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1-5 of 5
- Producer
- Writer
- Director
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
- Actor
- Director
A bright child, John Sayles began reading novels before age 9. A Williams College grad in 1972, he shunned a corporate career to work various blue-collar jobs, moving to east Boston to take a factory job. He wrote stories and submitted them to various magazines, and the Atlantic Monthly gave him the idea of publishing them in a novel--thus "Pride of the Bimbos" (1975) was born.
In the late 1970s he worked for renowned low-budget producer Roger Corman as a screenwriter. He saved much of the money he earned from that job, got some friends together and made Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) in 25 days. Altough it was a hit, he had trouble obtaining financing for the films he wanted to make because he would not give up his right of final cut. Baby It's You (1983) was Sayles' only film made under studio control.
In 1983 the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship granted him a tax-free income of $32,000 a year for 5 years. That stipend and money he earned for writing such films as The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983) and Breaking In (1989) enabled him to make the kinds of films he wanted to make. Lone Star (1996) placed Sayles in the ranks of top American filmmakers. In it and his other films, a broadly appealing social consciousness emerges, showing Sayles to be concerned with what's going on with regional cultures, national values and what living in the US is like today.
Sayles and Maggie Renzi, whom he met during college, have lived together since the 1970s, splitting their time between a Hoboken, NJ, house and a farm in upstate New York. They have no plans to marry.- Additional Crew
- Producer
People liked Joseph M. Schenck. Anyone who knew both him and his brother Nicholas Schenck would comment on how different they were. He came to New York in 1893 and, with his younger brother, built a drugstore business. They risked some profits and made more money in amusement parks. Marcus Loew bought one of their parks in 1907, then made the Schencks partners in Consolidated Enterprises, his theater and movie house chain in 1912. The brothers' personalities were quite different; Joe was affable and enjoyed keeping a deal together by finding common ground between business associates that often despised each other. His brother Nick was a cold, driven, hard-nosed businessman who thoroughly enjoyed keeping people on short leashes. In short, people were drawn to Joe and feared Nick.
Joe booked films, which gave him the opportunity to meet movie stars, among them Norma Talmadge, who became his wife in 1916. He was fascinated by Hollywood and wanted to get involved with movie production, whereas Nick was quietly managing Loew's burgeoning theatrical empire. Joe was far more enamored by the Hollywood lifestyle than his brother and wanted to take a much more active role in the production rather than the high finance end of the business. He saw his opportunity in 1917 to produce Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and the later D.W. Griffith films. At this point the brothers' lives took separate paths; Joe left Consolidated while Nick remained and soon became Marcus Loew's #2 man, assisting him in his dream of combining Metro Pictures with Goldwyn Pictures in order to provide the expanding theater chain with a steady flow of quality films (morphing into MGM, after bringing Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg on board in 1924), later ascending to the presidency of Loew's Incorporated's--MGM's parent company--after Marcus Loew's sudden death (quietly becoming the most powerful man in the motion picture industry) in late 1926. Joe became chairman of United Artists (which, somewhat ironically, lacked a theater chain--a factor that would ultimately cripple his brother's studio in the 1950s after the Supreme Court's anti-trust decision required theatrical divestment) in 1924, then its president in 1927.
In 1933 he helped Darryl F. Zanuck establish 20th Century Pictures, which merged with the ailing Fox Film Corp. in 1935, with Schenck as chairman of the renamed 20th Century-Fox. Organized crime had coveted Hollywood from a distance for years, but had been unable to make serious inroads into the area thanks to the brutally effective work of the Los Angeles Police Department's so-called "hat squad," which was tasked with keeping the city Mafia-free. The studio's weak link was through the growing thorns in their collective sides: the unions, whose membership and collectives spanned across state lines. In 1936 Willie Morris Bioff, a Chicago mobster out of the remnants of the Al Capone gang who ran the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees & Moving Picture Machine Operators behind the scenes, told the studios they could avoid strikes (along with the implied work slowdowns and spontaneous theater fires) for $2 million. All agreed to pay, but Schenck made one of the payoffs with a personal check, which came to the attention of U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents. Thanks to the paper trail, Schenck was indicted for income tax evasion. With some applied pressure and soul-searching, Joe testified against Bioff and the titular union president, George E. Browne, in 1941 as part of a plea bargain. In 1946 he began to serve a one-year sentence for tax irregularities and bribery (of the union officials) but was pardoned by President Harry Truman after having served only four months.
After leaving prison he immediately returned to Fox as head of production. Marilyn Monroe became friendly with him in 1947 and was known as one of his "girlfriends", although she said the relationship was platonic. He was helpful in her career in any case, getting her a very small part in Fox's Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) and convincing Harry Cohn at Columbia to give her a contract after Fox dropped her.
AMPAS awarded Schenck a special Oscar for services to the film industry in 1952. In 1953 he co-founded the Magna Corp. with Mike Todd to market the Todd-AO wide-screen system, which was wildly profitable (and remains a technological force in the movie industry to this day). Shortly after he retired in 1957, Schenck had a stroke and never fully recovered.- Music Department
- Composer
- Writer
Meredith Willson--musician, playwright, and composer--was best known for the book, words, and music for The Music Man (1962). He wrote two other musical plays, including The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964). Many of his songs are standards, including "You and I", "May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You", "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas", "Seventy-Six Trombones", and "Till There Was You", which was a surprising song choice for a hit record by The Beatles. Willson left his hometown of Mason City in 1919 to attend Damrosch Institute (now Juilliard) in New York. He played flute and piccolo in John Philip Sousa's band from 1921 to 1923 and then joined the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1924 to 1929. In 1930 he got a job in radio in California. Radio was his primary source of income over the following 25 years. He also composed several orchestral works during the '30s and '40s, including symphonies for The Great Dictator (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941). In 1951, stage producers Martin and Feuer proposed that Willson write a musical comedy about his Iowa boyhood. With his common touch, they said, it was sure to be a hit. After seven years, he finally got what turned out to be his masterpiece onto the stage. "The Music Man", which Willson said was "an Iowan's attempt to pay tribute to his home state", premiered on Broadway in 1957. Robert Preston recreated his most famous role and Willson's most famous character, that of Professor Harold Hill, in the film production of The Music Man (1962).- Additional Crew
- Producer
- Writer
Starting at the age 8 he had a series of jobs before starting his own business in 1900, which was sold to buy a Brooklyn nickelodeon in 1904. As the new owner with an empty house, Fox hired a coin manipulator and a barker to attract patrons into the dark 146-seat theatre. Once audiences adequately understood what moving pictures were, live acts were dispensed with. More nickelodeons were opened and he became a successful film exhibitor. He then won a long legal battle against Thomas Edison's Motion Pictures Patent Company, ending the film trust and allowing him to start his own production company in 1913. Operations were consolidated into the Fox Film Corporation in 1915. Theda Bara and Tom Mix starred in successful pictures made at the Fox Hollywood studios and the profits from them, and from the 1000 house Fox theatre chain, paid for "artistic" projects like Sunrise (1926), for awards and critical acclaim. In 1927, Fox acquired the American patent rights to the sound-on-film process developed by a Swiss firm. Fox pioneered the widescreen film with The Big Trail (1930). Poised for the future of talkies, he attempted to buy MGM just in time for 1929s stock market crash. In 1930 Fox was forced out of his company after a federal anti-trust investigation. His version is told in 1933 Upton Sinclair's book, 'Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.' In 1936, a year after Darryl F. Zanuck's 20th Century Pictures merged with Fox Films, Fox bribed a judge during the liquidation of his holdings in bankruptcy proceedings. His sentence, a year in prison, began in 1941. Paroled in 1943, he was a pariah in Hollywood. Though secure from his many patent holdings, the industry for which he had been so visionary was closed to him. A virtual pariah at the time of his death, no industry representative came to eulogize at his funeral.