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• 
  

• 
  California
  California (pronounced ⁱ/kælɨˈfɔrnjə/) is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third most extensive (after Alaska and Texas). It is home to the nation's second- and sixth-largest census statistical areas (Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and San Francisco Bay Area), and eight of the nation's fifty most populated cities (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland). The capital city is Sacramento.
  California's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west, to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east – from the Redwood–Douglas-fir forests of the northwest, to the Mojave Desert areas in the southeast. The center of the state is dominated by Central Valley, a major agricultural area. California contains both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States (Mount Whitney and Death Valley), and has the third-longest coastline of all states (after Alaska and Florida). Earthquakes are a common occurrence due to the state's location along the Pacific Ring of Fire: about 37,000 are recorded annually.
  
  wn.com/California
• Campbell Hall School
  Campbell Hall School is an independent, coeducational, K-12 Episcopal day school located in Studio City, California, United States. Founded in 1944 by the Reverend Alexander Campbell, Campbell Hall School is home to approximately 1,000 students from kindergarten through high school. Campbell Hall has programs in athletics, music, drama, dance and all other major academic areas. The school features a developed Performing Arts Program. Students in kindergarten through grade twelve participate in dance, voice, instrumental and drama programs. Orchestra and a World Music Program are available for grades 7-12. The Cunningham String Quartet performs an entirely classical repertoire at many school functions and recently^[when?] played at the National Association of Episcopal Schools Conference opening service. Students at the school, throughout all elementary grades the kids must wear a uniform all week while every other grades, must wear a uniform for four days of the school week, while Friday is a "Free-Dress" day. The uniform consists of khaki pants/shorts/skirts and a white collared shirt for upper school and navy pants/shorts/skirts and a white collared shirt.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Campbell_Hall_School
• 
  Cannes Film Festival
  The Cannes International Film Festival (French: Le Festival International du Film de Cannes or just Festival de Cannes), is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is the world's most prestigious and publicized film festival. The invitation-only festival is held annually (usually in May) at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès.
  The 2012 Cannes Film Festival took place from May 16 to May 27, 2012. The President of the Jury was the Italian film director Nanni Moretti.
  The Cannes Film Festival has its origins in the late 1930s when Jean Zay, the French Minister of National Education, on the proposal of Philippe Erlanger and with the support of the British and Americans,^{[clarification needed]} set up an international cinematographic festival. In 1947, the festival was held as the "Festival du film de Cannes", where films from sixteen countries were presented. Moreover, the principle of equality was introduced, so that the jury was to be made up only of one representative per country. Also, this year the festival was held at the made-for-the-occasion Palais des Festivals, although the roof was unfinished and blew off during a storm. The festival was not held in 1948 and 1950 on account of budgetary problems. In 1951, owing to better relations between France and Italy, the Cannes Festival was moved to Spring, while the Mostra remained in Autumn.
  
  wn.com/Cannes_Film_Festival
• 
  Cleveland, Ohio
  Cleveland ( /ˈkliːvlənd/) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately 60 miles (97 km) west of the Pennsylvania border. It was founded in 1796 near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, and became a manufacturing center owing to its location on the lake shore, as well as being connected to numerous canals and railroad lines. Cleveland's economy has diversified sectors that include manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, and biomedical. Cleveland is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
  As of the 2010 Census, the city proper had a total population of 396,815 and was the 45th largest city in the United States, and the second largest city in Ohio. It is the center of Greater Cleveland, the largest metropolitan area in Ohio. The Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor Metropolitan Statistical Area in 2011 ranked as the 28th largest in the United States with 2,068,283 people. Cleveland is part of the larger Cleveland-Akron-Elyria Combined Statistical Area, which in 2011 had a population of 2,871,084, and ranked as the country's 15th largest.
  
  wn.com/Cleveland,_Ohio
• 
  Emerson College
  Emerson College is a private coeducational university located in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a "school of oratory," Emerson is "the only comprehensive college or university in America dedicated exclusively to communication and the arts in a liberal arts context." Offering over three dozen degree programs in the area of Arts and Communication, the college is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc. Located in the Boston's Washington Street Theatre District on the edge of the Boston Common, the school also maintains buildings in Los Angeles and the town of Well, The Netherlands.
  Charles Wesley Emerson founded the Boston Conservatory of Elocution, Oratory, and Dramatic Art in 1880, a year after Boston University closed its School of Oratory.^{[citation needed]} Classes were held at Pemberton Square in Boston. Ten students enrolled in the conservatory's first class. The following year, the conservatory changed its name to the "Monroe Conservatory of Oratory," in honor of Charles Emerson's teacher at Boston University's School of Oratory, Professor Lewis B. Monroe. In 1890, the name changed again to "Emerson College of Oratory" and was later shortened to Emerson College in 1939.
  
  wn.com/Emerson_College
• 
  Los Angeles
  Los Angeles (ⁱ/lɒs ˈændʒələs/ loss-AN-jə-ləs; Spanish: [los ˈaŋxeles], which is written Los Ángeles; British pronounciation /lɒs ˈændʒəliːz/ loss-AN-jə-leez) with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in the state of California, and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of 468.67 square miles (1,213.8 km²), and is located in Southern California. Often known by its initials L.A., the city is the focal point of the larger Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metropolitan statistical area and Greater Los Angeles Area region, which contain 12,828,837 and nearly 18 million people respectively as of 2010, making it one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world and the second largest in the United States. Los Angeles is also the seat of Los Angeles County, the most populated and one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the United States, while the entire Los Angeles area itself has been recognized as the most diverse of the nation's largest cities. The city's inhabitants are referred to as "Angelenos".
  
  wn.com/Los_Angeles
• 
  New York University
  Coordinates: 40°43′48″N 73°59′42″W / 40.73°N 73.995°W / 40.73; -73.995
  New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City, USA. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the largest private nonprofit institutions of American higher education.
  NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1950. The university counts 34 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Abel Prize winners, 10 National Medal of Science recipients, 16 Pulitzer Prize winners, 21 Academy Award winners, and Emmy,Grammy, and Tony Award winners among its faculty and alumni. NYU also has MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as National Academy of Sciences members among its past and present graduates and faculty.
  NYU is organized into 18 schools, colleges, and institutes, located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, as well as more than a dozen other sites across the world, with plans for further expansion.
  
  wn.com/New_York_University
• 
  San Fernando Valley
  The San Fernando Valley (locally known as "The Valley") is an urbanized valley located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of southern California, United States, defined by the dramatic mountains of the Transverse Ranges circling it. Home to 1.76 million people, it lies north of the larger and more populous Los Angeles Basin.
  Nearly two thirds of the Valley's land area is part of the city of Los Angeles. The other incorporated cities in the valley are Burbank, Glendale, San Fernando, Hidden Hills and Calabasas.
  The San Fernando Valley is about 260 square miles (670 km²) bounded by the Santa Susana Mountains to the northwest, the Simi Hills to the west, the Santa Monica Mountains and Chalk Hills to the south, the Verdugo Mountains to the east, and the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. The northern Sierra Pelona Mountains, northwestern Topatopa Mountains, southern Santa Ana Mountains, and Downtown Los Angeles skyscrapers can be seen from higher neighborhoods, passes, and parks in the San Fernando Valley.
  
  wn.com/San_Fernando_Valley
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  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States

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  Adam Sandler
  Adam Richard Sandler (born September 9, 1966) is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, musician and film producer. After becoming a Saturday Night Live cast member, Sandler went on to star in several Hollywood feature films that grossed over $100 million at the box office. He is best known for his comedic roles, such as in the films Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996), The Waterboy (1998), Big Daddy (1999), and Mr. Deeds (2002), though he has ventured into more dramatic territory. In 1999, Sandler founded Happy Madison, a film and television production company that has produced numerous films and developed the 2007 television series Rules of Engagement.
  Adam Sandler was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents, Stanley, an electrical engineer, and Judy Sandler, a nursery school teacher. When he was five, his family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he attended Manchester Central High School. He found he was a natural comic, and nurtured his talent while at New York University by performing regularly in clubs and on campuses. Sandler graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1988.
  
  wn.com/Adam_Sandler
• 
  Aimee Mann
  Aimee Mann (born September 8, 1960) is an American rock singer-songwriter, guitarist and bassist.
  Aimee Mann grew up in Bon Air, Virginia, graduated from Open High School (Richmond, Virginia) in 1978 and attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out to sing with her first punk rock band, the Young Snakes.^{[citation needed]} The band released the EP Bark Along with the Young Snakes in 1982, and a compilation album was issued in 2004.
  In 1983, she co-founded with Berklee classmate and boyfriend Michael Hausman the new wave band 'Til Tuesday, which achieved success in 1985 with its first album, Voices Carry. The title song is said to be inspired by Hausman and Mann's breakup. The video became an MTV staple, winning the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist. Mann was featured on the Rush song "Time Stand Still" (from Hold Your Fire, 1987) which hit #3 on the American rock charts and became a minor UK hit, singing backup vocals and appearing in the music video. Her laughter is also heard at the start of "Force Ten," from the same album. With Mann playing an increasingly important role in songwriting, 'Til Tuesday released two more albums, Welcome Home and Everything's Different Now. Shortly after the release of Welcome Home, Mann told a writer for Nine-O-One Network Magazine that she was much more pleased with it than "Voices Carry", primarily because she felt it made more of a personal statement about her life. On their final tour, musician Jon Brion joined the band, which broke up in 1990 when Mann left to start her solo career.
  
  wn.com/Aimee_Mann
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  Amy Adams
  Amy Lou Adams (born August 20, 1974) is an American actress and singer. Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy to American parents, and began her performing career on stage in dinner theaters, before making her screen debut in the 1999 black comedy film Drop Dead Gorgeous. After a series of television guest appearances and roles in B movies, she was cast in the role of Brenda Strong in 2002's Catch Me If You Can, but her breakthrough role was in the 2005 independent film Junebug, playing Ashley Johnsten, for which she received critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
  Adams subsequently starred in Disney's 2007 film Enchanted, a critical and commercial success, and received a Golden Globe Award nomination for her performance as Princess Giselle. She received her second Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations the following year for her role as a young nun, Sister James, in Doubt. Though she has appeared in a range of dramatic and comedic roles, Adams has gained a reputation for playing characters with cheerful and sunny dispositions. Adams starred in Sunshine Cleaning with Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin, and the following year appeared as Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. She appeared in Julie & Julia in 2009 portraying writer Julie Powell followed by Leap Year in 2010. Her recent role as Charlene Fleming in The Fighter earned Adams her third Academy Award nomination, her third Golden Globe Award, second BAFTA Award, and fifth Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. In 2011, Adams appeared in the critically acclaimed musical film The Muppets alongside Jason Segel. She is scheduled to play Lois Lane in the upcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel in 2013.
  
  wn.com/Amy_Adams
• 
  Brillante Mendoza
  Brillante Mendoza (born July 30, 1960) is a Filipino film director. He has directed ten films since 2005. He won the award for Best Director for his film Kinatay at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. His latest film Lola won the award for Best Film at the 6th Dubai International Film Festival. His 2011 film Captive is scheduled to compete in competition at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival in February 2012.
  
  wn.com/Brillante_Mendoza
• 
  Coen brothers
  Joel David Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers. Their films include Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit.
  The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until recently Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing film credits for editor under the alias Roderick Jaynes.
  Joel and Ethan Coen, of Jewish heritage, grew up in a Jewish community in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their father, Edward, was an economist at the University of Minnesota, and their mother, Rena, an art historian at St. Cloud State University.
  When they were children, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television with a neighborhood kid, Mark Zimering ("Zeimers"),^{[citation needed]} as the star. Their first attempt was a romp titled, Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go. Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966) became their Zeimers in Zambia, which also featured Ethan as a native with a spear.
  
  wn.com/Coen_brothers
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  David Lynch
  David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, comic book artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery, and meticulous sound design. The surreal, and in many cases violent, elements to his films have earned them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences.
  Born to a middle class family in Missoula, Montana, Lynch spent his childhood traveling around the United States, before going on to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films. Deciding to devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977). After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man (1980), from which he gained mainstream success. Then being employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films: the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was highly critically acclaimed.
  
  wn.com/David_Lynch
• 
  David Mamet
  David Alan Mamet ( /ˈmæmɨt/; born November 30, 1947) is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.
  Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997). Mamet's books include: The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, a commentary on the movie business.
  Mamet was born in 1947 in Chicago to Jewish parents, Lenore June (Silver), a teacher, and Bernard Morris Mamet, an attorney. One of his first jobs was as a busboy at Chicago's The Second City. He was educated at the progressive Francis W. Parker School and at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
  
  wn.com/David_Mamet
• Edward Yang
  Edward Yang (simplified Chinese: 杨德昌; traditional Chinese: 楊德昌; pinyin: Yáng Déchāng; November 6, 1947 – June 29, 2007), along with Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming Liang, was one of the leading filmmakers of the Taiwanese New Wave and Taiwanese Cinema. He won the Best Director Award at Cannes for his 2000 film Yi Yi ("A One and a Two").
  Edward Yang was born in Shanghai in 1947, and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. After studying Electrical Engineering in National Chiao Tung University, he enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Florida, where he received his Masters Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1974. During this time and briefly afterwards, Yang worked at the Center for Informatics Research.^{[citation needed]} Yang always had a great interest in film ever since he was a child, but put away his aspirations in order to pursue a career in the high-tech industry.^{[citation needed]} Also, a brief enrollment at USC Film School after graduating with his M.S.E.E. convinced him that the world of film was not for him - he thought USC film school's teaching methodologies were too commercial-oriented.^{[citation needed]} Yang then applied and was accepted into Harvard's architecture school, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but decided not to attend.^{[dead link]} Thereafter, he went to Seattle to work in microcomputers and defense software.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Yang
• 
  Emily Watson
  Emily Watson (born 14 January 1967) is an English actress who gave an acclaimed debut film performance in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves. She has won a number of awards for acting throughout her career, which has encompassed theatre, motion picture and television; most recently a BAFTA award for her role in ITV's Appropriate Adult.
  Watson was born in Islington, London, England. Her father was an architect and her mother was an English teacher at St David's Girls' School, West London. She was brought up as an Anglican. Watson describes her childhood self as a "Nice middle class English girl ... I'd love to say I was a rebellious teenager but I wasn't".
  Watson was educated at St James Independent Schools, in west London, which she has described as a 'progressive' school. She attended the University of Bristol, where she obtained a B.A. (1988, English).^{[citation needed]} Following university, she trained at Drama Studio London,^{[citation needed]} and later received a M.A. (2003, honorary) from Bristol University.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Emily_Watson
• Ernie Anderson
  Ernest "Ernie" Earle Anderson (November 12, 1923 – February 6, 1997) was an American disc jockey, and television and radio announcer/voiceover artist. He is best known for his portrayal of Ghoulardi, a host of a late night horror movie presentation, and for his longtime role as the main voice of the American Broadcasting Company.
  Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Anderson planned to go to law school but was instead drafted into World War II. After the war, Anderson became a disc jockey at WSKI in Montpelier, VT. Anderson worked as a disc jockey in Albany, NY and Providence, RI before moving to Cleveland to join WHK. After WHK switched to a Top 40 format in late 1958, Anderson was let go as his persona didn't fit with the format's newer, high-energy presentation. From there, he went to NBC affiliate KYW-TV (now WKYC), where he first collaborated with Tim Conway for some on-air work.
  Both Anderson and Conway moved to then-CBS affiliate WJW-TV to host a local morning movie show called Ernie's Place, which also featured live skits and comedy bits reminiscent of then-popular comics Bob and Ray. When the two joined the station, Anderson sold Conway to WJW's management team as a director for the program, even though Conway never held any qualifications or had experience for that position. Unable to do the work, other staffers were called in to assist - including technician Chuck Schodowski - before Conway was ultimately dismissed. With Anderson deprived of his comic foil, Ernie's Place was canceled, but management soon offered him a horror host role for a local incarnation of Shock Theater that WJW acquired the rights to air late-nights on Fridays.
  
  wn.com/Ernie_Anderson
• 
  Fiona Apple
  Fiona Apple McAfee Maggart (born September 13, 1977) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Apple met international acclaim for her 1996 debut album, Tidal, which was a critical and commercial success. At the age of nineteen she received a Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for the single "Criminal" from that album in 1998.
  After Tidal, Apple released the critically acclaimed, though less commercially successful albums, When the Pawn... (1999) and Extraordinary Machine (2005). A perceived shelving of Extraordinary Machine was met with vocal protests from her fans, who campaigned against her record label in 2005. Apple's musical style contains elements of jazz and alternative rock.
  Born in New York City, Apple is the daughter of singer Diane McAfee and actor Brandon Maggart. Her older sister, Amber, sings cabaret under the stage name Maude Maggart. Her half brother Spencer is a director and directed the video for her single "Parting Gift." Her half brother Garett Maggart starred in the TV series The Sentinel. In addition, her maternal grandparents were Millicent Green, a dancer with the George White's Scandals, a series of 1920s musical revues similar to the Ziegfeld Follies, and Johnny McAfee, a multireedist and vocalist of the big band era; her grandparents met while touring with Johnny Hamp and his orchestra. Apple was raped at the age of twelve, a trauma she would later allude to in songs such as "Sullen Girl."
  
  wn.com/Fiona_Apple
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  Gus Van Sant
  Gus Green Van Sant, Jr. (born July 24, 1952) is an American film director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and author. He is a two time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director — for Good Will Hunting (1997) and Milk (2008), both of which were also nominated for Best Picture — and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Elephant (2003). He lives in Portland, Oregon.
  His early career was devoted to directing television commercials in the Pacific Northwest. In his films, he has dealt with themes concerning homosexuality and other marginalized subcultures.
  His filmography as writer and director includes a 1994 adaptation of Tom Robbins' 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which features a diverse cast (Keanu Reeves, Roseanne Barr, Uma Thurman, and k.d. lang, with cameos by William S. Burroughs and Heather Graham, among others); and My Own Private Idaho (1991), also starring Reeves as well as River Phoenix.
  He wrote the screenplays for most of his early movies, and wrote one novel, Pink. A book of his photography has also been published, called 108 Portraits.
  
  wn.com/Gus_Van_Sant
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  Gwyneth Paltrow
  Gwyneth Kate Paltrow ( /ˈɡwɪnɨθ ˈpæltroʊ/; born September 27, 1972) is an American actress and singer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991. After appearing in several films throughout the decade, Paltrow gained early notice for her work in films such as Seven (1995) and Emma (1996) (in which she played the title role). Following the films Sliding Doors (1998) and A Perfect Murder (1998), Paltrow garnered worldwide recognition through her performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actress and as a member of the Outstanding Cast. She also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2011 for her role as Holly Holliday on the Fox hit TV show Glee in the episode "The Substitute".
  Paltrow has portrayed supporting as well as lead roles in films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Shallow Hal (2001), and Proof (2005), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in Motion Picture Drama. Since 2008, she has portrayed Pepper Potts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring in Iron Man and its sequel, Iron Man 2 (2010), and also appearing in The Avengers (2012). Paltrow has been the face of Estée Lauder's Pleasures perfume since 2005. She is married to Chris Martin, the lead vocalist of Coldplay. They have two children together, Apple and Moses. She is also the face of American fashion brand Coach, owner of the lifestyle company Goop.com and author of the cookbook My Father's Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness.
  
  wn.com/Gwyneth_Paltrow
• 
  Howard Hawks
  Howard Winchester Hawks (May 30, 1896–December 26, 1977) was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. He is popular for his films from a wide range of genres such as Scarface (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), The Thing from Another World (1951), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959).
  In 1975, Hawks was awarded the Honorary Academy Award as "a master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema," and in 1942 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York.
  Howard Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana on May 30, 1896. Hawks was the first-born child of Frank W. Hawks (1865–1950), a wealthy paper manufacturer, and the former Helen Howard (1872–1952), the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Hawks's family on his father's side were American pioneers and his ancestor John Hawks had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1630. The family eventually settled in Goshen and by the 1890s was one of the wealthiest families in the Mid-West, due mostly to the highly profitable Goshen Milling Company. Hawk's maternal grandfather C. W. Howard (1845–1916) had homesteaded in Neenah, Wisconsin in 1862 at age 17 and within 15 years had earned a fortune in the town's Paper mill and other industrial endeavors. Frank Hawks and Helen Howard met in the early 1890s and married in 1895. Hawks was the oldest of five children and his birth was followed by Kenneth Neil Hawks (August 12, 1899- January 2, 1930), William Bellinger Hawks (1902- January 10, 1969), Grace Louise Hawks (October 17, 1903- December 23, 1927) and Helen Bernice Hawks (1906- May 4, 1911). In 1898 the family moved to Neenah, Wisconsin where Franks Hawks began working for his father-in-law's Howard Paper Company.
  
  wn.com/Howard_Hawks
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  Im Kwon-taek
  Im Kwon-taek (born May 2, 1936) is one of South Korea's most renowned film directors. In an active and prolific career, his films have won many domestic and international film festival awards as well as considerable box-office success, and helped bring international attention to the Korean film industry.
  Im Kwon-taek was born in Jangseong, Jeollanam-do and grew up in Gwangju. After the Korean War, he moved to Busan in search of work. He then moved to Seoul in 1956, where director of Five Fingers of Death (1972), Jeong Chang-hwa offered him room and board for work as a production assistant. Jeong recommended him for directing in 1961.
  Im's directorial premiere was with the 1962 film, Farewell to the Duman River (Dumanganga jal itgeola).
  Before 1980 he was known primarily as a commercial filmmaker who could efficiently direct as many as eight genre pictures a year, helping to fulfill the quota for domestic pictures set by the government [1]. His desire to make more artistically satisfying films began to show itself with his 1978 film Jokbo (Genealogy or The Family Tree), but the turning point of his career came with the 1981 film Mandala. From this point his films have been regarded as art-house cinema, and have been regularly shown at international film festivals, and have won numerous awards.
  
  wn.com/Im_Kwon-taek
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  Jacques Tati
  Jacques Tati (born Jacques Tatischeff; born 9 October 1907 in Le Pecq, Yvelines, France – died 5 November 1982) was a French filmmaker. Throughout his long career he worked as a comic actor, writer, and director. In a poll conducted by Entertainment Weekly of the Greatest Movie Directors Tati was voted the 46th greatest of all time. With only six feature-length films to his credit as director, he directed fewer films than any other director on this list of 50.
  Jacques Tati was born French with Russian, Dutch and Italian ancestry. His father, George Emmanuel Tatischeff, born in 1875 in Paris (d. 1957), was the son of Count Dmitriy Tatischeff (Дмитрий Татищев), General of the Imperial Russian Army and military attaché to the Russian Embassy in Paris. The Tatischeffs (also spelled Tatishchev) were a Russian noble family of patrilineal Rurikid descent. Whilst stationed in Paris Count Dmitri Tatischeff married a French woman, Rose Anahalie Alinquant.
  Under suspicious circumstances Count Dmitri Tatischeff died from injuries sustained in a horse riding accident shortly after the birth of George Emmanuel. As a child George Emmanuel experienced turbulent times, such as being forcibly removed from France and taken to Russia to live. In 1883 his mother brought him back to France where they settled on the estate of Le Pecq, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the outskirts of Paris. In 1903, Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff married the Dutch-Italian Marcelle Claire van Hoof (d. 1968). Together they had two children, Natalie (b. 1905) and Jacques. Claire's Dutch father, a friend of van Gogh whose clients included Toulouse Lautrec, was the owner of a prestigious picture framing company near the Place Vendôme in Paris, and he brought Georges-Emmanuel into the family business. Subsequently, Georges-Emmanuel became the director of the company Cadres Van Hoof, and the Tatischeff family enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.
  
  wn.com/Jacques_Tati
• Jann Wenner
  Jann Simon Wenner (born January 7, 1946) is the co-founder and publisher of the music and politics biweekly Rolling Stone, as well as the owner of Men's Journal and Us Weekly magazines.
  Wenner was born in New York City and grew up in a secular Jewish family.^{[citation needed]} His parents divorced in 1958, and he and his sisters, Kate and Merlyn, were sent to boarding schools to live. He graduated from high school at Chadwick School in 1963 and went on to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Before dropping out of Berkeley in 1966, Wenner was active in the Free Speech Movement and produced the column "Something's Happening" in the student-run newspaper, The Daily Californian. With the help of his mentor, San Francisco Chronicle jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, Wenner landed a job at Ramparts, a high-circulation muckraker, where Gleason was a contributing editor and Wenner worked on the magazine's spinoff newspaper.
  In 1967, Wenner and Gleason founded Rolling Stone in San Francisco. To get the magazine off the ground, Wenner borrowed $7,500 from family members and from the family of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim. In the summer following the start of the magazine, Wenner and Schindelheim were married in a small Jewish ceremony.
  
  wn.com/Jann_Wenner
• Jean-Pierre Melville
  Jean-Pierre Melville, born Jean-Pierre Grumbach (October 20, 1917 – August 2, 1973), was a French filmmaker. While with the French Resistance during World War II, he adopted the nom de guerre Melville as a tribute to his favorite American author, Herman Melville. He kept it as his stage name once the war was over.
  Jean-Pierre Grumbach was born in Paris, France, to an ethnic Jewish Alsatian family.
  After the fall of France in 1940 during World War II, Grumbach entered the French Resistance to oppose the German Nazis who occupied the country. He adopted the nom de guerre Melville, after the American author Herman Melville, a favorite of his. Melville fought in Operation Dragoon.
  When he returned from the war, he applied for a license to become an assistant director, but was refused. Without this support, he decided to direct his films by his own means, and continued to use Melville as his stage name. He became an independent film-maker and owned his own studio.
  He became well known for his tragic, minimalist film noir crime dramas, such as Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle rouge (1969), starring major actors such as Alain Delon (probably the definitive 'Melvillian' actor), Jean-Paul Belmondo and Lino Ventura. Influenced by American cinema, especially gangster films of the 1930s and '40s, he used accessories such as weapons, clothes (trench coats), and fedora hats, to shape a characteristic look in his movies.
  
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  Jeremy Renner
  Jeremy Lee Renner (born January 7, 1971) is an American actor, film producer and musician. Renner appeared largely in independent films throughout the 2000's such as Dahmer (2002) and Neo Ned (2005). He also offered supporting acting work in bigger films, S.W.A.T. and 28 Weeks Later (2007). He eventually came to prominence for his critically acclaimed performance in The Hurt Locker (2009) which garnered him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actor. He then turned out another praised performance for his role in The Town for which he received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. This subsequent recognition gave him the opportunity to star alongside some of Hollywood's biggest talent in blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) and The Avengers (2012) which broke records grossing more than a billion dollars internationally.
  Renner was born in Modesto, California, the first child of Valerie and Lee Renner, who managed a bowling alley. His parents married as teenagers and divorced when he was ten. He has five younger siblings, He graduated from Fred C. Beyer High School and attended Modesto Junior College. Renner is of German and Irish descent.
  
  wn.com/Jeremy_Renner
• John Holmes (actor)
  John Curtis Holmes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most prolific male porn stars of all time, appearing in about 2250 adult loops and pornographic feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s. He was best known for his exceptionally large penis, which was heavily promoted as being the longest, thickest, and hardest in the porn industry, although no definitive measurement of Holmes' actual penis length exists. Near the end of his life, Holmes attracted notoriety for his involvement in the Wonderland murders in 1981, and eventually for his death from complications caused by AIDS.
  Holmes was the subject of several books, a lengthy essay in Rolling Stone, two feature length documentaries, and was the inspiration for two Hollywood movies (Boogie Nights and Wonderland).
  John Holmes III was born John Curtis Estes on August 8, 1944 in the small rural town of Dilley Texas, located a few miles south of San Antonio of South Texas. The youngest of four children born to 26-year-old Mary June Holmes (née Barton); the name of John's father was not listed on his birth certificate. Mary and her husband, Edward Holmes, the father of Holmes' three older siblings, Dale, Edward and Anne, were separated numerous occasions throughout their marriage. Mary changed John's surname to Holmes when he was a child. It was not until 1986, prior to a trip to Italy, when his mother provided him with the hand-written copy of his original birth certificate that Holmes learned the name of his biological father, Carl Estes. John's mother was a devout Southern Baptist, who regularly attended the Milport Chapel Church along with her children, where John had perfect attendance.
  
  wn.com/John_Holmes_(actor)
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  John Huston
  John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote the screenplay for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The Misfits (1961), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). During his 46-year career, Huston received 15 Oscar nominations, winning twice, and directed both his father, Walter Huston, and daughter, Anjelica Huston, to Oscar wins in different films.
  Huston was known to direct with the vision of an artist, having studied and worked as a fine art painter in Paris in his early years. He continued to explore the visual aspects of his films throughout his career: sketching each scene on paper beforehand, then carefully framing his characters during the shooting. In addition, while most directors rely on post-production editing to shape their final work, Huston instead created his films while they were being shot, making his films both more economical and more cerebral, with little editing needed.
  
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  Johnny Greenwood
  Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwood (born 5 November 1971) is an English musician and composer best known as a member of the English rock band Radiohead. Noted for his aggressive playing style, Greenwood is consistently named as one of the greatest guitarists of the modern era. Beyond his primary roles as the band's lead guitarist and keyboardist, Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist and also plays viola, harmonica, glockenspiel, ondes Martenot, banjo and drums, and works with computer-generated sounds and sampling; he is also a computer programmer and writes music software used by Radiohead.
  Outside his work with Radiohead, Greenwood wrote the soundtracks for the films Bodysong (2003), There Will Be Blood (2007), Norwegian Wood (2010) and We Need To Talk About Kevin (2010), and serves as composer-in-residence for the BBC Concert Orchestra. He is the younger brother of Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood.
  Greenwood had begun studying music and psychology at Oxford Brookes University when Radiohead, then known as On A Friday, signed a recording contract with EMI in 1991. He left the university shortly after. While Greenwood is the only member of Radiohead to have been classically trained on any instrument (he took viola lessons as a child), he is also the only band member without a university degree.
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Greenwood
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  Jon Brion
  Jon Brion (born December 11, 1963) is an American rock and pop multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, composer and record producer.
  Brion was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. He came from a musical family; his mother, LaRue, was an administrative assistant and singer, and his father, Keith Brion, was a band director at Yale. His brother and sister became a composer/arranger and a violinist, respectively. Brion had difficulties at Hamden High School and at the age of 17 left education, opting instead to play music professionally. From 1980-85 Jon was part of the band The Excerpts, along with Stephen Harris, Dean Falcone, Jim Balga, Bobby Butcher & Spike Priggen.
  In the early 1980s, Brion and musician/producer Bill Murphy began a writing collaboration in New Haven, Connecticut. They eventually enlisted bassist Don "Riff" Fertman and together formed The Bats, (not to be confused with the New Zealand group of the same name). The Bats released a single, "Popgun" and one album How Pop Can You Get?, on Gustav records in 1982. The recordings had much critical acclaim, but little commercial success, and the trio eventually disbanded.
  
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  Jonathan Demme
  Robert Jonathan Demme (born February 22, 1944) is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. Best known for directing The Silence of the Lambs, which won him the Academy Award for Best Director, he has also directed the acclaimed movies Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married, the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense and a trilogy of Neil Young documentary/concert movies.
  Demme broke into feature film working for exploitation film producer Roger Corman from 1971 to 1976, co-writing and producing Angels Hard as They Come and The Hot Box. He then moved on to directing, with three films (Caged Heat, Crazy Mama, Fighting Mad) for Corman's studio New World Pictures. After Fighting Mad, Demme directed the comedy film Handle with Care for Paramount Pictures in 1977. The film was well-reviewed by critics, but received little promotion, and performed poorly at the box office.
  Demme's next film, 1980's Melvin and Howard, did not get a wide release, but received a groundswell of critical acclaim, and led to the signing of Demme to direct the Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell star vehicle Swing Shift. Intended as a prestige picture for Warner Bros. as well as a major commercial vehicle for Demme, it instead became a troubled production due to the conflicting visions of Demme and star Hawn. Demme ended up renouncing the finished product, and when the film was released in May 1984, it was generally panned by critics and neglected by moviegoers. After Swing Shift, Demme stepped back from Hollywood to make the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense; the eclectic screwball action-romantic comedy Something Wild; a film-version of the stage production Swimming to Cambodia, by monologist Spaulding Gray; and the New York Mafia-by-way-of Downtown comedy Married to the Mob.
  
  wn.com/Jonathan_Demme
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  Julian Schnabel
  Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates.
  Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award nominated role and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards.
  He has won a Golden Globe, as well as BAFTA, a César Award, a Golden Palm, two nominations for the Golden Lion and an Academy Award nomination.
  Born in Brooklyn, New York City to Esta Greenberg and Jack Schnabel. Schnabel moved with his family to Brownsville, Texas when still young. It was in Brownsville that he spent most of his formative years and where he took up surfing and resolved to be an artist. He is from a Jewish background and his mother was president in 1948 of the Brooklyn chapter of Hadassah, a religious Women's Zionist Organization in America.
  He received his B.F.A. at the University of Houston. After graduating, he sent an application to the independent study program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His application included slides of his work sandwiched between two pieces of bread. He was admitted into the program. Schnabel worked as a short-order cook and frequented Max's Kansas City, a restaurant-nightclub, while he worked on his art. In 1975, Schnabel had his first solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Over the next few years he traveled frequently to Europe, where he was enormously impressed by the work of Antoni Gaudi, Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys.
  
  wn.com/Julian_Schnabel
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  Julianne Moore
  Julianne Moore (born Julie Anne Smith on December 3, 1960) is a British-American actress and a children's book author. She has been nominated for four Oscars, six Golden Globes, three BAFTAs and nine Screen Actors Guild Awards.
  Moore began her acting career in 1983 in minor roles, before joining the cast of the soap opera As the World Turns, for which she won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1988. She began to appear in supporting roles in films during the early 1990s, in films such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The Fugitive. Her performance in Short Cuts (1993) won her and the rest of the cast a Golden Globe for their ensemble performance, and her performance in Boogie Nights (1997) brought her widespread attention and nominations for several major acting awards.
  Her success continued with films such as The Big Lebowski (1998), The End of the Affair (1999) and Magnolia (1999). She received particular acclaim for her portrayal of a betrayed wife in Far from Heaven (2002), winning several critic awards as best actress of the year, in addition to several other nominations, including the Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award. The same year, she was also nominated for several awards as best supporting actress for her work in The Hours. In 2010, Moore starred in the comedy drama The Kids Are All Right, for which she received a Golden Globe and BAFTA nomination.
  
  wn.com/Julianne_Moore
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  Kevin Smith
  Kevin Patrick Smith (born August 2, 1970) is an American screenwriter, actor, film producer, and director, as well as a popular comic book writer, author, comedian/raconteur, and internet radio personality best recognized by viewers as Silent Bob. Although primarily known for the View Askew film series, Smith also wrote, directed and produced films such as the buddy cop action comedy Cop Out, as well as the horror film Red State. His first several films were mostly set in his home state of New Jersey, and while not strictly sequential, they frequently feature crossover plot elements, character references, and a shared canon in what is known by fans as the "View Askewniverse", named after his production company View Askew Productions, which he co-founded with Scott Mosier.
  Smith is also the owner of Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash comic book and novelty store in Red Bank, New Jersey. He co-hosts several weekly podcasts that are recorded at various locations around the world and released on SModcast Internet Radio. Smith is well known for participating in long, humorous Q&A sessions that are often filmed for DVD release, beginning with An Evening with Kevin Smith.
  
  wn.com/Kevin_Smith
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  Luis Guzmán
  Luis Guzmán (born August 28, 1956) is a Puerto Rican-born American actor, who is known for his character work. For much of his Guzmán's career, he has played character roles largely as sidekicks, thugs, or policemen.
  He is a favorite of director Steven Soderbergh, who cast him in Out of Sight, The Limey, and Traffic, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. He also voiced Ricardo Diaz in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. He recently starred in the HBO original series How to Make It in America.
  Guzmán was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico and was raised in New York City's Greenwich Village and the surrounding Lower East Side neighborhood. His mother, Rosa, was a hospital worker, and his stepfather, Benjamin Cardona, was a TV repairman. A graduate of City College of New York, he began his career not as an actor but as a social worker and moonlighted as an actor, eventually becoming heavily involved in street theater and independent films.
  
  wn.com/Luis_Guzmán
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  Mark Wahlberg
  Mark Robert Michael Wahlberg (born June 5, 1971) is an American actor, film and television producer, and former rapper. He was known as Marky Mark in his earlier years, and became famous for his 1989 debut as frontman with the band Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. He was named No. 1 on VH1's 40 Hottest Hotties of the 90's. Wahlberg is well known for his roles in films such as Boogie Nights (1997), Three Kings (1999), The Perfect Storm (2000), Planet of the Apes (2001), Rock Star (2001), The Italian Job (2003), I Heart Huckabees (2004), Four Brothers (2005), The Departed (2006), Invincible (2006), Shooter (2007), and The Fighter (2010), Date Night (2010). He has also served as the executive producer of the TV series Entourage, Boardwalk Empire and How to Make It in America.
  Wahlberg was born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, the youngest of nine children, with siblings Arthur, Jim, Paul, Robert, Tracey, Michelle, Debbie (died in 2003 at age 44), and Donnie. His father was of half Swedish and half Irish ancestry, and his mother is of Irish, English, and French Canadian descent. Maternally, Wahlberg is distantly related to author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wahlberg's mother, Alma Elaine (née Donnelly), was a bank clerk and nurse's aide, and Wahlberg's father, Donald Edward Wahlberg, was a Teamster who worked as a delivery driver. His parents divorced in 1982. Wahlberg had a Roman Catholic upbringing and attended Copley Square High School (but never graduated) on Newbury Street in Boston.
  
  wn.com/Mark_Wahlberg
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  Martin Scorsese
  Martin Charles Scorsese ( /skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.
  Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.
  
  wn.com/Martin_Scorsese
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  Mathieu Amalric
  Mathieu Amalric (born 25 October 1965) is a French actor and film director, perhaps best known internationally for his performance as the lead villain in Bond film Quantum Of Solace and for his role in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which he drew critical acclaim. He also has won the Étoile d'or and the Lumière Award.
  Amalric was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, France, the son of journalists Nicole Zand, a literary critic for Le Monde, and Jacques Amalric, who has worked as a foreign affairs editor for Le Monde and Libération. Mathieu Amalric's mother was born in Poland to Jewish parents, and moved to France before World War II; she originates from the same village as director Roman Polanski's family. Amalric first gained fame in the film Ma Vie Sexuelle (My Sex Life...or How I Got Into an Argument), for which he won a César Award.
  Amalric was selected to play the James Bond villain Dominic Greene, and stars alongside Daniel Craig (alongside whom he had previously starred in Munich) in the 2008 film Quantum of Solace.
  
  wn.com/Mathieu_Amalric
• Max Ophuls
  Maximillian Oppenheimer (6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany – 26 March 1957, Hamburg, Germany) — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany (1931–33), France (1933–40), the United States (1947–50), and France again (1950–57). He made nearly 30 films altogether, those from the last period being especially noted: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955).
  Max Ophüls was the son of Leopold Oppenheimer, a Jewish textile manufacturer from Saarbrücken and owner of several textile shops in Germany, and his wife Helen. He took the pseudonym Ophüls during the early part of his theatrical career so that, should he fail, it wouldn't embarrass his father.
  Initially envisioning an acting career, he started as a stage actor in 1919 and played at the Aachen Theatre from 1921 to 1923. He then worked as a theater director, becoming the first director at the city theater of Dortmund. Ophüls moved into theatre production in 1924. He became creative director of the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1926. Having had 200 plays to his credit, he turned to film production in 1929, when he became a dialogue director under Anatole Litvak at UFA in Berlin. He worked throughout Germany and directed his first film in 1931, the comedy short Dann schon lieber Lebertran (literally In This Case, Rather Cod-Liver Oil).
  
  wn.com/Max_Ophuls
• Max Ophüls
  Maximillian Oppenheimer (6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany – 26 March 1957, Hamburg, Germany) — known as Max Ophüls — was an influential German-born film director who worked in Germany (1931–33), France (1933–40), the United States (1947–50), and France again (1950–57). He made nearly 30 films altogether, those from the last period being especially noted: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955).
  Max Ophüls was the son of Leopold Oppenheimer, a Jewish textile manufacturer from Saarbrücken and owner of several textile shops in Germany, and his wife Helen. He took the pseudonym Ophüls during the early part of his theatrical career so that, should he fail, it wouldn't embarrass his father.
  Initially envisioning an acting career, he started as a stage actor in 1919 and played at the Aachen Theatre from 1921 to 1923. He then worked as a theater director, becoming the first director at the city theater of Dortmund. Ophüls moved into theatre production in 1924. He became creative director of the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1926. Having had 200 plays to his credit, he turned to film production in 1929, when he became a dialogue director under Anatole Litvak at UFA in Berlin. He worked throughout Germany and directed his first film in 1931, the comedy short Dann schon lieber Lebertran (literally In This Case, Rather Cod-Liver Oil).
  
  wn.com/Max_Ophüls
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  Maya Rudolph
  Maya Khabira Rudolph (born July 27, 1972) is an American actress, comedienne and singer who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 2000 to 2007, and has appeared in films such as Away We Go, Bridesmaids, Grown Ups, A Prairie Home Companion and MacGruber. She is the daughter of R&B and soul singer Minnie Riperton and music producer/composer Richard Rudolph. Since 2011, she has co-starred in the NBC sitcom Up All Night.
  Rudolph was born in Gainesville, Florida. She is the daughter of soul singer Minnie Riperton and composer/songwriter/producer Richard Rudolph. Her father is Ashkenazi Jewish and her mother was African-American. Her paternal grandfather was Sidney Rudolph, a philanthropist who once owned all of the Wendy's and Rudy's restaurants in Dade County, FL. Her parents moved to Los Angeles when she and her brother Marc were very young, and they grew up primarily in the Westwood section.
  Rudolph was in the studio with her mother on the day Riperton recorded "Lovin' You",^{[citation needed]} Near the end of the track, Riperton can be heard singing "Maya, Maya, Maya" to Rudolph. Riperton incorporated this into her performance of the song on The Midnight Special. Riperton died on July 12, 1979, at age 31, from breast cancer, just shy of Rudolph's seventh birthday. Rudolph's godmother was R&B singer Teena Marie.
  
  wn.com/Maya_Rudolph
• Melora Walters
  Melora Walters (born October 21, 1959) is an American actress.
  Walters was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia to American parents in 1960 (according to IMDB). She was partly raised there and in Holland. Walters attended high school at Lake Forest Academy-Ferry Hall in Lake Forest, Illinois. She is divorced from Nip/Tuck actor Dylan Walsh, with whom she has two children, Joanna and Thomas.
  Cast three times by Paul Thomas Anderson, Walters has appeared in Hard Eight, Boogie Nights (as Jessie St. Vincent), and Magnolia (as Claudia Wilson Gator). She has also appeared on such television shows as Roseanne, Seinfeld, NYPD Blue and CSI.
  In 2003, Walters portrayed Lila in Cold Mountain, and in 2004, played Andrea Treborn in the The Butterfly Effect. She guest-starred as Sylvia Greene on Desperate Housewives in 2007 and played the role of Wanda Hendrickson in the HBO drama Big Love.
  
  wn.com/Melora_Walters
• Michael Caton-Jones
  Michael Caton-Jones (born Michael Jones; 15 October 1957) is the director of such films as Scandal, Rob Roy, Memphis Belle and The Jackal. Caton-Jones was born in Broxburn, Lothian, Scotland.
  He attended to St Marys Academy in Bathgate, and trained at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, Bucks, UK.
  A lifelong Celtic FC supporter, Caton-Jones is married to film producer Laura Viederman, with whom he has 2 children (Romy b. 2001 and Charlie b. 2003). He also has two daughters from a previous relationship (Daisy b. 1983 and Molly b. 1990).
  His film Basic Instinct 2 won several Razzies at the 2007 ceremony.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Michael_Caton-Jones
• Michael De Luca
  Michael De Luca (born August 13, 1965) is an American movie producer and screenwriter.
  De Luca was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was a German Jewish immigrant, and his father, who was Italian American and Catholic, worked at ConEdison. De Luca was exposed to motion pictures by his father, who would sneak the youngster into movie theaters. Although he has been characterized as "neither athletic nor academic," he skipped the eighth grade and enrolled at New York University in film studies at age 17. An internship with the independent producer-distributor New Line Cinema led to an offer of full-time work when he was just a few credits shy of graduating from NYU. De Luca abandoned academia for a career in showbiz in 1986. Originally tapped to work as a story editor, he rose fairly quickly through the ranks, thanks in part to his mentor, chair and co-founder Robert Shaye. De Luca did complete his degree from Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 1995.
  In 1988, De Luca made his debut as an associate producer on "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III". De Luca has been collecting comics since childhood and is a huge fan of comics and sci-fi such as Star Trek. In 1996, De Luca, a self-proclaimed "Trekkie", was approached by the producers Brannon Braga and Ron Moore for Star Trek: Voyager and pitched an idea which turned into an opportunity to write an episode for the series.
  
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  Michael Haneke
  Michael Haneke (German pronunciation: [hɑːnɛkɛ]; born 23 March 1942) is a German born Austrian filmaker and screenwriter best known for his bleak and disturbing style. His films often document problems and failures in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theatre and cinema. He is also known for raising social issues in his work. Besides working as filmmaker he also teaches directing at the Filmacademy Vienna.
  At the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, his film The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or for best film, and at the 67th Golden Globe Awards the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2012, his film, Love, premiered and competed at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The film would go on to win the Palme d'Or, making it his second win of the prestigious award in three years and putting him in an elite club of only seven with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola. He has made films in French, German and in English.
  Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, the son of the German actor and director Fritz Haneke and the Austrian actress Beatrix von Degenschild. Haneke was raised in the city Wiener Neustadt. He attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy, psychology and drama after failing to achieve success in his early attempts in acting and music. After graduating, he became a film critic and from 1967 to 1970 he worked as editor and dramaturg at the southwestern German television station Südwestfunk. He made his debut as a television director in 1974.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Haneke
• Michael Penn
  Michael Penn (born August 1, 1958) is an American singer, songwriter and composer. He is the eldest son of actor/director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan, and the brother of actors Sean Penn and the late Chris Penn.
  Michael Penn is a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter and film composer. Prior to the release of his 1989 debut album March, Penn was a member of the Los Angeles band Doll Congress, and had appeared as an extra on a few television series, including St. Elsewhere.
  March, particularly the first single, "No Myth," brought Penn attention, as well as the 1990 MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist. Penn's follow-up albums Free-for-All (1992), Resigned (1997) MP4: Days Since a Lost Time Accident (2000 ) Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947 (2005) and Palms and Runes, Tarot and Tea (2007) weren't able to match the commercial success of March, although critics continued to praise his songcraft.
  It was with Free-for-All that Penn faced the specter of the one-hit wonder. The album, while praised by critics, was not as successful as Penn's debut, though it had more than its share of supporters. Rolling Stone called it "stunning" and CMJ wrote that the album "exhausts any doubts" about whether March was a fluke.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Penn
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  Miranda July
  Miranda July (born February 15, 1974) is an American performance artist, writer, actress and film director. Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, she works under the surname of "July," which can be traced to a character from a "girlzine" Miranda created with high school friend Johanna Fateman, called Snarla.
  Miranda July was born in Barre, Vermont, the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. Her parents, who taught at Goddard College at the time, are both writers. In 1974 they founded North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles. Her father was Jewish and her mother was Protestant. July was encouraged to work on her short fiction by author and friend of a friend, Rick Moody.
  Miranda grew up in Berkeley, California, where she first began writing plays and staging them at the all-ages club 924 Gilman. She attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland for high school. She later attended UC Santa Cruz, dropping out in her sophomore year. After leaving college, she moved to Portland, Oregon and took up performance art. Her performances were successful; she has been quoted as saying she has not worked a day job since she was 23 years old.
  
  wn.com/Miranda_July
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  Nicolas Winding Refn
  Nicolas Winding Refn (born 29 September 1970) is a Danish film director, screenwriter and producer. Winding Refn moved to the United States in 1981 and graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1993. He is famous for directing the Pusher trilogy. His film Drive premiered in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival where it won him the Best Director Award.
  Winding Refn was born in Copenhagen and raised partly in New York. He is married to actress Liv Corfixen, with whom he has two children. His parents are Danish film director and editor Anders Refn and cinematographer Vibeke Winding. His half-brother is Danish singer Kasper Winding.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Nicolas_Winding_Refn
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  Nuri Bilge Ceylan
  Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkish pronunciation: [ˈnuːri ˈbilɡe ˈdʒejlan]; born 26 January 1959 in Istanbul) is a Turkish photographer and film director. He is married to the filmmaker, photographer, and actress Ebru Ceylan, his co-star in İklimler (Climates).
  Ceylan learned photography at age 15, and developed an interest in film at 22. While Ceylan study at Bogazici University, he participated cinema and photography clubs and he took passport-style photos to make pocket money. After graduating from university with a BSC degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, he went to London and Kathmandu to decide what he should do in life. Then he went to Ankara back to do military service. When he was in the army, he found out how to give shape to the rest of his life 'cinema'. Ceylan's first short film Koza (Cocoon) was screened in the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. He received many awards with his debut feature Kasaba (Small Town). His third feature Uzak (Distant) received many awards including the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Actor Prize at Cannes, and was praised internationally. His 2006 film Iklimler (Climates) won the FIPRESCI Movie Critics' Award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and received international praise by critics and experts. The film won 5 awards at the 2006 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, bringing him the "Best Director" title. During the preparation of this movie, Ceylan turned his attentions to photography again. From this point on, he began devoting his time to both cinema and photography. "Turkey Cinemascope" is a book of Panoramic Photographs of Turkey by Nuri Bilge Ceylan between the years 2003 and 2009. He won the best director award in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys). At the end of his speech, Ceylan stated, "I dedicate this award to my beautiful and lonely country, which I love passionately."
  
  wn.com/Nuri_Bilge_Ceylan
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  Orson Welles
  George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds (1938), the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane (1941), which many critics and scholars name as the best film of all time.
  After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.
  
  wn.com/Orson_Welles
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  Paul Dano
  Paul Franklin Dano (born June 19, 1984) is an American actor and producer. He has appeared in films such as L.I.E. (2001), Too Young to Be a Dad (2002), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Gigantic (2008).
  Dano was born in New York City, the son of Gladys (née Pipp) and Paul Dano. He spent the first few years of his childhood in New York City and initially attended the Browning School, while his father worked as a businessman in New York.
  While he was still a child, Dano's family moved from New York to New Canaan, Connecticut, finally settling in Wilton, Connecticut, where Dano continued his education at Wilton High School, graduating in 2002 to further attend Eugene Lang College in New York, NY.
  As a child he was involved in community theatre, and while performing in New Canaan his parents were encouraged to take him to New York City. At age 10, he was quickly scouted for roles in plays on Broadway, making his debut at age 12 in a revival of Inherit the Wind along with George C. Scott and Charles Durning. At age 17, Dano acted in his first major film role as Howie in L.I.E.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Dano
• Paul F. Tompkins
  Paul Francis Tompkins (born c. 1968), best known as Paul F. Tompkins, is an American comedian, actor and writer. He is known for his work in television on such programs as Mr. Show with Bob and David, Real Time With Bill Maher and Best Week Ever, later renamed Best Week Ever with Paul F. Tompkins.
  He is also the host of The Pod F. Tompkast, which was ranked #1 by Rolling Stone on their list of "The 10 Best Comedy Podcasts of the Moment" in 2011.
  A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, In 1986 Tompkins first performed comedy at 17 years of age at The Comedy Works in Philadelphia (a club now located in Bristol, Pennsylvania) where he performed as half of a sketch comedy duo with the late Rick Roman. Tompkins attended Temple University however he dropped-out and left for Los Angeles, California in 1994.
  Tompkins met actor Jay Johnston in L.A. through their mutual friend, actor and director Adam McKay. McKay and Tompkins had become friends in Philadelphia, where they had both started to perform stand-up at around the same time. McKay later moved to Chicago and met Johnston; Johnston moved to L.A. at around the same time as Tompkins and McKay introduced the two. Tompkins and Johnston went on to create a live sketch comedy show called "The Skates" that was seen by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross and helped get them hired to work on Mr. Show with Bob and David in 1996.
  
  wn.com/Paul_F._Tompkins
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  Paul Thomas Anderson
  Paul Thomas Anderson (born June 26, 1970), is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has written and directed feature films: Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), and The Master (2012). He has been nominated for five Academy Awards — There Will Be Blood for Best Achievement in Directing, Best Motion Picture of the Year, and Best Adapted Screenplay; Magnolia for Best Original Screenplay; and Boogie Nights for Best Original Screenplay.
  Anderson has been hailed as being "one of the most exciting talents to come along in years" and "among the supreme talents of today." After the release of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Anderson was praised as a wunderkind. In 2004, Anderson was ranked twenty-first on The Guardian's list of the forty best directors. In 2007, Total Film named him the twentieth greatest director of all time, while the American Film Institute regards him as "one of American film's modern masters." In 2011, Entertainment Weekly named him the tenth-greatest working director calling him "one of the most dynamic directors to emerge in the last twenty years."
  
  wn.com/Paul_Thomas_Anderson
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  People (magazine)
  People (originally called People Weekly) is a weekly American magazine of celebrity and human-interest stories, published by Time Inc. As of 2006, it has a circulation of 3.75 million and revenue expected to top $1.5 billion. It was named "Magazine of the Year" by Advertising Age in October 2005, for excellence in editorial, circulation and advertising.People ranked #6 on Advertising Age's annual "A-list" and #3 on Adweek's "Brand Blazers" list in October 2006.
  The magazine runs a roughly 50/50 mix of celebrity and human-interest articles. People's editors claim to refrain from printing pure celebrity gossip, enough so to lead celebrity publicists to propose exclusives to the magazine, evidence of what one staffer calls a "publicist-friendly strategy".
  People's website, People.com, focuses exclusively on celebrity news. In February 2007, the website drew 39.6 million page views "within a day" of the Golden Globes. However "the mother ship of Oscar coverage" broke a site record with 51.7 million page views on the day after the Oscars, beating the previous record set just a month before from the Golden Globes.^{[not in citation given]}
  
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  Philip Baker Hall
  Philip Baker Hall (born September 10, 1931) is an American actor.
  Hall was born in Toledo, Ohio, the son of a factory worker father who was from Montgomery, Alabama. He attended the University of Toledo. As a younger man, Hall served in the military, started a family, and became a high school English teacher. In 1961, he decided to become an actor. He moved to New York, enjoying success in Off Broadway and Broadway productions.
  In 1975, Hall moved to Los Angeles to make a career in television. Since then, he has had over 200 guest roles on television shows.
  He starred in many films, including Robert Altman's Secret Honor in which he played the film's only role, Richard Nixon. Hall got his first high-profile film role when Paul Thomas Anderson wrote a role in his film Hard Eight, specifically for Hall. Hall went on to have roles in two of Anderson's subsequent films, Boogie Nights and Magnolia. He also had a minor role as Captain Diel in the Rush Hour trilogy (though his scenes were cut from the theatrical release of Rush Hour 2).
  
  wn.com/Philip_Baker_Hall
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  Quentin Tarantino
  Quentin Jerome Tarantino (pronunciation: /ˌtærənˈtiːnoʊ/; born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. He has received many industry awards, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA and the Palme d'Or and had been nominated for an Emmy and Grammy.
  Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tarantino was an avid film fan. His career began in the late 1980's, when he wrote and directed My Best Friend's Birthday. Its screenplay would form the basis for True Romance. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).
  His movies are generally characterized by stylistic influences from grindhouse, kung fu, and spaghetti western films. Tarantino also frequently collaborates with his friend and fellow filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.
  
  wn.com/Quentin_Tarantino
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  Reese Witherspoon
  Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon (born March 22, 1976), better known as Reese Witherspoon, is an American actress and film producer. Witherspoon landed her first feature role as the female lead in the film The Man in the Moon in 1991; later that year she made her television acting debut, in the cable movie Wildflower. In 1996, Witherspoon appeared in Freeway and followed that appearance with roles in three major 1998 films: Overnight Delivery, Pleasantville and Twilight. The following year, Witherspoon appeared in the critically acclaimed Election, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
  2001 marked her career's turning point with the breakout role as Elle Woods in the box office hit Legally Blonde, and in 2002 she starred in Sweet Home Alabama, which became her biggest commercial film success to date. 2003 saw her return as lead actress and executive producer of Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. In 2005, Witherspoon received worldwide attention and praise for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, which earned her an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
  
  wn.com/Reese_Witherspoon
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  Richard Linklater
  Richard Stuart Linklater (born July 30, 1960) is an American film director and screenwriter.
  Linklater was born in Houston, Texas. He studied at Sam Houston State University and left midway through his stint in college to work on an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. While working on the rig he read a lot of literature, but on land he developed a love of film through repeated visits to a repertory theater in Houston. It was at this point that Linklater realized he wanted to be a filmmaker. After his job on the oil rig, Linklater used the money he had saved to buy a Super-8 camera, a projector, and some editing equipment, and moved to Austin. It was there that the aspiring cineaste founded the Austin Film Society and grew to appreciate such auteurs as Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Josef Von Sternberg, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. He enrolled in Austin Community College in the fall of 1984 to study film.
  Since his early 20s, Linklater has been a vegetarian.
  Linklater founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 together with his frequent collaborator Lee Daniel, and is lauded for launching and solidifying the city of Austin as a hub for independent filmmaking.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Linklater
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  Robert Altman
  Robert Bernard Altman (February 20, 1925 – November 20, 2006) was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.
  His films MASH (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and Nashville (1975) have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
  Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Helen (née Matthews), a Mayflower descendant from Nebraska, and Bernard Clement Altman, a wealthy insurance salesman and amateur gambler, who came from an upper-class family. Altman's ancestry was German, English and Irish; his paternal grandfather, Frank Altman, Sr., anglicized the spelling of the family name from "Altmann" to "Altman". Altman had a Catholic upbringing, but he did not continue to practice as a Catholic as an adult, although he has been referred to as "a sort of Catholic" and a Catholic director. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including Rockhurst High School, in Kansas City. He graduated from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri in 1943.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Altman
• Robert Downey, Sr.
  Robert John Downey Sr. (born Robert John Elias; June 24, 1936) is an American actor, writer, and film director, and the father of actor Robert Downey Jr. He is best known as an underground filmmaker, serving as director and/or writer of such cult classics as Putney Swope, a satire on the New York Madison Avenue advertising world.
  Downey's father, Robert Elias, was the son of Russian Jewish parent, and his mother, cover girl Betty McLoughlin, was of Irish Catholic descent. He was born Robert Elias, but changed his last name to "Downey" (after his stepfather, James Downey) when he was a minor and wanted to enlist in the Army.
  Downey Sr. has been married three times. His first marriage was to actress Elsie Downey (née Ford), with whom he had two children: actress/writer Allyson Downey and actor Robert Downey Jr. The marriage ended in divorce in 1975. Downey Sr.'s second marriage, to actress-writer Laura Ernst, ended with her 1994 death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease. He currently lives in New York City with his third wife, Rosemary Rogers, whom he married in 1998.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Downey,_Sr.
• Robert Elswit
  Robert Christopher Elswit, ASC (born April 22, 1950) is an American cinematographer. He has had multiple Oscar, BAFTA, and Independent Spirit nominations for several films, including There Will Be Blood. Elswit frequently works with director Paul Thomas Anderson.
  Elswit is a fierce defender of shooting with film, and whenever possible refuses to use digital cameras. Images shot digitally, he says, have "no texture, no grain."
  Elswit has also worked with director George Clooney several times. He shot Clooney's black and white, multiple-Oscar nominated film Good Night, and Good Luck. Notably, Elswit shot the film in color, then converted the film into black and white in post production. According to Elswit, this technique preserved the subtlety of the colors (as complex shades of blacks and greys) and made the overall look much richer in the final film.
  Elswit received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography in 2006 for his work on the movie Good Night, and Good Luck. He lost that Oscar to Dion Beebe for Memoirs of a Geisha. Two years later, Elswit would again be nominated and this time win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, for his work on There Will Be Blood.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Elswit
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  Roger Ebert
  Roger Joseph Ebert ( /ˈiːbərt/; born June 18, 1942) is an American journalist, film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
  Ebert is known for his film review column (appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and later online) and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The Movies, all of which he co-hosted for a combined 23 years with Gene Siskel. After Siskel's death in 1999, Ebert teamed with Richard Roeper for the television series Ebert & Roeper & the Movies, which began airing in 2000. Although his name remained in the title, Ebert did not appear on the show after mid-2006 after he suffered post-surgical complications related to thyroid cancer, leaving him unable to speak. Ebert ended his association with the show in July 2008, but in February 2009 he stated that he and Roeper would continue their work on a new show. Ebert's current show, Ebert Presents: At the Movies, premiered on January 21, 2011, with Ebert contributing a review voiced by someone else in a brief segment called "Roger's Office".
  
  wn.com/Roger_Ebert
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  Samuel Fuller
  Samuel Michael Fuller (August 12, 1912 – October 30, 1997) was an American screenwriter, novelist, and film director known for low-budget genre movies with controversial themes.
  He was born Samuel Michael Fuller in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of Benjamin Rabinovitch, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and Rebecca Baum, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. After immigrating to America, the family's surname was changed from Rabinovitch to "Fuller" possibly by inspiration of a Doctor who arrived in America on the Mayflower. At the age of 12, he began working in journalism as a newspaper copyboy. He became a crime reporter in New York City at age 17, working for the New York Evening Graphic. He broke the story of Jeanne Eagels' death. He wrote pulp novels, including The Dark Page (1944; reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Wim Wenders), and screenplays from the mid-1930s onwards. Fuller also became a screenplay ghostwriter but would never tell interviewers which screenplays he ghost-wrote explaining "that's what a ghost writer is for."^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Samuel_Fuller
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  Spike Jonze
  Spike Jonze (born Adam Spiegel; October 22, 1969) is an American director, producer and actor, whose work includes music videos, commercials, film and television. He is best known for his collaborations with writer Charlie Kaufman, which include the 1999 film Being John Malkovich (that gave him an Academy Award for Best Director nomination) and the 2002 film Adaptation, and as the co-writer/director of the 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are.
  He is well known also for his music video collaborations with Weezer, Beastie Boys, and Björk. He was also a co-creator and executive producer of MTV's Jackass. He is currently the creative director of VBS.tv. He is also part owner of skateboard company Girl Skateboards with riders Rick Howard and Mike Carroll.
  He also co-founded Directors Label with filmmakers Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry.
  Spiegel was born in Rockville, Maryland, and raised in Bethesda, Maryland and in Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania. His father, Arthur Spiegel III, was a distant relation of the Spiegel catalog family and founded APM Management Consultants. His mother, Sandy Granzow, is a writer, communications consultant in developing countries, and artist. His brother Sam (aka Squeak E. Clean) is a producer and DJ. Jonze attended SFAI in San Francisco, California.
  
  wn.com/Spike_Jonze
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  Stanley Kubrick
  Stanley Kubrick (/ˈkuːbrɪk/; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor. He is regarded as having been one of America's greatest filmmakers. His films, typically adaptations of novels or short stories, were noted for their "dazzling" and unique cinematography, attention to details to achieve realism and an inspired use of music scores. Kubrick's films covered a variety of genres, including war, black comedy, horror and science fiction. Kubrick was also noted for being a perfectionist, using painstaking care with scene staging and working closely with his actors.
  Starting out as a photographer in New York City, he taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating high school. His earliest films were made on a shoestring budget, followed by one Hollywood blockbuster, after which he spent most of the rest of his career living and filming in England. His home became his workplace where he did his writing, research, editing and management of production details. This allowed him to have almost complete artistic control, but with the rare advantage of having financial support from major Hollywood studios.
  
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  Steven Soderbergh
  Steven Andrew Soderbergh (/ˈsoʊdərbɜrɡ/; born January 14, 1963) is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing critically acclaimed commercial Hollywood films like Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and Traffic, and the remake of Ocean's Eleven. He has also directed smaller, less conventional works, such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience and Che. His most recent works are Contagion and Haywire.
  Soderbergh was born in Atlanta, the son of Mary Ann (née Bernard) and Peter Andrew Soderbergh, who was a university administrator and educator. His paternal grandfather was a Swedish immigrant, from Stockholm. When he was a child, his family moved from Atlanta to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived during his adolescence, then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father became Dean of Education at Louisiana State University (LSU). There he discovered filmmaking as a teenager, directing short Super 8 mm films with equipment borrowed from LSU students.
  
  wn.com/Steven_Soderbergh
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  The Wachowskis
  Lana Wachowski (born Laurence Wachowski on June 21, 1965; formerly nicknamed "Larry") and Andrew Paul "Andy" Wachowski (born December 29, 1967), siblings collectively known as The Wachowskis (formerly The Wachowski Brothers), are American film directors, writers and producers, most famous for creating The Matrix series. They are currently co-directing Cloud Atlas, based on the book by David Mitchell.
  Lana Wachowski (formerly known as "Larry") was born Laurence Wachowski in Chicago in 1965. Andy Wachowski followed in 1967. Their mother, Lynne (née Luckinbill), was a nurse and painter whose brother is actor Laurence Luckinbill. Their father, Ron Wachowski, was a businessman of Polish descent. They went to Kellogg Elementary School, in Chicago's Beverly area, and graduated from Whitney Young High School, known for its performing arts and science curriculum, in 1983 and '86. Former students recall them playing Dungeons & Dragons and working in the school's theater and TV program. Andy then attended Emerson College in Boston, while Lana went to Bard College in New York. Both dropped out before graduating, and they ran a carpentry business in Chicago while creating comic books.
  
  wn.com/The_Wachowskis
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  Thomas Pynchon
  Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. He is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
  
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  Tom Cruise
  Thomas Cruise Mapother IV ( /ˈtɒməs ˈkruːz ˈmeɪpɒθər/; born July 3, 1962), widely known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won three Golden Globe Awards for the same movies: Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996), Magnolia (1999). He started his career with the movie Endless Love. Cruise's first appearance in a major film was in 1981's Taps. His first leading role was in the film Risky Business, released in August 1983. Cruise played the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and successful 1986 film Top Gun, and also secret agent Ethan Hunt in the series of Mission: Impossible action films.
  He has starred in a variety of other successful films, including: Rain Man (1988), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004), and War of the Worlds (2005).
  Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio, with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the Church of Scientology.
  
  wn.com/Tom_Cruise
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  Tony Gatlif
  Tony Gatlif (born as Michel Dahmani on 10 September 1948 in Algiers, Algeria) is a French film director of Romani ethnicity who also works as a screenwriter, composer, actor, and producer.
  Tony Gatlif was born on 10 September 1948 in Algiers. Like many others, he left Algeria in the early 1960s. In elementary school he discovered the cinema. A teacher bought a 16mm projector and showed a movie every week, which served as the basis for a passion in film. “ [I] have seen the films of Vigo, Renoir, from John Ford and Chaplin’s … That is my cinema education.”
  as he arrives without anything in France, he goes to the chaotic way of street children who juvenile delinquency and educational institutions. By day, he sneaked into the cinema halls of the Grands Boulevards, in order to be able to sleep in warm places. One evening in 1966, he was courageous enough to seek out his idol, Michel Simon after a theatrical performance in his dressing room. The actor wrote Gatlif a recommendation that helped him attend an acting course in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
  
  wn.com/Tony_Gatlif
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  Upton Sinclair
  Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was an American author and one-time candidate for governor of California who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."
  Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed his son's childhood. Priscilla Harden Sinclair was a strict Episcopalian who disliked alcohol, tea, and coffee. Her lineage was of great affluence. Her parents were very prosperous in Baltimore and her sister married a millionaire. Sinclair had wealthy grandparents with whom he often stayed. This gave him insight into how both the rich and the poor lived during the late nineteenth century. Living in two social settings affected him and greatly influenced his books. Upton Beall Sinclair Sr. was also from a highly respected family in the south, but due to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the family's wealth evaporated and the family became ruined.
  
  wn.com/Upton_Sinclair
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  Wes Anderson
  Wesley Wales Mortimer "Wes" Anderson (born May 1, 1969) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer of features, short films and commercials. He was nominated for a 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Royal Tenenbaums and a 2010 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Fantastic Mr. Fox. His films employ similar aesthetics, using a deliberate, methodical cinematography, with mostly primary colors. His soundtracks feature folk and early rock music, in particular classic British rock. Anderson's films combine dry humor with poignant portrayals of flawed characters – often a mix of the wealthy and the working class. He is also known for working with many of the same actors and crew on varying projects.
  Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom opened the Cannes Film Festival 2012.
  
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  William H. Macy
  William Hall Macy, Jr. (born March 13, 1950) is an American actor and writer.
  He was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. He is also a teacher and director in theater, film and television. His film career has been built mostly on his appearances in small, independent films, though he has appeared in summer action films as well. Macy has described himself as "sort of a Middle American, WASPy, Lutheran kind of guy... Everyman". He has won two Emmy Awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award, being nominated for nine Emmy Awards and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards in total. He is also a three-time Golden Globe Award nominee.
  Macy was born in Miami, Florida, and grew up in Georgia and Maryland. His father, William Hall Macy, Sr., was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal for flying a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber in World War II; he later ran a construction company in Atlanta and worked for Dun & Bradstreet, before taking over a Cumberland, Maryland-based insurance agency, when Macy was nine years old. His mother, Lois (née Overstreet), was a war widow who met Macy's father after her first husband died in 1943; Macy has described her as a "Southern belle".
  
  wn.com/William_H._Macy

Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World (2003)

"Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World (2003)" Actors

• Paul Bettany
• James D'Arcy
• Edward Woodall
• Chris Larkin
• Max Pirkis
• Jack Randall
• Max Benitz
• Lee Ingleby
• Richard Pates
• Robert Pugh
• Richard McCabe
• Ian Mercer
• Tony Dolan
• David Threlfall
• Russell Crowe

"Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World (2003)" Director

• Peter Weir

• The Human Machine
• It's What Your Country Can Do for You
• Twisted Truth
• True Color
• Suppress Free Thinking
• A Replica of Invention
• Faceless Victims Expelled
• Worship the Sun
• The Lack of Space
• Impale to Kill

• Pledge of Allegiance
• Unknown Soldier
• Fallen From Grace
• Mangled Dehumanization
• Rabid Anger
• Pay to Die
• Funeral Bitch
• Remorseless Poison
• Live for Free
• Master
• Pledge of Allegiance
• Unknown Soldier
• Fallen From Grace
• Mangled Dehumanization
• Rabid Anger
• The Truth
• Pay to Die
• Funeral Bitch
• Remorseless Poison
• Children of the Grave

• What Kind of God
• Latitudinarian
• Heathen
• Used
• Demon
• Constant Quarrel
• Judgement of Will
• America the Pitiful
• Who Is Left to Decide
• Submerged in Sin

• The Final Skull
• In Control
• Beaten for the Possibility
• Slaves to Society
• The Darkest Age
• Cheater
• Anarchy Nearly Lost
• The Room With Views
• Remnants of Hate
• The Last Chapter
• World Police

• Race to Extinction
• Shoot to Kill
• All We've Become
• Does One Feel Pain
• Betrayal
• He'll Probably Win
• Can the US Be So Great
• Lined Up and Punished
• Blind Hatred
• Line to Kill
• Special Skills
• To Fight and Die
• Everything Is Rotten

• You'll Be Blamed
• The Serpents Tongue
• Rights of Life
• Envy
• Sign Up
• Another Day in Phoenix
• Whatever, Wherever, Forever
• The Gold Mine
• The Perfect Family
• Pistols, Whiskey and Coyotes (The Spirit of the West)
• Long Knives
• Ring of Fire

• Master
• Unknown Soldier
• Mangled Dehumanization
• Funeral Bitch
• Terrorizer
• Pledge of Allegiance
• Re-Entry and Destruction
• Constant Quarrel (1991 demo)
• Judgement of Will (1991 demo)
• Submerged in Sin (1991 demo)
• Cut Through the Filth (1993 demo)

• Funeral Bitch
• Submerged in Sin
• Master
• Mangled Dehumanization
• Unknown Soldier
• Terrorizer
• Pay to Die
• Bass Solo
• Children of the Grave
• Re-Entry and Destruction
• Antidote (live)
• Cut Through the Filth
• Return to Vietnam
• Follow Your Savior
• Judgement of Will
• Spoiled Brat
• You Don't Listen
• Collections of Souls

• Cast One Vote
• American Freedom
• Miss Misery
• Dictators
• Let's Start a War
• Protégé
• Every Dog Has Its Day
• Command Your Fate
• Purchase a New Handgun
• Watch What You Wish For
• Disturbed

• Command Your Fate
• Lets Start a War
• Follow Your Savior
• Fatso
• You Didnt Listen
• Wolves in Sheeps Clothing
• Flying Teeth
• Spoil Brat
• I Want Nothing

• Follow Jesus
• Cast the First Stone
• Addicted to the Pistol
• Imprisoned
• Re-Terrorizer
• We're About to Fall
• Believers Have a Choice
• Faith Is Still in Season
• Broken Promise
• Where Are You Now?
• Butchered by Numbers
• Antidote
• Spiritual Bankruptcy
• Victims of Jesus
• Return to Vietnam
• Previously Committed

• Constant Reminders
• Taste of Insanity
• Hidden Stories
• Glorify the Dead
• Blinded Faith
• Justice or Fate
• Jailbreak
• Collection of Souls
• Silver Spoon