero Carl Wanderer for the murder of his pregnant wife in 1921. The newspaper business, which he and MacArthur famously parodied in "The Front Page", was a good training ground for a screenwriter, as he had to write vivid prose and had to write quickly.
While in New York in 1926 he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The telegram read: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht moved to Hollywood, winding up at Paramount, working uncredited on the script for Lewis Milestone's adaptation of Ring Lardner's story The New Klondike (1926), starring silent superstar Thomas Meighan. However, it was his script for Josef von Sternberg's seminal gangster picture Underworld (1927) that got him noticed. From then until the 1960s, he was arguably the most famous, if not the highest paid, screenwriter of his time.
As a playwright, novelist and short-story writer, Hecht always denigrated writing for the movies, but it is for such films as Scarface (1932) and Nothing Sacred (1937) as well The Front Page (1931), based on his play of the same name, for which he is best remembered.
He died on April 18, 1964, in New York City from thrombosis. He was 70 years old.- Mario Puzo was born October 15, 1920, in "Hell's Kitchen" on Manhattan's (NY) West Side and, following military service in World War II, attended New York's New School for Social Research and Columbia University. His best-known novel, "The Godfather," was preceded by two critically acclaimed novels, "The Dark Arena" and "The Fortunate Pilgrim." In 1978, he published "Fools Die," followed by "The Sicilian" (1984) and "The Fourth K" (1991). Mario Puzo has also written several screenplays, including Earthquake (1974), Superman (1978), and all three "Godfather" movies, for which he received two Academy Awards. Mario's latest novel, 1996's "The Last Don," was made into a CBS television miniseries in May 1997, starring Danny Aiello, Kirstie Alley and Joe Mantegna. In 1997, Part II was aired. Also in 1997, Mario's "The Fortunate Pilgrim" was re-released by Random House. Mario passed away July 2, 1999, at his home in Bay Shore, Long Island. His last novel, "Omerta," will be published July, 2000. He is survived by his companion of 20 years, Carol Gino, and five children.Notable Screenplays: The Godfather (1972)✍; The Godfather: Part II (1974)✍; Superman
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Paul Haggis established himself over twenty years with an extensive career in television, before his big break into features arrived when he became the first screenwriter to garner two Best Film Academy Awards back-to-back for his scripts: "Million Dollar Baby" (2004) directed by Clint Eastwood, and "Crash" (2005) which Paul directed himself.
In 2006, among others, Haggis penned two Clint Eastwood productions, "Flags of our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima," for which he earned his third Best Screenplay Oscar nomination. He also co-wrote "Casino Royale," which garnered considerable acclaim for reinvigorating the James Bond spy franchise.
In 2007, Haggis wrote, directed, and produced "In the Valley of Elah." The film starred Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, and Susan Sarandon, and earned Jones a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance.
In 2010, his film "The Next Three Days" was released, starring Russell Crowe, Liam Neeson, and Elizabeth Banks.
And in 2013 he wrote and directed the romantic, personal drama "Third Person," which starred Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde, Mila Kunis, Adrien Brody, James Franco, and Kim Basinger.
Most recently, Haggis directed and executive produced all six episodes of the HBO mini-series "Show Me A Hero," starring Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, Winona Ryder, James Belushi, and Alfred Molina.
Currently, Haggis is co-directing a feature length documentary on the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, called "5B."
Equally committed to his private and social concerns, Haggis is the founder of Artists for Peace and Justice. Under this umbrella, many of his friends in the film business have come forward to major build schools and clinics serving the children of the slums of Haiti (www.APJNow.org).- Writer
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Working his way up from general factotum and gag writer to highly versatile writer/director, George Seaton was involved in many aspects of the entertainment industry along the way.
He was born George Stenius of Swedish parentage (his family hailed from Stockholm) in South Bend, IN, and grew up in Detroit. Determined to become an actor after leaving school, rather than pursuing a university education at Yale (much to his father's chagrin), George joined Jessie Bonstelle's stock company for $15 a week and changed his name to "Seaton", which he thought people would find easier to pronounce. In addition to his work on the stage, he supplied the voice to "The Lone Ranger" on Detroit radio station WXYZ, where he claimed to have originated the "Hi-yo, Silver!" catchphrase because of his inability to whistle. In 1933 he sent a play he had written to MGM's office in New York. Irving Thalberg, who read it, was less interested in the play than the man, in whom he recognized potential. George was consequently hired as a writer for $50 a week, to learn his new trade as an assistant to the famous writing team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Unfortunately, MGM parted company with the duo before George ever reached Hollywood.
Over the next few years George worked, often uncredited, as a gag writer and ideas man. The turning point in his career was his contribution to the classic The Marx Brothers picture A Night at the Opera (1935). Groucho Marx was sufficiently impressed to ask for his collaboration on the screenplay for A Day at the Races (1937). This zany comedy proved one of the brothers' biggest hits and, along with Robert Pirosh, George Oppenheimer and Al Boasberg, the name George Seaton appeared prominently among the writing credits. He also sidelined as a playwright, but his first attempt to create a hit on Broadway, "But Not Goodbye", closed in 1944 after just 23 performances. He tried again 23 years later with the comedy "Love in E Flat", to even poorer critical reception.
During a brief stint at Columbia (1939-40 he became the protégé of producer William Perlberg. When Perlberg left Columbia to join 20th Century-Fox in 1941 he took George with him. As a result of this alliance, George had carte blanche to write the screenplay for the religious drama The Song of Bernadette (1943), which was a box-office hit and garnered him an Academy Award nomination. He remained under contract to Fox as a writer until 1950, and as a director from 1945-50. His directorial debut, from his own screenplay, was the musical comedy Diamond Horseshoe (1945) starring Betty Grable. Featuring the classic song "The More I See You" (sung by Dick Haymes), "Diamond Horseshoe" turned a tidy profit for Fox, and for Billy Rose, who earned a $76,000 fee for allowing his nightclub (or a set thereof) to be used as the backdrop for the film. George's next assignments as writer/director included humorous family fare in the shape of Junior Miss (1945) and the period comedy The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947), with Grable and songs by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. "Miss Pilgrim" was a lamentable failure, as audiences were unwilling to accept Grable's "Million Dollar Legs" hidden beneath 1870s skirts.
His next film more than compensated for that failure: the perennial sentimental Christmas favorite Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which won Academy Awards for Seaton (Best Screenplay), Valentine Davies (Best Original Story) and Edmund Gwenn (Best Supporting Actor) as Kris Kringle. Two of the last Seaton-Perlberg collaborations at Fox were The Big Lift (1950), a well-mounted drama based on the Berlin airlift, filmed on location; and For Heaven's Sake (1950), an amusing variant on Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), starring Clifton Webb. In 1952 the team packed their bags and set up shop at Paramount, where they remained for eight years. For the remainder of the decade George worked as co-producer (with Perlberg) on several big-budget films, such as The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) and the classic western The Tin Star (1957). Seaton won his second Academy Award (again for Best Screenplay) for his adaptation of a play by Clifford Odets, The Country Girl (1954). The film was one of Paramount's top-grossing releases of the year. George was credited with eliciting Bing Crosby's best-ever dramatic performance as an alcoholic weakling and Grace Kelly's (who won the Academy Award as Best Actress) as his wife.
Seaton's output became more sparse during the following decade. He directed Fred Astaire and Lilli Palmer in the stagy but highly entertaining The Pleasure of His Company (1961) and William Holden and Lilli Palmer in the excellent World War II espionage drama The Counterfeit Traitor (1962). His last big success as director was the blockbuster Airport (1970), for which he won another Academy Award nomination. Until Jaws (1975), this was Universal's biggest money-making picture, earning the studio $45 million in film rentals in the US and Canada alone.
In addition to his direct involvement in making movies, George Seaton was also very active within Hollywood as President of the Screenwriter's Guild, President of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (from 1955-58) and Vice President of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. He was a recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1961. His wife, Phyllis Loughton, a former Hollywood dialogue director, became the first female mayor of Beverly Hills.- Writer
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Alvin Sargent was an American screenwriter who wrote Ordinary People and the Marvel screenplays for Sony: Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man. His writing for Spider-Man 2 got widespread acclaim. He also wrote a few episodes of Paper Moon. He was married to film producer Laura Ziskin, who produced the Spider-Man films he had written.- Writer
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Avid reader Charlie Kaufman wrote plays and made short films as a young student. He moved from Massapequa, New York to West Hartford, Connecticut in 1972 where he attended high school. As a comedic actor, he performed in school plays and, after graduation, he enrolled at Boston University but soon transferred NYU to study film. Charlie worked in the circulation department of the Star Tribune, in Minneapolis, in the late 1980s and moved to Los Angeles in 1991, where he was hired to write for the TV sitcom Get a Life (1990). He went on to write comedy sketches and a variety of TV show episodes. Between writing assignments, he wrote the inventive screenplay Being John Malkovich (1999), which created Hollywood interest and the attention of producer Steve Golin. Charlie works at home in Pasadena, California, where he lives with his wife Denise and children.- Writer
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Certainly idiosyncratic as a writer, Cameron Crowe has created a series of scripts that, while liked by the critics, were considered offbeat and difficult to market.
Cameron Bruce Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California, to Alice Marie Crowe (née George), a teacher and activist, and James A. Crowe, a real estate/telephone business owner. Cameron began his writing career as a 15-year-old high-school student, with articles on music submitted to Rolling Stone magazine, and only a few years later had his first script, for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). This movie was important for more than his career - his future wife Nancy Wilson had a small role in the film. Music remained important to him, with the rock band Pearl Jam playing a bit role in Singles (1992) well before they were "discovered". His next movie, Jerry Maguire (1996), took over five years to develop - a chance photograph of a football player and his agent was the initial inspiration. It took some 20 drafts and near terminal discouragement that he would ever get it right before the film finally made it to the screen. And this time his wife composed the music.- Actor
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Since starring in his first film, Splendor in the Grass (1961), Warren Beatty has been said to have demonstrated a greater longevity in movies than any actor of his generation. Few people have taken so many responsibilities for all phases of the production of films as producer, director, writer, and actor, and few have evidenced so high a level of integrity in a body of work.
In Rules Don't Apply (2016), he writes, produces, directs and stars in. Only Beatty and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) have been nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an actor, a director, a writer, and a producer for the same film. Beatty is the only person ever to have done it twice, for Heaven Can Wait (1978) and again for Reds (1981). Beatty has been nominated 15 times by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and 8 films he has produced have earned 53 Academy nominations. In 1982 he won the Academy Award for Directing and in 2000 was given the Academy's highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award.
He was awarded Best Director from the Directors Guild of America and Best Writer three times from the Writers Guild of America. He has received the Milestone Award from the Producers Guild, the Board of Governors Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, the Directors Award from the Costume Designers Guild, the Life Achievement Award from the Publicists Guild, and the Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery Award from the Art Directors Guild. The National Association of Theater Owners has honored him as Director of the Year, as Producer of the Year and as Actor of the Year.
He has won 16 awards from the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Golden Globes. In 1992, he was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France; in Italy he received the David di Donatello award in 1968 and again in 1981 and its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998; in 2001, he received the Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Sebastian International Film Festival; in 2002, he received the British Academy Fellowship from BAFTA; and in 2011, he was awarded the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film.
In December 2004, Beatty received The Kennedy Center Honor in Washington, D.C. In addition, he is the recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, the HFPA Cecile B. DeMille Award and many others. Politically active since the 1960's, Beatty campaigned with Robert F. Kennedy in his 1968 presidential campaign. That same year he traveled throughout the United States speaking in favor of gun control and against the war in Vietnam. In 1972 he took a year off from motion pictures to campaign with George McGovern.
In 1981, Beatty was a founding board member of the Center for National Policy. He is a founding member of The Progressive Majority, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has participated in the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.
Beatty serves on the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture and Television Fund Foundation. He previously served on the Board of Trustees of The Scripps Research Institute for several years. He has received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Americans for Democratic Action, the Brennan Legacy Award from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, and the Philip Burton Public Service Award from The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.
In multiple forums he has addressed campaign finance reform, the increasing disparity of wealth, universal health care and the need for the Democratic Party to return to its roots.
In March of 2013, he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
Beatty was born in Richmond, Virginia. He and his wife, Annette Bening, live in Los Angeles and have four children.
His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (MacLean), was a drama teacher from Nova Scotia, Canada, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, a professor of psychology and real estate agent, was from Virginia. His sister is actress Shirley MacLaine (born Shirley MacLean Beaty). His ancestry is mostly English and Scottish.- Writer
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Together with Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni is credited with defining the modern art film. And yet Antonioni's cinema is also recognized today for defying any easy categorization, with his films ultimately seeming to belong to their own distinctive genre. Indeed, the difficulty of precisely describing their category is itself the very quintessence of Antonioni's films. Among the most-cited contributions of Antonioni's cinema are their striking descriptions of that unique strain of post-boom ennui everywhere apparent in the transformed life and leisure habits of the Italian middle and upper classes. Detecting profound technological, political and psychological shifts at work in post-WWII Italy, Antonioni set out to explore the ambiguities of a suddenly alienated and dislocated Italy, not simply through his oblique style of narrative and characters, nor through any overt political messaging, but instead by tearing asunder the traditional boundaries of cinematic narrative in order to explore an ever shifting internal landscape expressed through architecture, urban space and the sculptural, shaping presence of objects, shapes and emotions invented by camera movement and depth of focus.
Antonioni deftly manipulates the quieter, indirect edges of cinematic structure, often so discretely that his existential puzzles are felt before they can be intellectualized. The negative space is as prominent as the positive, silence as loud as noise, absence as palpable as presence, and passivity as driving a force as direct action. Transgressing unspoken cinematic laws, Antonioni frequently focuses on female protagonists while refusing to sentimentalize or morally judge his characters and placing them on equal footing with the other elements within his total dynamic system, like sounds or set pieces. And he violates spoken rules with unconventional cutting techniques, fractured spatial and temporal continuity, and a camera that insistently lingers in melancholy pauses, long after the actors depart, as if drifting just behind an equally distracted, dissipating narrative. Leaving questions unanswered and plot points irresolute, dispensing with exposition, suspense, sentimentality and other cinematic security blankets, Antonioni releases the viewer into a gorgeous, densely layered fog to contemplate and wrestle with his characters' imprecise quandaries and endless possibilities. Culminating in tour de force endings that often reframe the narrative in a daring, parting act of deconstruction, Antonioni's rigorously formal, yet open compositions allow his great, unwieldy questions to spill over into the world outside the cinema and outside of time.
Born into a middle-class family in the northern Italian town of Ferrara, Antonioni studied economics at the University of Bologna where he also co-founded the university's theatrical troupe. While dedicating himself to painting, writing film reviews, working in financial positions and in different capacities on film productions, Antonioni suffered a few false starts before expressing his unique directorial vision and voice in his first realized short film, Gente del Po, a moving portrait of fisherman in the misty Po Valley where he was raised. Uncomfortable with the neo-realist thrust of Italian cinema, Antonioni directed a series of eccentric and oblique documentary shorts that, in retrospect, reveal his desire to investigate the psyche's mysterious interiors. In his first fictional feature, Story of a Love Affair, Antonioni immediately subtly challenged traditional plot and audience expectation in ways that anticipate the formal and emotional expressionist dynamic that would fully flower within the groundbreaking L'Avventura (1960).
Reversing its raucous 1960 premiere to an infuriated Cannes audience, L'Avventura was rapturously lauded by fellow artists and filmmakers and awarded a special Jury Prize "for its remarkable contribution toward the search for a new cinematic language." It also presented the controlled ambivalence of Monica Vitti, who would become his partner, muse and psychological constant throughout his famed trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962) in addition to the exquisite Red Desert (1964), a film that marked another significant shift toward expressive color, male leads and working with soft focus and faster cuts. After the phenomenal commercial success of the MGM-produced Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni was devastated by the anti-climactic box office disaster of Zabriskie Point (1970) and returned to documentary. Invited to make Chung Kuo China by the Chinese government, Antonioni delivered a mesmerizing yet unsentimental four-hour tour of China which was vehemently rejected by its solicitors. A few years later, Antonioni returned to fictional form in his last masterpiece, The Passenger (1975), an enigmatic fable of vaporous identity that offers a bold companion piece to L'Avventura. Aside from the thematically retrospective Identification of a Woman (1982) and a period film made for television, The Mystery of Oberwald (1980) in which he conducted unusual experiments with color and video, Antonioni closed out his career with mostly short films, many of which were made after he suffered a stroke in 1985.
Tremendously influential yet largely taken for granted, Antonioni made difficult, abstract cinema mainstream. Embracing an anarchic geometry, Antonioni turned the architecture of narrative filmmaking inside-out in the most eloquent way possible, with many of his iconic scenes eternally preserved in the depths of the cinema's psyche. Observing modern maladies without judgment - sexism, dissolution of family and tradition, ecological/technological quandaries and the eternal questions of our place in the cosmos - Antonioni's prescience continues to resonate deeply as we find our way in the quickly moving fog.- Director
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Oliver Stone has become known as a master of controversial subjects and a legendary film maker. His films are filled with a variety of film angles and styles, he pushes his actors to give Oscar-worthy performances, and despite his failures, has always returned to success.
William Oliver Stone was born in New York City, to Jacqueline (Goddet) and Louis Stone, a stockbroker. His American father was from a Jewish family (from Germany and Eastern Europe), and his mother, a war bride, was French (and Catholic). After dropping out of Yale University, he became a soldier in the Vietnam War. Serving in two different regiments (including 1rst Cavalry), he was introduced to The Doors, drugs, Jefferson Airplane, and other things that defined the sixties. For his actions in the war, he was awarded a Bronze Star for Gallantry and a Purple Heart. Returning from the war, Stone did not return to graduate from Yale. His first film was a student film entitled Last Year in Viet Nam (1971), followed by the gritty horror film Seizure (1974) for which he also wrote the screenplay. The next seven years saw him direct two films: Mad Man of Martinique (1979) and The Hand (1981), starring Michael Caine. He also wrote many screenplays for films such as Midnight Express (1978), Conan the Barbarian (1982), and Scarface (1983). Stone won his first Oscar for Midnight Express (1978), but his fame was just beginning to show.
1986 was the year that brought him much fame to the U.S.A. and the world. He directed the political film Salvador (1986) starring Oscar-nominated James Woods. However, his big hit was the Vietnam war film Platoon (1986) starring Charlie Sheen,Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, and Francesco Quinn. Berenger and Dafoe received Oscar nominations for their roles as the polar opposite sergeants who each influence the tour of duty of Chris Taylor (Sheen). Stone won his first Oscar for directing this film, which won Best Picture and was a hit at the box office. After Platoon (1986), Stone followed up with the critically acclaimed Wall Street (1987). The movie, starring Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas, focuses on the business world of tycoons and stock brokers. The film was well received and won an Oscar for Douglas' portrayal of the villainous Gordon Gekko. Stone returned immediately the following year with Talk Radio (1988), which talked of a foul-mouthed radio host (played by Eric Bogosian) who never fails to talk about the serious issues. Although it was not as successful as his last three films, Stone did not slow down at all. He directed Tom Cruise into an Oscar-nominated role in Born on the Fourth of July (1989).
The movie talked about the return of an embittered, crippled Vietnam soldier from the war. Although it failed to win Best Picture or Best Actor, Oliver Stone won an Academy Award for Directing, his third win to date. After Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Stone took a hand in producing several movies, including the Academy Award-winning film Reversal of Fortune (1990). He returned to the director's chair in 1991, once again with two films. Val Kilmer starred as the legendary and controversial Jim Morrison in Stone's psychedelic film The Doors (1991).
Despised by former Doors member Ray Manzarek, the film is nevertheless a wonderful achievement, with Kilmer pulling off an almost flawless impersonation of Morrison. Regardless of opinion, The Doors (1991) was overshadowed by Stone's colossal film JFK (1991), which Stone himself considers the best of his films. In Stone's movie, Jim Garrison tackles the conspiracy behind the murder of America's president John F. Kennedy. The large cast featured such well-known names as Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, John Candy, Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland, and Walter Matthau. This film represented a change in Stone's works, because it was with this film that he really began to explore the different camera styles and combining them together to create a multi-dimensional way of showing a movie. JFK (1991), as with Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), earned eight Oscar nominations and was one of Stone's most successful films. However, he failed to win a third Oscar for Best Director.
After this film, Stone directed his third Vietnam film to date. Heaven & Earth (1993) was a film about the war from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese girl, and also co-starred Tommy Lee Jones (who had received an Oscar nomination for JFK (1991)). Despite its new woman's perspective and several positive reviews, it was a box office failure. Stone was unfazed; his next film is perhaps his most notorious film to date. Adapting a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, Stone made Natural Born Killers (1994) starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore and Rodney Dangerfield in his only dramatic performance. The film was received well at the box office, while review were very mixed. Because of the violence that people claimed was inspired by the film, it was compared to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). As usual, Stone was at the center of controversial subjects; his next film Nixon (1995) was no exception. The film focused on the life of President Richard Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins, while featuring another well-known cast, including Joan Allen in the role of Nixon's wife. Both went on to receive Oscar nominations, while Stone received his sixth Oscar nomination for Screenwriting. The film got mixed reviews, and failed to recoup its budget.
Aside from directing, Stone has worked as a producer on several different films. There was, of course, the successful film Reversal of Fortune (1990), which won Jeremy Irons an Oscar and also nominated the director for an Oscar. There was also the highly praised and successful emotional drama The Joy Luck Club (1993) which centered around four Chinese immigrant women whose relationships with their daughters is affected by their own lives. Another highly praised Oscar nominated film was Milos Forman's classic film The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) starring Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton, and Courtney Love. Whether the crime/action film The Corruptor (1999) or the brilliant war epic Savior (1998), Stone has worked in a variety of film genres.
Stone had directed ten films in nine years; now however, he began to slow down. He directed the film U Turn (1997) starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez. As with Natural Born Killers (1994), it was a dark and twisted satire on violence, but did not have the same success as the former. Stone was set to direct several projects in the late 90's but they fell through and were not made. However, success came back to Stone in the Al Pacino film Any Given Sunday (1999). This sports movie centered on the life behind the game of football, and it starred an impressive cast that included frequent Stone collaborators James Woods and John C. McGinley. This film was one of his most successful box office films, and put him back on track.
The following years brought Stone no new theatrical films, though he did make three fascinating TV documentaries. Two of them, 'Looking for Fidel' and Comandante (2003) were interviews of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, while 'Persona Non Grata' was an interview of several Palestinian leaders. Stone was also set to direct American Psycho (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Beyond Borders (2003), starring Angelina Jolie and at the time, Ralph Fiennes. However, Stone dropped out of both projects, as did a number of the actors mentioned. Finally, five years after Any Given Sunday (1999), Stone directed a film he'd long wanted to make; the colossal epic Alexander (2004). Starring Colin Farrell as the Macedonian leader, Stone attempted to capture the essence of Alexander the Great through his conquests of the known world. The film focused on Alexander's relationships with his parents (a brilliant performance by Val Kilmer and a less impressive one by Angelina Jolie) and his relationships with his wife and childhood friend/ gay lover (played by Rosario Dawson and Jared Leto respectively).
Alexander (2004) was a critical failure, and failed to win back its budget domestically. Despite being one of 2004's highest grossing films internationally, and recouping its budget through DVD sales, Stone's pet project was heavily criticized. Despite a far superior version (Alexander Revisited) being released on DVD, the film's reputation remains low by the majority. Stone was personally stung at these attacks, but managed to rebound, if mildly, with his hopeful film World Trade Center (2006). The film centers on two firefighters trapped in the rubble of the twin towers. It received good reviews, and allowed Oliver to step forward from his failure towards the possibility of more films.
In late 2007, besides a number of projects Stone was set to direct "Pinkville", which would have been his fourth Vietnam film to date. It was set to star a large number of well known actors such as Bruce Willis, Toby Jones, Channing Tatum, Michael Pitt, Woody Harrelson, and Michael Peña. However, a week before shooting was to begin, the Writer's Strike was started, and the finance for the film was cut, using the strike as an excuse. After Willis backed out of the project, it was eventually scuttled, much like Stone's early productions of Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Stone turned to another project he had worked on with former Wall Street (1987) collaborator Stanley Weiser. The project was W. (2008), a biography on president George W. Bush. Stone initially cast Christian Bale in the role of Bush but the actor dropped out at the last minute. Josh Brolin was cast, and this followed with a large cast of well known Oscar nominated character actors such as Richard Dreyfuss, James Cromwell, and Ellen Burstyn. The film was made in a record four months, starting in June and released in October. The film opened to mixed reviews, and though film's budget was recouped, it was not a financial hit.
Stone then made the documentary South of the Border (2009), a documentary which focused on bringing to light the positive aspects of the left-wing governments in South America, particularly Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Stone was much less critical than usual, instead making the documentary as a response to the harsh reputation that Chavez has in the States. The documentary was poorly received in the States. Stone also began work on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan, and Eli Wallach, the film focuses on the 2008 economic crisis, and the return of Gordon Gekko from prison. The film was screened at Cannes to positive reception, and hailed as Stone's triumphant return. After this, Stone made a film adaptation of "Savages", a novel by Don Winslow . The movie follows two highly successful marijuana growers (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson ), whose shared girlfriend (Blake Lively) is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel and held for ransom. The movie also starred Salma Hayek, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta, and Emile Hirsch. The film was a return to the tense action and violence of Stone's earlier films, though it polarized many audience members due to the colorful narrations of Lively's vapid and naive character, as well as the film's ending.
After completing the ambitious and well-received television project The Untold History of the United States (2012), as well as a documentary on Hugo Chavez, Stone finally returned to feature films with Snowden (2016). Based on the life of American whistle blower Edward Snowden, Stone's film depicted his awakening to the truth behind the massive surveillances conducted by the NSA, and his attempt to warn the general public of what they did not know. The film was done independently, financed by Europeans on a low budget. It was also a return to form for Stone in a way that had not been seen since "Alexander". Joseph Gordon-Levitt, delivered a very strong performance as Snowden, with the supporting cast including Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Melissa Leo, Timothy Olyphant, and Nicolas Cage. Sadly, the film received a mixed response from critics, and was a box office disappointment.
Since then, Stone has returned to television for his next two projects. One is a series of interviews with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and the other is directing a new fictional series based on the abusive Guantanamo prison. It will be his first venture into fictional television.
Oliver Stone is a three-time Oscar winner, and although he has mostly been stung by critics of his films, he remains a well-known name today in the film industry. The films he directed have been nominated for 31 Academy Awards, including eight for acting, six for screen writing, and three for directing. There is no denying that Stone has cemented himself a position among the legends of Hollywood.Greats: Scarface (1983) (1983); Salvador (1986) (1986)✍; Platoon (1986) (1986)✍; Born on the Fourth of July (1989) (1989)✍; JFK (1991) (1991)✍
Other Notable Film(s): Midnight Express (1978) (1978)✎; Nixon (1995) (1995)✎- Producer
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Barry Lee Levinson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Violet (Krichinsky) and Irvin Levinson, who worked in furniture and appliance. He is of Russian Jewish descent. Levinson graduated from high school in 1960, attended college at American University in Washington, DC. He did well, but decided he wanted to go to Los Angeles. In LA, Levinson worked for the Oxford Company, studying acting, improvisation, and production; worked in comedy clubs, where he learned how to write; and began dating Valerie Curtin. In 1967, won a job writing for a local TV comedy show. He eventually performed his material on the show, winning a local Emmy. In the 70s, Levinson wrote for The Carol Burnett Show (1967) -- and won two Emmys in three years. Mel Brooks hired him for Silent Movie (1976), then, High Anxiety (1977). Levinson and Curtin married in 1975. They co-wrote: _...And Justice for All (1979)_, and other scripts. While Curtin performed in San Francisco, he wrote Diner (1982). MGM bought it and, with a budget of under $5 million, Levinson directed. Curtin and Levinson divorced in 1982. Levinson met Dianna Rhodes while he was filming Diner (1982). She lived in Baltimore, with her two children Patrick and Michelle Levinson. Levinson and Rhodes later married and had two more children, Sam Levinson and Jack Levinson. Proving himself as a director with The Natural (1984), he tackled his most ambitious project to that time in Rain Man (1988). Levinson went on to place his stamp on films like Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), and Bugsy (1991). After his many successes, Toys (1992) did poorly. Levinson had a hit with Disclosure (1994) in 1994, the same year the Levinsons moved to Marin County in Northern California to get away from the Hollywood scene.- Writer
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Andrew Stanton has been a major creative force at Pixar Animation Studios since 1990, when he became the second animator and ninth employee to join the company's elite group of computer animation pioneers. As Vice President, Creative he currently oversees all shorts and feature projects at the studio. Stanton wrote and directed the Academy Award®-winning Disney and Pixar feature film "WALL.E," for which he also received a Best Original Screenplay Oscar®-nomination. In 2016 Stanton directed Disney and Pixar's "Finding Dory," which, upon release, became the highest-grossing domestic animated feature of all time and in 2019 Stanton served as screenwriter and executive producer of "Toy Story 4."
Stanton made his directorial debut with the record-shattering "Finding Nemo," an original story of his that he also co-wrote. The film garnered Stanton two Academy Award® nominations (Best Original Screenplay and Best Animated Film), and "Finding Nemo" was awarded an Oscar® for Best Animated Feature Film of 2003, the first such honor Pixar Animation Studios received for a full-length feature film.
One of the four screenwriters to receive an Oscar® nomination in 1996 for his contribution to "Toy Story," Stanton went on to receive credit as a screenwriter on every subsequent Pixar film - "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story 2," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo." Additionally, he served as co-director on "A Bug's Life," and was the executive producer of "Monsters, Inc.," and "Monsters University," and Academy Award®-winning films "Ratatouille" and "Brave."
In addition to his multi-award winning animation work, Stanton made his live-action writing and directorial debut with Disney's "John Carter," released in March 2012.
A native of Rockport, Massachusetts, Stanton earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Character Animation from California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), where he completed two student films. In the 1980s, he launched his professional career in Los Angeles animating for Bill Kroyer's Kroyer Films studio, and writing for Ralph Bakshi's production of "Mighty Mouse, The New Adventures" (1987).- Additional Crew
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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.- Writer
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Born in Keighley, Bradford, West Yorkshire. He attended Malsis School in Cross Hills Ermysted's Grammar School at Skipton, later he attended Sedbergh School in Cumbria.
He has read English at St Peter's College, Oxford and graduated from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth.
In 2009 he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Slumdog Millionaire, also winning a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award.- Director
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Daniel Francis Boyle is a British filmmaker, producer and writer from Radcliffe, Greater Manchester. He is known for directing 28 Days Later, 127 Hours, Trainspotting, T2 Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, Shallow Grave, The Beach, Yesterday, and Steve Jobs. He won many awards for Slumdog Millionaire. He was in a relationship with Gail Stevens and had three children.- Producer
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Sir Peter Jackson made history with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, becoming the first person to direct three major feature films simultaneously. The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King were nominated for and collected a slew of awards from around the globe, with The Return of the King receiving his most impressive collection of awards. This included three Academy Awards® (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture), two Golden Globes (Best Director and Best Motion Picture-Drama), three BAFTAs (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film and Viewers' Choice), a Directors Guild Award, a Producers Guild Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award.
As a follow up to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in 2005, Jackson directed, wrote, and produced King Kong, for Universal Pictures. The film grossed over $500 million and won three Oscars®.
Jackson previously received widespread acclaim for his 1994 feature Heavenly Creatures, which received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Screenplay. Other film credits include The Frighteners, starring Michael J. Fox; the adult puppet feature Meet the Feebles; and Braindead, which won 16 international science fiction awards, including the Saturn. Jackson also co-directed the television documentary Forgotten Silver, which also hit the film festival circuit.
Jackson directed the Academy Award®-nominated The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of the acclaimed best-selling novel by Alice Sebold and produced the worldwide sci-fi hit District 9. He was a producer on Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in 2011, with two more films set to come out in the future.
His most recent films include producer of 2018's action film Mortal Engines, based on a post-apocalyptic world where cities ride on wheels and consume each other to survive. Following Mortal Engines, he produced They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary on World War I with never-before-seen footage. BAFTA nominated the film for Best Documentary, and it won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing from the Motion Picture Sound Editors.
Jackson's next project is the music documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which he directed and produced, due to be released August, 2021.
Jackson works closely with partner Dame Fran Walsh, with whom he shares his writing and producing credits, as well as a family. Jackson has a special interest in WWI memorabilia and is the proud owner of several aircraft from that era.- Writer
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George Walton Lucas, Jr. was raised on a walnut ranch in Modesto, California. His father was a stationery store owner and he had three siblings. During his late teen years, he went to Thomas Downey High School and was very much interested in drag racing. He planned to become a professional racecar driver. However, a terrible car accident just after his high school graduation ended that dream permanently. The accident changed his views on life.
He decided to attend Modesto Junior College before enrolling in the University of Southern California film school. As a film student, he made several short films including Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB (1967) which won first prize at the 1967-68 National Student Film Festival. In 1967, he was awarded a scholarship by Warner Brothers to observe the making of Finian's Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas and Coppola became good friends and formed American Zoetrope in 1969. The company's first project was Lucas' full-length version of THX 1138 (1971). In 1971, Coppola went into production for The Godfather (1972), and Lucas formed his own company, Lucasfilm Ltd.
In 1973, he wrote and directed the semiautobiographical American Graffiti (1973) which won the Golden Globe and garnered five Academy Award nominations. This gave him the clout he needed for his next daring venture. From 1973 to 1974, he began writing the screenplay which became Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). He was inspired to make this movie from Flash Gordon and the Planet of the Apes films. In 1975, he established ILM. (Industrial Light & Magic) to produce the visual effects needed for the movie. Another company called Sprocket Systems was established to edit and mix Star Wars and later becomes known as Skywalker Sound. His movie was turned down by several studios until 20th Century Fox gave him a chance. Lucas agreed to forego his directing salary in exchange for 40% of the film's box-office take and all merchandising rights. The movie went on to break all box office records and earned seven Academy Awards. It redefined the term "blockbuster" and the rest is history.
Lucas made the other Star Wars films and along with Steven Spielberg created the Indiana Jones series which made box office records of their own. From 1980 to 1985, Lucas was busy with the construction of Skywalker Ranch, built to accommodate the creative, technical, and administrative needs of Lucasfilm. Lucas also revolutionized movie theaters with the THX system which was created to maintain the highest quality standards in motion picture viewing.
He went on to produce several more movies that have introduced major innovations in filmmaking technology. He is chairman of the board of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. In 1992, George Lucas was honored with the Irving G. Thalberg Award by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his lifetime achievement.
He reentered the directing chair with the production of the highly-anticipated Star Wars prequel trilogy beginning with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) . The films have been polarizing for fans and critics alike, but were commercially successful and have become a part of culture. The animated spin-off series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) was supervised by Lucas. He sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, making co-chair Kathleen Kennedy president. He has attended the premieres of new Star Wars films and been generally supportive of them.- William Rose was born on 31 August 1918 in Jefferson City, Missouri, USA. He was a writer, known for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Ladykillers (1955) and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). He was married to Tania Rose. He died on 10 February 1987 in Jersey, Channel Islands, UK.
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Nora Ephron was educated at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. She was an acclaimed essayist (Crazy Salad 1975), novelist (Heartburn 1983), and had written screenplays for several popular films, all featuring strong female characters, such as anti-nuclear activist Karen Silkwood (Silkwood (1983), co-written with Alice Arlen) and a mobster's feisty independent daughter Cookie Voltecki (Cookie (1989), also co-written with Arlen). Ephron's hard-headed sensibilities helped make Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally... (1989) a clear-eyed view of modern romance, and she earned an Oscar nomination for her original screenplay.
Ephron made her directorial debut with the comedy This Is My Life (1992), co-scripted by her sister Delia Ephron, which starred Julie Kavner as a single mother who struggles to establish herself as a stand-up comedienne. Ephron followed up by helming and co-writing Sleepless in Seattle (1993), a romantic comedy in which lovers Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are separated for most of the film. Less about love than about love in the movies, the film drew inspiration from the beloved shipboard romance An Affair to Remember (1957), starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.
Ephron was born in New York City, the daughter of stage and screen writing team Henry Ephron and Phoebe Ephron, who used her infancy as the subject of their play "Three's a Family" and based their comedy Take Her, She's Mine (1963) on letters their daughter wrote them from college. Their screenplays include There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), Carousel (1956) and Desk Set (1957). Formerly married to novelist Dan Greenburg and investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, Ephron was wed to crime journalist and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, at the time of her passing, who wrote such films as Goodfellas (1990). She was of Russian Jewish descent.- Writer
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Robert Douglas Benton is an American screenwriter and filmmaker from Waxahachie, Texas who is known for screenwriting Bonnie & Clyde, Kramer vs. Kramer and Superman. He won two Academy Awards for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer. He directed other feature films including Twilight, Bad Company and Nobody's Fool. He is married to Sallie Rendig since 1964.- Writer
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Frederic Raphael was born on 14 August 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Two for the Road (1967) and Darling (1965). He has been married to Sylvia Betty Glatt since 17 January 1955.- Writer
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I.A.L. Diamond was born on 27 June 1920 in Ungheni, Romania [now Moldova]. He was a writer and producer, known for The Apartment (1960), Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). He was married to Barbara Diamond. He died on 21 April 1988 in Beverly Hills, California, USA.- Writer
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One of the most critically and commercially successful screenwriters in Hollywood history, Lehman grew up on Long Island, graduated from NY's City College. One of his first jobs was as a copywriter for a Broadway publicist. This experience would later be reflected in his novel and screenplay, "Sweet Smell of Success." He also worked as a radio comedy writer, and as editor of a financial magazine. He freelanced short stories for the likes of Collier's magazine and one of these fiction piece 'The Comedian' led to his first job in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Paramount in the mid 1950s. Nick Roddick, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, praised Lehman as "a champion of the well-crafted, what-happens-next screenplay." Served as president of the Writers Guild of America from 1983-85.- Writer
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John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.- Writer
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Charles Brackett, born in Saratoga Springs, New York, of Scottish ancestry, followed in his attorney-father's footsteps and graduated with a law degree from Harvard University in 1920. He practised law for several years, before commencing work as drama critic for The New Yorker (1925-29), in addition to submitting short stories to The Saturday Evening Post. In 1932, Brackett left for Hollywood as a screenwriter. He was signed by Paramount primarily on the strength of his novel "Week-End". Brackett remained at the studio until 1950, doubling up as producer from 1945.
During his tenure at Paramount, Brackett became part of one of the most celebrated screenwriting partnerships in the motion picture business, alongside Billy Wilder. They were eventually dubbed by Life Magazine as "the happiest couple in Hollywood". Despite having very different personalities and arguing incessantly -- Wilder being the more extroverted and cynical, while Bracket was, to quote Gloria Swanson, 'quieter, more refined' -- their collaboration endured until 1951, spanning fourteen motion pictures. Many of their most popular hits, such as Ninotchka (1939), Ball of Fire (1941) and The Lost Weekend (1945), were noted for their intricate scripting and witty, sardonic dialogue. The culmination of their efforts was Sunset Boulevard (1950), which won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. Following this, the team split up at the peak of their success, each going their separate ways.
Brackett moved on to work under contract at 20th Century Fox for the next eight years. With Walter Reisch, he co-wrote the screenplays for Niagara (1953) and Titanic (1953), winning his third Oscar for the latter. He also produced the superior western Garden of Evil (1954), the historical drama The Virgin Queen (1955) and the lavish musical The King and I (1956). Brackett retired due to illness after producing State Fair (1962).- Script and Continuity Department
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Anthony Minghella was the son of immigrants from Italy, who own an ice-cream factory on the Isle of Wight, where Anthony was born on January 6, 1954. He and his two siblings, Edana Minghella and Dominic Minghella, grew up there, a popular British holiday spot. After graduating from the University of Hull, Minghella took a position as a university lecturer, but quit academia to focus on the theater and songwriting. He oversaw the music in many of his movies.
Minghella was employed as a scriptwriter on the British TV series Maybury (1981) and Inspector Morse (1987) and, as a script editor on the British TV series Grange Hill (1978), before succeeding as a dramatist in the West End, London's equivalent of Broadway. In 1984, the London Theatre Critics named him Most Promising Playwright of the Year and, two years later, his drama "Made in Bangkok" won the the London Theatre Critics' award for best play.
An Anthony Minghella film assured movie-goers would enjoy a film blessed with a literate script, superlative performances and first-rate production values. His great craftsmanship was apparent from the beginning, with the bittersweet comedy Truly Madly Deeply (1990), in which the ghost of Alan Rickman comes back to his lady love, Juliet Stevenson, with unintended consequences. The theme of a ghostly love also was present in The English Patient (1996) his greatest success.
It is for that film he will be best remembered. Minghella claimed that with The English Patient (1996), which won nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, that he had reached the heights of his directing career.
In addition to his theater and film awards, in 2001, Anthony Minghella was appointed a Commander of the British Empire, a step just below knighthood, in the Queen's Birthday Honors List.
Anthony Minghella died of a hemorrhage on the morning of March 18, 2008 at Charing Cross Hospital in London, England. The 54-year-old Minghella had undergone an operation to remove a growth on his neck the previous week. He was survived by his wife, Carolyn Choa, and their two children, Max Minghella, who is an actor, and Hannah Minghella, who worked as a production assistant.- Writer
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Three-time Oscar nominee Frank Darabont was born in a refugee camp in 1959 in Montbeliard, France, the son of Hungarian parents who had fled Budapest during the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution. Brought to America as an infant, he settled with his family in Los Angeles and attended Hollywood High School. His first job in movies was as a production assistant on the 1981 low-budget film, Hell Night (1981), starring Linda Blair. He spent the next six years working in the art department as a set dresser and in set construction while struggling to establish himself as a writer. His first produced writing credit (shared) was on the 1987 film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), directed by Chuck Russell. Darabont is one of only six filmmakers in history with the unique distinction of having his first two feature films receive nominations for the Best Picture Academy Award: 1994's The Shawshank Redemption (1994) (with a total of seven nominations) and 1999's The Green Mile (1999) (four nominations). Darabont himself collected Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for each film (both based on works by Stephen King), as well as nominations for both films from the Director's Guild of America, and a nomination from the Writers Guild of America for The Shawshank Redemption (1994). He won the Humanitas Prize, the PEN Center USA West Award, and the Scriptor Award for his screenplay of "The Shawshank Redemption". For "The Green Mile", he won the Broadcast Film Critics prize for his screenplay adaptation, and two People's Choice Awards in the Best Dramatic Film and Best Picture categories. The Majestic (2001), starring Jim Carrey, was released in December 2001. He executive-produced the thriller, Collateral (2004), for DreamWorks, with Michael Mann directing and Tom Cruise starring. Future produced-by projects include "Way of the Rat" at DreamWorks with Chuck Russell adapting and directing the CrossGen comic book series and "Back Roads", a Tawni O'Dell novel, also at DreamWorks, with Todd Field attached to direct. Darabont and his production company, "Darkwoods Productions", have an overall deal with Paramount Pictures.- Director
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Bill Condon was born on 22 October 1955 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a director and writer, known for Dreamgirls (2006), Gods and Monsters (1998) and Kinsey (2004).- Producer
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Following a distinguished career in the theatre between the 1960s and the 1980s, Jim Sheridan wrote and directed his first critically acclaimed feature My Left Foot in 1989. The film was nominated for two European Film Awards. He followed this in 1990 with The Field which he also wrote and directed. In the same year he wrote the screenplay Into the West which was directed in 1992 by Mike Newell. In 1993 he wrote, produced and directed In the Name Of The Father, which again was nominated for a European Film Award, and in 1995 he wrote and produced Some Mother's Son, which was directed by Terry George. In 1997 he wrote, produced and directed The Boxer and in 1999 he produced Agnes Browne, directed by and starring Anjelica Huston. He was also executive producer of Borstal Boy, On The Edge and Bloody Sunday. In America, which he produced, directed and wrote, was released in 2003. In 2005 he directed and produced Get Rich Or Die Tryin'. Brothers was released in 2009 and Dream House in 2011. His most recent feature film is The Secret Scripture. He directed the short film 11th Hour at the end of 2016 and produced the documentary Shelter Me. Jim Sheridan's films have achieved popular and critical acclaim throughout the world. His films have garnered sixteen Oscar nominations and have won two Academy Awards as well as numerous prestigious international awards. Jim Sheridan is the father of Irish Actress Clodagh Amira Sheridan with his partner Filmmaker Zahara Moufid.- Writer
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Lawrence Kasdan is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. He directed Body Heat, Grand Canyon, The Big Chill, Silverado and Dreamcatcher. He wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Bodyguard, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Force Awakens and Solo: A Star Wars Story. He is married to Meg Goldman since 1971 and has two sons.- Writer
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James Goldman was born on 30 June 1927 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer, known for The Lion in Winter (1968), Robin and Marian (1976) and Cyber Bandits (1995). He was married to Barbara Goldman and Maria McKeon. He died on 28 October 1998 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director whose films were known for their colorful visual style, was born in Parma, Italy. He attended Rome University and became famous as a poet. He served as assistant director for Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film Accattone (1961) and directed The Grim Reaper (1962). His second film, Before the Revolution (1964), which was released in 1971, received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Bertolucci also received an Academy Award nomination as best director for Last Tango in Paris (1972), and the best director and best screenplay for the film The Last Emperor (1987), which walked away with nine Academy Awards.- Director
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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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John Hughes was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter. He was credited for creating some of the most memorable comedy films of the 1980s and the 1990s, when he was at the height of his career. He had a talent for writing coming-of-age stories, and for depicting fairly realistic adolescent characters.
In 1950, Hughes was born in Lansing, Michigan. The city's main employers for much of the 20th century were manufacturing plants for automobiles. Lansing housed the headquarters of companies such as Oldsmobile and the REO Motor Car Company. Hughes' father John Hughes Sr. was a salesman, while Hughes' mother Marion Crawford worked as a volunteer for charity organizations.
Hughes had three sisters and no brothers. His family moved often. For most of his childhood, the Hughes family lived in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a commuter suburb of Metro Detroit. According to an interview of Hughes, he was the only boy in his neighborhood while growing up. He was surrounded by girls and "old people," and there was no boys around for him to befriend. He spend a lot of time alone, and used his active imagination to keep himself entertained.
In 1963, the Hughes family moved to Northbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Hughes attended first the Grove Middle School, and then the Glenbrook North High School. His high school experiences reportedly provided inspiration for his teen-themed films of his career. According to interviews with Hughes' friends, Hughes had a poor relationship with his parents who often criticized him.
As an adolescent, Hughes felt the need to escape his problems. He became an avid film fan, as he found that films satisfied his need for escapism. He was a fan of both the Rat Pack (an informal group of actors and singers), and the music group The Beatles.
After graduating high school, Hughes enrolled in the University of Arizona. He eventually dropped out of the University, and tried to make a living as a comedy writer. He wrote jokes for professional comedians, such as Rodney Dangerfield (1921 - 2004) and Joan Rivers (1933 - 2014).
In 1970, Hughes was hired by the advertising company Needham Harper & Steers (1925-1986). That same year, Hughes married his former high school classmate Nancy Ludwig. Hughes worked in the advertising industry for several years. In 1974, Hughes was hired by the advertising agency Leo Burnett Worldwide. This company's most notable clients included the Pillsbury Company, StarKist, Heinz, Green Giant, and Philip Morris.
As a marketing agent, Hughes was assigned to handle Virginia Slims, a brand of cigarettes produced by Philip Morris. The assignment required him to regularly travel to New York City, where Philip Morris' headquarters were located. Hughes took the opportunity to visit the offices of the popular humor magazine "National Lampoon" (1970-1998) in New York City. He successfully negotiated a new position as a regular contributor to the magazine.
Hughes reportedly impressed the magazine's editors by producing quality work at a fast pace. Among his first short stories was "Vacation '58," based on his recollections of his family's vacations during his childhood. The story was eventually adapted into the road comedy film "National Lampoon's Vacation" (1983).
"National Lampoon" co-produced films written by their staff writers. Hughes provided the script for the black comedy "National Lampoon's Class Reunion" (1982), depicting a serial killer who targets his former classmates. The film was poorly received and under-performed at the box office, but it inspired Hughes to try to make a career as a screenwriter.
Hughes subsequently wrote the scripts for both "National Lampoon's Vacation" (1983) and "Mr. Mom" (1983), comedy films which were box office hits. He then signed a contract for three films with the studio Universal Pictures. He made his directing debut in the coming-of-age comedy film "Sixteen Candles" (1984). The film depicted the misadventures of high school sophomore Samantha "Sam" Baker (played by Molly Ringwald). It performed well at the box office, and was well-received by critics.
Hughes quickly established himself as a leading director of teen films. His films "The Breakfast Club" (1985), "Weird Science" (1985), and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986) are considered classics of the genre. To cover new ground, he then directed "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" (1987), featuring a duo of adult protagonists. The stars of the film were experienced comic actors Steve Martin and John Candy. The film was a hit. More importantly, Hughes and Candy became close friends. They would often work together in subsequent films.
Hughes' next film as a director was "She's Having a Baby" (1988), about the life of a newlywed couple. The film fared poorly financially and was considered rather "blasé" by critics. Hughes made a comeback with "Uncle Buck" (1989), about a lifelong bachelor who has to take care of his two nieces and a nephew. The film was a box office hit, earning about 80 million dollars at the box office.
Hughes' final film as a director was the comedy-drama "Curly Sue" (1991), about homeless con artist Bill Dancer (played by Jim Belushi) who desperately tries to keep the custody of his surrogate daughter. While moderately successful at the box office at the box office, the film was widely ridiculed for being overly sentimental.
In the 1990s, Hughes found success as a screenwriter, scripting several box office hits. Among his most notable films in this period were "Home Alone" (1990) and "Beethoven" (1992), with both films starting lucrative media franchises. Hughes also wrote the scripts of the sequels "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" (1992) and "Home Alone 3" (1997). He also scripted a notable comic strip adaptation, "Dennis the Menace" (1993). It was based on the long-running comic strip "Dennis the Menace" (1951-) by Hank Ketcham (1920-2001).
In 1994, Hughes moved to the Chicago metropolitan area. At about that time, he started actively avoiding publicity. He rarely gave any interviews until the end of his life. In 1995, Hughes co-founded the production company Great Oaks Entertainment, which mainly handled co-production of Disney produced films. Hughes handled the scripting of two of the company's films: "101 Dalmatians" (1996) and "Flubber" (1997). Both were remakes of older films.
In 1997, Hughes severed his partnership with Ricardo Mestres. A year later, their final co-production, "Reach the Rock," was released. The film was scripted by Hughes, though it was uncharacteristically dramatic for a Hughes film. The film depicted the conflict between an alienated young man and a police chief.
In the 2000s, Hughes only scripted three more films. The most notable among them the romantic drama "Maid in Manhattan" (2002), a hit for protagonist Jennifer Lopez. It earned about 164 million dollars.
In August 2009, Hughes visited New York City with his wife. He wanted to visit one of his sons who lived there, and to meet his new grandson. On August 6, Hughes suffered a heart attack while walking in Manhattan. He was transported to Roosevelt Hospital, but died shortly after. He was fifty-nine years old.
Hughes was buried in Lake Forest Cemetery, a rural cemetery located in Lake Forest, Illinois. He was survived by his wife, their two children, and several grandchildren.Notable Film(s): Breakfast Club; The Great Outdoors; Sixteen Candles; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles- Director
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William Todd Field was born in Pomona, California, and began acting after graduating from high school in Portland, Oregon, where he was raised. A budding jazz musician as well, he skipped college in favor of a move east to New York to study acting. Once there, he began performing with the Ark Theatre Company as both an actor and musician.
Field subsequently won a role in Woody Allen's nostalgic Radio Days (1987). Then had an independent Spirit Award-nominated turn in Victor Nunez's Sundance Film Festival Grand jury Prize-winner Ruby in Paradise (1993). He also starred in Nicole Holofcener's_Walking and Talking (1996)_ which won the Grand Special Prize at the Deauville Film Festival. Other credits include Scott Ziehl's_Broken Vessels (1998)_ in which Field starred and produced, and'Stanley Kubrick''s final masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) in which he played the mysterious "Nick Nightingale".
In 1999, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Field has a deceptive facade of all-American clean-cut looks that allows him to suggest a wide range of emotions and thoughts behind such a regular-guy appearance; in "Ruby in Paradise" he expressed such uncommon decency and intelligence you had to wonder how Ashley Judd's hardscrabble Ruby could ever have considered letting him get away. In "Eyes Wide Shut" he's the likable med school dropout turned saloon piano player, and in Broken Vessels he's an increasingly raging sociopath. In all these roles Field has the precious gift of being able to surprise you and to command your attention on screen."
However, it was precisely at this point in his career that Field decided to leave acting behind and try instead to make a name for himself as a writer/director.
His first film When I Was a Boy (1993) was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of their New Directors/New Films series and was shown at the Museum of Modern Art.
His next film, Nonnie & Alex (1995) received both the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the Best Film prize at the Aspen Film Festival. The film was honored with a special citation from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and Field was honored with the Franklin J. Schaffner Award for Excellence from the AFI, one of the highest honors the institute ever bestows upon a filmmaker.
In 2001, Field made his feature writing/directing debut with In the Bedroom (2001), an intensely emotional portrayal of the repercussions of family tragedy on a New England couple. The film received five Academy Award nominations, three Golden Globe nominations, and Field was named both Screenwriter and Director of the year by the National Board of Review. Internationally acclaimed by critics, the film was named Best Picture of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New York Observer, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
In 2006, Field co-wrote and directed Little Children (2006). The film, starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson, won numerous awards from the nation's top critics associations including writing awards for Field and Perrotta. The movie received three Golden Globe nominations including Best Picture of the Year, and was nominated for three Academy Awards.
In 2022 Field's next film, "TÁR," premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival to universal acclaim, becoming only the fourth film in history to be named Best of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the London Film Critics' Circle as well as the National Society of Film Critics. "TÁR" was named the year's best by more critics than any other film released in 2022. The film received six Academy Award nominations including Best Picture of the Year, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.- Writer
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Steven Zaillian was born on 30 January 1953 in Fresno, California, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), A Civil Action (1998) and The Irishman (2019). He is married to Elizabeth Zaillian. They have two children.- Writer
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Peter Morgan was born on 10 April 1963 in London, England, UK. He is a writer and producer, known for Frost/Nixon (2008), The Last King of Scotland (2006) and The Queen (2006).- Writer
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Born in Cape Town, Union of South Africa in 1934, Ronald Harwood moved to London in 1951 to pursue a career in the theatre. After attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he joined the Shakespeare Company of Sir Donald Wolfit, one of the last 'actor-manager' of Great-Britain. From 1953 to 1958, Harwood became the personal dresser of Sir Donald. He would later draw from this experience in his play 'The Dresser' and write a biography 'Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His life and work in the Unfashionable Theatre'.
In 1960, he started a new career as a writer and would prove to be quite prolific, penning plays, novels and non-fiction books. He also worked often as a screenwriter but he seldom wrote original material directly for the screen, rather acting as an adapter sometimes of his own work.
One of the recurring themes in Harwood's work is his fascination for the stage, its artists and artisans as displayed in the aforementioned 'The Dresser', his plays 'After the Lions' (about Sarah Bernard) ,'Another time' (about a gifted piano player), 'Quartet' (about aging opera singers) and his non-fiction book 'All the world's a stage', a general history of theater. Harwood also has a strong interest in the WWII period, as highlighted by the films 'Operation daybreak', 'The Statement', 'The Pianist', and his play turned to film 'Taking sides'. Based on true stories, the two last films feature once again musicians as their main characters.
Made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974 and Commander of the British Empire in 1999, Harwood was president of the international PEN Club from 1993 to 1997 after presiding the British section during the four previous years.- Director
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Roman Polanski is a Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few truly international filmmakers. Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933.
His parents returned to Poland from France in 1936, three years before World War II began. On Germany's invasion in 1939, as a family of mostly Jewish heritage, they were all sent to the Krakow ghetto. His parents were then captured and sent to two different concentration camps: His father to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, where he survived the war, and his mother to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Roman witnessed his father's capture and then, at only 7, managed to escape the ghetto and survive the war, at first wandering through the Polish countryside and pretending to be a Roman-Catholic kid visiting his relatives. Although this saved his life, he was severely mistreated suffering nearly fatal beating which left him with a fractured skull.
Local people usually ignored the cinemas where German films were shown, but Polanski seemed little concerned by the propaganda and often went to the movies. As the war progressed, Poland became increasingly war-torn and he lived his life as a tramp, hiding in barns and forests, eating whatever he could steal or find. Still under 12 years old, he encountered some Nazi soldiers who forced him to hold targets while they shot at them. At the war's end in 1945, he reunited with his father who sent him to a technical school, but young Polanski seemed to have already chosen another career. In the 1950s, he took up acting, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1955) before studying at the Lodz Film School. His early shorts such as Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), Le gros et le maigre (1961) and Mammals (1962), showed his taste for black humor and interest in bizarre human relationships. His feature debut, Knife in the Water (1962), was one of the first Polish post-war films not associated with the war theme. It was also the first movie from Poland to get an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Though already a major Polish filmmaker, Polanski chose to leave the country and headed to France. While down-and-out in Paris, he befriended young scriptwriter, Gérard Brach, who eventually became his long-time collaborator. The next two films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), made in England and co-written by Brach, won respectively Silver and then Golden Bear awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1968, Polanski went to Hollywood, where he made the psychological thriller, Rosemary's Baby (1968). However, after the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson Family in 1969, the director decided to return to Europe. In 1974, he again made a US release - it was Chinatown (1974).
It seemed the beginning of a promising Hollywood career, but after his conviction for the sodomy of a 13-year old girl, Polanski fled from he USA to avoid prison. After Tess (1979), which was awarded several Oscars and Cesars, his works in 1980s and 1990s became intermittent and rarely approached the caliber of his earlier films. It wasn't until The Pianist (2002) that Polanski came back to full form. For that movie, he won nearly all the most important film awards, including the Oscar for Best Director, Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, the BAFTA and Cesar Award.
He still likes to act in the films of other directors, sometimes with interesting results, as in A Pure Formality (1994).- Director
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Sofia Coppola was born on May 14, 1971 in New York City, New York, USA as Sofia Carmina Coppola. She is a director, known for Somewhere (2010), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006). She has been married to Thomas Mars since August 27, 2011. They have two daughters, Romy and Cosima. She was previously married to Spike Jonze.Notable Film(s): Lost in Translation (2003)✍- Writer
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David Hare is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre and film director. Best known for his stage work, Hare had also great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing The Hours (2002) in 2002, based on the novel written by Michael Cunningham, and The Reader (2008) in 2008, based on the novel of the same name written by Bernhard Schlink.
In the West End, David Hare had his greatest success with the plays Plenty, which he adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1985, Racing Demon (1990), Skylight (1997), and Amy's View (1998). The four plays ran on Broadway in 1982-83, 1996, 1998 and 1999 respectively, earning Hare three Tony Award nominations for Best Play for the first three and two Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. Other notable projects on stage include A Map of the World, Pravda, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War and The Vertical Hour. He wrote screenplays for films including The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) and the BBC dramas Page Eight (2011) and Collateral (2018).
As at 2013, Hare has received two Academy Award nominations, three Golden Globe Award nominations, three Tony Award nominations and has won a BAFTA Award, a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Laurence Olivier Awards. He has also been awarded several critics' awards such as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and received the Golden Bear in 1985. He was knighted in 1998.- Writer
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Christopher Hampton was born on 26 January 1946 in Faial, Açores, Portugal. He is a writer and producer, known for The Father (2020), Atonement (2007) and Dangerous Liaisons (1988). He has been married to Laura de Holesch since 1971. They have two children.- Writer
- Producer
- Director
William Monahan was born on 3 November 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for The Departed (2006), London Boulevard (2010) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005).Greats: The Departed (2006)✍
Other Notable Film(s):- Producer
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Darren Aronofsky was born February 12, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up, Darren was always artistic: he loved classic movies and, as a teenager, he even spent time doing graffiti art. After high school, Darren went to Harvard University to study film (both live-action and animation). He won several film awards after completing his senior thesis film, "Supermarket Sweep", starring Sean Gullette, which went on to becoming a National Student Academy Award finalist. Aronofsky didn't make a feature film until five years later, in February 1996, where he began creating the concept for Pi (1998). After Darren's script for Pi (1998) received great reactions from friends, he began production. The film re-teamed Aronofsky with Gullette, who played the lead. This went on to further successes, such as Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010). Most recently, he completed the films Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017).- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Additional Crew
Jay Cocks was born on 1 December 1944 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a writer, known for Silence (2016), Strange Days (1995) and Gangs of New York (2002). He was previously married to Verna Bloom.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Producer
Stephen Gaghan was born on 6 May 1965 in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Syriana (2005), Traffic (2000) and Dolittle (2020). He has been married to Minnie Mortimer since 19 May 2007. They have two children.- Writer
- Producer
- Script and Continuity Department
John Logan was a playwright in Chicago for ten years before writing, on spec, his first screenplay, "Any Given Sunday." He won the 2010 Tony, Drama Desk, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle awards for his play RED, which premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in London and the Golden Theatre on Broadway.- Writer
- Producer
- Actor
Aaron Sorkin grew up in Scarsdale, a suburb of New York City where he was very involved in his high school drama and theater club. After graduating from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theater, Sorkin intended to pursue a career in acting. It took him only a short time to realize that his true love, and his true talent, lay in writing. His first play, "Removing All Doubt", was not an immediate success, but his second play, "Hidden in This Picture", debuted in 1988 at the West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theater Bar. A longer version of "Hidden in This Picture", called "Making Movies", opened at the Promenade Theater in 1990. Despite his youth and relative inexperience, Sorkin was about to break into the spotlight. In 1989, he received the prestigious Outer Critics Circle award as Outstanding American Playwright for the stage version of A Few Good Men (1992), which was later nominated for a Golden Globe. The idea for the plot of "A Few Good Men" came from a conversation with his older sister, Deborah. Deborah was a Navy Judge Advocate General lawyer sent to Guantanamo Bay on a case involving Marines accused of killing a fellow Marine. Deborah told Aaron of the case and he spent the next year and a half writing a Broadway play, which later led to the movie. Sorkin has gone on to write for many movies and TV shows. Besides A Few Good Men (1992), he has written The American President (1995) and Malice (1993), as well as cooperating on Enemy of the State (1998), The Rock (1996) and Excess Baggage (1997). In addition, he was invited by Steven Spielberg to "polish" the script of Schindler's List (1993). Sorkin's TV credits include the Golden Globe-nominated The West Wing (1999) and Sports Night (1998).- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Andrew Kevin Walker was born on 14 August 1964 in Altoona, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for The Killer (2023), Se7en (1995) and Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar (2023).- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Phil Alden Robinson was born on 1 March 1950 in Long Beach, Long Island, New York, USA. He is a writer and director, known for Field of Dreams (1989), Sneakers (1992) and The Sum of All Fears (2002). He has been married to Paulette Bartlett since 26 September 2009.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Wesley Wales Anderson was born in Houston, Texas. His mother, Texas Ann (Burroughs), is an archaeologist turned real estate agent, and his father, Melver Leonard Anderson, worked in advertising and PR. He has two brothers, Eric and Mel. Anderson's parents divorced when he was a young child, an event that he described as the most crucial event of his brothers and his growing up. During childhood, Anderson also began writing plays and making super-8 movies. He was educated at Westchester High School and then St. John's, a private prep school in Houston, Texas, which was later to prove an inspiration for the film Rushmore (1998).
Anderson attended the University of Texas in Austin, where he majored in philosophy. It was there that he met Owen Wilson. They became friends and began making short films, some of which aired on a local cable-access station. One of their shorts was Bottle Rocket (1993), which starred Owen and his brother Luke Wilson. The short was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was successfully received, so much so that they received funding to make a feature-length version. Bottle Rocket (1996) was not a commercial hit, but it gained a cult audience and high-profile fans, which included Martin Scorsese.
Success followed with films such as Rushmore (1998), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and an animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). The latter two films earned Anderson Oscar nominations.- Producer
- Writer
- Director
Frank Pierson was born on 12 May 1925 in Chappaqua, New York, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Presumed Innocent (1990) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). He was married to Helene Szamet, Dori Pierson and Polly Stokes. He died on 22 July 2012 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Greats: tt0061512/ (1967)✍; Dog Day Afternoon (1975) (1975)✍
Other Notable Film(s): Cat Ballou (1965) (1965)- Writer
- Producer
- Director
James Francis Cameron was born on August 16, 1954 in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada. He moved to the United States in 1971. The son of an engineer, he majored in physics at California State University before switching to English, and eventually dropping out. He then drove a truck to support his screenwriting ambition. He landed his first professional film job as art director, miniature-set builder, and process-projection supervisor on Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and had his first experience as a director with a two week stint on Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) before being fired.
He then wrote and directed The Terminator (1984), a futuristic action-thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton. It was a low budget independent film, but Cameron's superb, dynamic direction made it a surprise mainstream success and it is now regarded as one of the most iconic pictures of the 1980s. After this came a string of successful, bigger budget science-fiction action films such as Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). In 1990, Cameron formed his own production company, Lightstorm Entertainment. In 1997, he wrote and directed Titanic (1997), a romance epic about two young lovers from different social classes who meet on board the famous ship. The movie went on to break all box office records and earned eleven Academy Awards. It became the highest grossing movie of all time until 12 years later, Avatar (2009), which invented and pioneered 3D film technology, and it went on to beat "Titanic", and became the first film to cost two billion dollars until 2019 when Marvel took the record.
James Cameron is now one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. He was formerly married to producer Gale Anne Hurd, who produced several of his films. In 2000, he married actress Suzy Amis, who appeared in Titanic, and they have three children.- Producer
- Director
- Actor
Martin Charles Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 in Queens, New York City, to Catherine Scorsese (née Cappa) and Charles Scorsese, who both worked in Manhattan's garment district, and whose families both came from Palermo, Sicily. He was raised in the neighborhood of Little Italy, which later provided the inspiration for several of his films. Scorsese earned a B.S. degree in film communications in 1964, followed by an M.A. in the same field in 1966 at New York University's School of Film. During this time, he made numerous prize-winning short films including The Big Shave (1967), and directed his first feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967).
He served as assistant director and an editor of the documentary Woodstock (1970) and won critical and popular acclaim for Mean Streets (1973), which first paired him with actor and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro. In 1976, Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), also starring De Niro, was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and he followed that film with New York, New York (1977) and The Last Waltz (1978). Scorsese directed De Niro to an Oscar-winning performance as boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), which received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and is hailed as one of the masterpieces of modern cinema. Scorsese went on to direct The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995) and Kundun (1997), among other films. Commissioned by the British Film Institute to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema, Scorsese completed the four-hour documentary, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), co-directed by Michael Henry Wilson.
His long-cherished project, Gangs of New York (2002), earned numerous critical honors, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Director; the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004) won five Academy Awards, in addition to the Golden Globe and BAFTA awards for Best Picture. Scorsese won his first Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), which was also honored with the Director's Guild of America, Golden Globe, New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and Critic's Choice awards for Best Director, in addition to four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Scorsese's documentary of the Rolling Stones in concert, Shine a Light (2008), followed, with the successful thriller Shutter Island (2010) two years later. Scorsese received his seventh Academy Award nomination for Best Director, as well as a Golden Globe Award, for Hugo (2011), which went on to win five Academy Awards.
Scorsese also serves as executive producer on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010) for which he directed the pilot episode. Scorsese's additional awards and honors include the Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival (1995), the AFI Life Achievement Award (1997), the Honoree at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 25th Gala Tribute (1998), the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), The Kennedy Center Honors (2007) and the HFPA Cecil B. DeMille Award (2010). Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio have worked together on five separate occasions: Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Producer
Michael Arndt was born on 11 November 1965 in Harris County, Texas, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013).- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Mardik Martin is in the elite group of screenwriters on WGA's list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written. He immigrated to the United States from Iraq to attend 'New York University'. He won the Mahler award and graduated with a Master's degree in Screenwriting in 1968, then went on to teach at NYU from 1968 to 1973. Mardik moved to Hollywood after Mean Streets (1973), which he co-wrote with Martin Scorsese, became a huge success. He worked for Chartoff-Winkler Productions in the years following, writing screenplays like Valentino (1977) and collaborating with Scorsese on multiple projects before writing the first three drafts of Raging Bull (1980). Recently Martin co-wrote the screenplay to Fatih Akin's The Cut (2014) which premiered in the Competition at the 'Venice Int. Film Festival 2014'. Mardik Martin is a professor at the prestigious 'USC School of Cinematic Arts', having mentored and taught thousands of the brightest young luminaries in the movie business.- Writer
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Dustin Lance Black was born on 10 June 1974 in Sacramento, California, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Milk (2008), Under the Banner of Heaven (2022) and J. Edgar (2011). He has been married to Tom Daley since 6 May 2017. They have one child.Greats: Milk (2008)✍
Caution: J. Edgar (2011)
Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Benjamin Géza "Ben" Affleck-Boldt was born on August 15, 1972 in Berkeley, California and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to mother Chris Anne (Boldt), a school teacher, and father Timothy Byers "Tim" Affleck, a social worker. Ben has a younger brother, actor Casey Affleck, who was born in 1975. He is of mostly English, Irish, German, and Scottish ancestry. His middle name, Géza, is after a Hungarian family friend who was a Holocaust survivor.
Affleck wanted to be an actor ever since he could remember, and his first acting experience was for a Burger King commercial, when he was on the PBS mini-series, The Voyage of the Mimi (1984). It was also at that age when Ben met his lifelong friend and fellow actor, Matt Damon. They played little league together and took drama classes together. Ben's teen years consisted of mainly TV movies and small television appearances including Hands of a Stranger (1987) and The Second Voyage of the Mimi (1988). He made his big introduction into feature films in 1993 when he was cast in Dazed and Confused (1993). After that, he did mostly independent films like Kevin Smith's Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy (1997) which were great for Ben's career, receiving renowned appreciation for his works at the Sundance film festival. But the success he was having in independent films didn't last much longer and things got a little shaky for Ben. He was living in an apartment with his brother Casey and friend Matt, getting tired of being turned down for the big roles in films and being given the forgettable supporting ones. Since Matt was having the same trouble, they decided to write their own script, where they could call all the shots. So, after finishing the script for Good Will Hunting (1997), they gave it to their agent, Patrick Whitesell, who showed it to a few Hollywood studios, finally being accepted by Castle Rock. It was great news for the two, but Castle Rock wasn't willing to give Ben and Matt the control over the project they were hoping for. It was friend Kevin Smith who took it to the head of Miramax who bought the script giving Ben and Matt the control they wanted and, in December 5, 1997, Good Will Hunting (1997) was released, making the two unknown actors famous. The film was nominated for 9 Academy Awards and won two, including Best Original Screenplay for Ben and Matt. The film marked Ben's breakthrough role, in which he was given for the first time the chance to choose roles instead of having to go through grueling auditions constantly.
Affleck chose such roles in the blockbusters Armageddon (1998), Shakespeare in Love (1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001). In the early years of the 2000s, he also starred in the box office hits Changing Lanes (2002), The Sum of All Fears (2002), and Daredevil (2003), as well as the disappointing comedies Gigli (2003) and Surviving Christmas (2004). While the mid 2000s were considered a career downturn for Affleck, he received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in Hollywoodland (2006). In the several years following, he played supporting roles, including in the films Smokin' Aces (2006), He's Just Not That Into You (2009), State of Play (2009), and Extract (2009). He ventured into directing in 2007, with the thriller Gone Baby Gone (2007), which starred his brother, Casey Affleck, and was well received. He then directed, co-wrote, and starred in The Town (2010), which was named to the National Board of Review Top Ten Films of the year. For the political thriller Argo (2012), which he directed and starred in, Affleck won the Golden Globe Award and BAFTA Award for Best Director, and the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, and BAFTA Award for Best Picture (Affleck's second Oscar win).
In 2014, Affleck headlined the book adaptation thriller Gone Girl (2014). He starred as Bruce Wayne/Batman in the superhero film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016), and Justice League (2017). He reprised the role in Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) and he will next appear as Batman in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) and The Flash (2023).
Recently he has given praise-worthy performances in The Way Back (2020) as a recovering alcoholic, The Last Duel (2021) (notably he also co-wrote the script), and a scene-stealing golden globe nominated performance in The Tender Bar (2021).Good Will Hunting (1997)✍- Producer
- Actor
- Writer
Matthew Paige Damon was born on October 8, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Kent Damon, a stockbroker, realtor and tax preparer, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood education professor at Lesley University. Matt has an older brother, Kyle, a sculptor. His father was of English and Scottish descent, and his mother is of Finnish and Swedish ancestry. The family lived in Newton until his parents divorced in 1973, when Damon and his brother moved with his mother to Cambridge. He grew up in a stable community, and was raised near actor Ben Affleck.
Damon attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and he performed in a number of theater productions during his time there. He attended Harvard University as an English major. While in Harvard, he kept on skipping classes to pursue acting projects, which included the TNT original film, Rising Son (1990), and prep-school drama, School Ties (1992). It was until his film, Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), was expected to be a big success that he decided to drop out of university completely. Arriving in Hollywood, Matt managed to get his first break with a part in the romantic comedy, Mystic Pizza (1988). However, the film did not do too well and his film career failed to take off. Not letting failure discourage him from acting, he went for another audition, and managed to get a starring role in School Ties (1992). Up next for Matt was a role as a soldier who had problems with drug-addiction in the movie, Courage Under Fire (1996). Matt had, in fact, lost forty pounds for his role which resulted in health problems.
The following year, he garnered accolades for Good Will Hunting (1997), a screenplay he had originally written for an English class at Harvard University. Good Will Hunting (1997) was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, one of which, Matt won for Best Original Screenplay along with Ben Affleck. In the year 1998, Matt played the title role in Steven Spielberg's film, Saving Private Ryan (1998), which was one of the most acclaimed films in that year. Matt had the opportunity of working with Tom Hanks and Vin Diesel while filming that movie. That same year, he starred as an earnest law student and reformed poker player in Rounders (1998), starring opposite Edward Norton and John Malkovich. The next year, Matt rejoined his childhood friend, Ben Affleck and fellow comedian, Chris Rock, in the comedy Dogma (1999).
Towards the end of 1999, Matt played "Tom Ripley", a working-class young man who tastes the good life and will do anything to live it. Both Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow also starred in the movie. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) earned mixed reviews from critics, but even so, Matt earned praise for his performance. Matt lent his voice to the animated movie, Titan A.E. (2000) in the year 2000, which also earned mixed reviews from the public. He also starred in two other movies, All the Pretty Horses (2000) and the golf comedy-drama, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), starring alongside Will Smith. In the year 2003, he signed on to star in The Informant! (2009) by Steven Soderbergh and the Farrelly Brothers' Stuck on You (2003). He also starred in Gerry (2002), a film he co-wrote with his friends, Gus Van Sant and Casey Affleck. One of Matt's most recognizable work to date is his role in the "Bourne" movie franchise. He plays an amnesiac assassin, "Jason Bourne", in The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Another praised role is that as "Linus Caldwell" in the "Ocean's" movie franchise. He had the opportunity to star opposite George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Don Cheadle in Ocean's Eleven (2001). The successful crime comedy-drama eventually had two other sequels, Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007). Among other highly acclaimed movies that Matt has been a part of are Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm (2005), George Clooney's Syriana (2005), Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) and Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd (2006).
In his personal life, Matt is now happily married to Argentine-born Luciana Barroso, whom he met in Miami, where she was working as a bartender. They married in a private civil ceremony on December 9, 2005, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. The couple have four daughters Alexia, Luciana's daughter from a previous relationship, as well as Isabella, Gia and Stella. Matt is a big fan of the Boston Red Sox and he tries to attend their games whenever possible. He has also formed great friendships with his Ocean's co-stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, whom he works on charity projects with. He and actor Ben Affleck have remained lifelong friends and collaborators.Good Will Hunting (1997)✍- Writer
- Producer
- Actress
Diablo Cody is originally from Chicago, Illinois, and moved to Minnesota to live with her Internet boyfriend, Jonny who later became her husband. While there, she decided on a whim to take up stripping as a hobby of sorts.
She was working at an ad agency and got a promotion. The job wore her ragged and was something she did not particularly care for. It demanded organization which is something at which she was not very good. Eventually, she quit her day job with Jonny's blessings and began stripping full-time. During the course of about a year she went from Amateur Night, which was her first stripping experience, to a place she refers to in her book as Sheiks, then to Déjà Vu, and so on. She then took up work as a phone-sex operator before returning to stripping.
Shortly thereafter she decided to quit stripping and she and Jonny married. They moved to what she refers to as "the 'burbs, and no one strips unless they're taking a bubble bath." Her stepdaughter was the flower girl in the wedding.Give It a Shot: Young Adult (2011)
Caution: Juno (2007)
Other Notable Screenplay(s):- Writer
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Considered one of the pioneer screenwriters of the action genre, Black made his mark with his Lethal Weapon (1987) screenplay. He also collaborated on the story of the sequel, Lethal Weapon 2 (1989). Each successive script he turned in had a higher price attached it, from The Last Boy Scout (1991) to The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), and in between a re-write on the McTiernan/Schwarzenegger Last Action Hero (1993) script.- Writer
- Producer
- Director
David S. Goyer was born on 22 December 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Dark City (1998), The Dark Knight (2008) and Flashforward (2009). He is married to Marina Black. They have two children. He was previously married to Jessika Borsiczky.- Music Artist
- Composer
- Actor
Nick Cave is a man of many talents. Musician. Songwriter. Screenwriter. Novelist. Actor. The Australian was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria in 1957, and would go onto form the alternative rock band Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, who have since successfully released a string of hit albums.
In film, Nick has starred in two films with Brad Pitt: Johnny Suede (1991) by Tom DiCillo and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). He scripted the dark western, The Proposition (2005) and has contributed to over 50 soundtracks including Gas Food Lodging (1992) with fellow rocker J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr.. His first contribution was in the Marlon Brando film, The Freshman (1990): 'From Her To Eternity'.
Nick is also a lyricist and poet. His first offering was 'King Ink' (1988).- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Ashvin was the youngest and is the only Indian Oscar nominee for his live action short 'Little Terrorist' which, also nominated for European Film Academy Awards, honorable mention at BAFTA/LA, winning twenty-four first/best film prizes of the over two hundred film festivals it was invited to around the world.
He is a two time national award winner for his Kashmir series - Inshallah, Football and Inshallah, Kashmir, has among other credits 'Road to Ladakh' (starring Irrfan Khan), 'Dazed in Doon', 'The Forest' (Jaaved Jaffery), and a UNHCR commissioned documentary on migration, 'I Am Not Here'. His films are now available on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
His latest project as writer, director and producer is 'No Fathers in Kashmir', a Sundance Lab/Mumbai Mantra 2014 & Asia Pacific Screen Academy grant winning screenplay of a feature film, the last of a trilogy set based in the Kashmir valley.
Ashvin began working as a director in theatre, and founded one of the first digital post-production studios in India in 1996. Ashvin is a voting member of the European Film Academy.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Deepa Mehta is a transnational artist and a screenwriter, director, and producer whose work has been called "courageous", "provocative" and "breathtaking". Her visually lush and emotionally resonating films have played at every major international film festival; receiving numerous awards and accolades, and have been distributed around the world. Deepa was born in India and received a degree in philosophy from the University of New Delhi before immigrating to Canada. She began her career making documentaries in India.
In 1991, Deepa's first feature film Sam & Me, which stars Om Puri, won a Special Jury Mention in the Camera D'Or section at the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1992-1994 she directed two episodes of The Young Indiana Jones, produced by George Lucas for ABC. In 1993, Deepa directed her second feature film Camilla, a Canada-UK co-pro starring Jessica Tandy, Bridget Fonda, Elias Koteas, Maury Chaykin, Graham Greene, and Hume Cronyn. Fire, which Deepa wrote and directed, is the first film in her Elemental Trilogy (Fire, Earth, Water). Fire opened Perspective Canada at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was runner-up for the People's Choice Most Popular Film Award. It played at the New York Film Festival and won many awards worldwide, including the Audience Award for Best Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Festival, the Special Jury Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival and Silver Hugo Awards for Best Direction and Best Actress in Chicago.
Earth, based on Bapsi Sidhwa's acclaimed novel about Partition, Cracking India, is the second film in the Elemental Trilogy. It premiered as a Special Presentation at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival, and won the Prix Premiere du Public at the Festival du Film Asiatique de Deauville and the Critics' Award at the Verona Schermi d'Amore International Film Festival. Bollywood/Hollywood was a change of pace. Written and directed by Deepa, it is a lighthearted, affectionate comedy about two mismatched lovers. It opened Perspective Canada at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and was a tremendous crossover box office success. It remains one of the top 10 grossing English language Canadian movies. In 2003 Deepa co-wrote and directed the Canada-UK co-pro The Republic of Love, based on a Carol Shields novel.
After a disrupted and hazardous production history Deepa's final film in the Elemental Trilogy Water opened the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, and was the first Canadian film acquired by US distributor Fox Searchlight. Water is a powerful, hauntingly tragic story, set in Benares (Varanasi) about a child widow who at the age of eight is forced to enter a house of widows where she has to live for the rest of her life. The movie was to have been shot in India in 2000, but Hindu fundamentalists fomented riots, burnt sets, and issued death threats against the director and actors, forcing production to shut down and the filmmakers to leave the country. Water was successfully remounted in Sri Lanka and completed shooting in June 2004, and features many of India's most renowned actors.
Water was an enormous success. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 79th Annual Academy Awards, and has screened at festivals around the world, winning many awards, and remains an audience favourite. The Vancouver Film Critics Circle named Deepa Mehta the Best Canadian Director of 2006. This fall (2015) is the 10th anniversary of Water's launch.
In 2006 Deepa made a documentary about domestic violence in Toronto's immigrant families called Let's Talk About It, which continues to be used in community outreach programs. She then thematically segued into the feature film Heaven On Earth, which explores arranged marriages and isolation. Starring Preity Zinta, the film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008. It was awarded a Silver Hugo for Best Actress at the Chicago International Film Festival, and received the Best Screenplay Award at the Dubai International Film Festival. It also won the Youth Jury Award at the Schermi d'Amore Film Festival in Verona and the Audience Award at the River to River Florence Indian Film Festival.
In 2012, Deepa completed her epic cinematic adaptation of Salman Rushdie's famous novel about the history of India in the 20th century, Midnight's Children. A novel that won three Booker prizes. The movie, with 127 speaking parts, and covering five distinct time periods from 1917-1977, was a vast, ambitious undertaking and has screened all over the world, including the Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival. Midnight's Children was chosen as the Best Feature Film of 2013 at the Directors Guild of Canada's Awards.
Deepa's work as an artist, as a progressive voice about social issues, and her generous mentorship have often been recognized. She has received numerous honorary degrees and many awards and honours, among them: The Life of Distinction Award from the Canadian Centre of Diversity, The Excellence in the Arts Award from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the Woman of Distinction, President's Award from the YMCA. She is a recipient of the Governor General's Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award for Film. Most recently, in 2013, Deepa was appointed as an officer to the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour, for her work as a "groundbreaking screenwriter, director, and producer." She is also a recipient of the province of Ontario's highest honour, the Order of Ontario.- Writer
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Woody Allen was born on November 30, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in The Bronx, NY, the son of Martin Konigsberg and Nettie Konigsberg. He has one younger sister, Letty Aronson. As a young boy, he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today.
Allen broke into show business at 15 years when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows but felt that his jokes were being wasted. His agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, convinced him to start doing stand-up and telling his own jokes. Reluctantly he agreed and, although he initially performed with such fear of the audience that he would cover his ears when they applauded his jokes, he eventually became very successful at stand-up. After performing on stage for a few years, he was approached to write a script for Warren Beatty to star in: What's New Pussycat (1965) and would also have a moderate role as a character in the film. During production, Woody gave himself more and better lines and left Beatty with less compelling dialogue. Beatty inevitably quit the project and was replaced by Peter Sellers, who demanded all the best lines and more screen-time.
It was from this experience that Woody realized that he could not work on a film without complete control over its production. Woody's theoretical directorial debut was in What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966); a Japanese spy flick that he dubbed over with his own comedic dialogue about spies searching for the secret recipe for egg salad. His real directorial debut came the next year in the mockumentary Take the Money and Run (1969). He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in about a film a year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of comedy.
While best known for his romantic comedies Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Woody has made many transitions in his films throughout the years, transitioning from his "early, funny ones" of Bananas (1971), Love and Death (1975) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972); to his more storied and romantic comedies of Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); to the Bergmanesque films of Stardust Memories (1980) and Interiors (1978); and then on to the more recent, but varied works of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Husbands and Wives (1992), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Celebrity (1998) and Deconstructing Harry (1997); and finally to his films of the last decade, which vary from the light comedy of Scoop (2006), to the self-destructive darkness of Match Point (2005) and, most recently, to the cinematically beautiful tale of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Although his stories and style have changed over the years, he is regarded as one of the best filmmakers of our time because of his views on art and his mastery of filmmaking.- Director
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Director. Writer. Producer. Actor. Poet. He studied history, literature and theatre for some time, but didn't finish it and founded instead his own film production company in 1963. Later in his life, Herzog also staged several operas in Bayreuth, Germany, and at the Milan Scala in Italy. Herzog has won numerous national and international awards for his poetic feature and documentary films.- Writer
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Probably the most ambitious and visually distinctive filmmaker to emerge from Denmark since Carl Theodor Dreyer over 60 years earlier, Lars von Trier studied film at the Danish Film School and attracted international attention with his very first feature, The Element of Crime (1984). A highly distinctive blend of film noir and German Expressionism with stylistic nods to Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky and Orson Welles, its combination of yellow-tinted monochrome cinematography (pierced by shafts of blue light) and doom-haunted atmosphere made it an unforgettable visual experience. His subsequent features Epidemic (1987) and Europa (1991) have been equally ambitious both thematically and visually, though his international fame is most likely to be based on The Kingdom (1994), a TV soap opera blending hospital drama, ghost story and Twin Peaks (1990)-style surrealism that was so successful in Denmark that it was released internationally as a 280-minute theatrical feature.- Additional Crew
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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.- Director
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Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces and became a copilot of a B-24. After his discharge from the military, he became fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)), songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, "The Rumors are Flying"), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the Calvin Co., who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable, from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging projects. He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature film Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), he produced and directed several television commercials including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the TV series The Pulse of the City (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community theater. His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co., and went to Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock's TV show. From here, he went on to direct a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for M*A*S*H (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer's first choice - more than fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn't his first movie, but it was his first success. After that, he had his share of hits and misses, but The Player (1992) and, more recently, Gosford Park (2001) were particularly well-received.