Aaron Sorkin came to prominence in 1989 with the smash Broadway play, A Few Good Men, which garnered him the John Gassner Award for an American play by a new playwright. His film adaptation a few years later, forever immortalized...
Emma Thomas met Christopher Nolan while they were both students majoring in English literature at University College in London, England, and they were married during their last year at the school. Hardcore film buffs, Thomas and Nolan organized a film...
Stunt coordinator and 2nd Unit director Steve Ritzi grew up around boats on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway on the Atlantic coast. In 1989 he auditioned for and won a role in the stunt boat show at Universal Studios Orlando. At the...
Ridley Scott’s extraordinary sense of visuals was clear from the start. In 1977, he made a big splash in the film industry with The Duellists. Based on a Joseph Conrad story and set in the Napoleonic era, the film was...
Shawn Levy, a product of Yale’s drama department and USC’s graduate film program, paid his dues doing one-off acting jobs on many hit TV shows from the late 1980s. And he says acting roles on shows like thirtysomething, 21 Jump...
Although producer Jon Landau was born into the Hollywood industry, serendipity still played a role in his career. As COO of James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment, Landau produced both Avatar and Titanic. His early career, however, didn’t seem headed...
If there is one person in Hollywood worthy of laying claim to the crown worn by Jack P. Pierce – Universal Studios’ makeup genius of the 1930s and ‘40s (Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man) – it is Rick Baker....
Between his earliest low-budget films and later studio-sponsored efforts, New Zealand-born filmmaker Peter Jackson has blended inventive visual effects (sometimes hilariously over-the-top in nature) and photographic sleight of hand to portray apparitions, both ghastly and ghostly. These treatments have varied...
Ken Burns was born in Brooklyn and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He enrolled at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1971 with, as he puts its, “a naïve notion of preparing for a career as a narrative filmmaker in...
Fans of the old television series Fame will never forget hearing: “You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying in sweat,” from a tough-as-nails teacher whose compassion and sense of purpose was matched only...
Born in London, production designer Nathan Crowley began his career working as a set designer on Hook and has actually worked far more in the U.S. than in the U.K. He’s been involved on a wide range of projects, moving...
Any catalog of major action films of the ’80s, ’90s or the current decade would be seriously lacking if it didn’t include more than a handful of titles edited or co-edited by Chris Lebenzon. The editor just completed work with...
