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• Walt Disney
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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
• 
  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
• 
  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
• 
  DreamWorks
  DreamWorks Studios, officially DW II Distribution Co., LLC, also known as DreamWorks, LLC, DreamWorks SKG, DreamWorks Studios or DW Studios, LLC, is an American film studio which develops, produces, and distributes films, video games and television programming. It has produced or distributed more than ten films with box-office grosses totalling more than $100 million each.
  DreamWorks began in 1994 as an ambitious attempt by media moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen (forming the SKG present on the bottom of the DreamWorks logo) to create a new Hollywood studio of which they own 72%. In December 2005, the founders agreed to sell the studio to Viacom, parent of Paramount Pictures. The sale was completed in February 2006. In 2008, DreamWorks announced its intention to end its partnership with Paramount and signed a $1.5 billion deal to produce films with India's Reliance ADA Group. Reliance provided $325M of equity to fund recreating Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studio as an independent entity. Clark Hallren, former Managing Director of the Entertainment Industries group of J.P. Morgan Securities and Alan J. Levine of J.P. Morgan Entertainment Advisors led the Reliance team in structuring the capital and business plan for the company. The movie studio is 50% owned by Reliance which is led by Anil Ambani.
  
  wn.com/DreamWorks
• 
  Essanay Studios
  The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was an American motion picture studio. It is best known today for its series of Charlie Chaplin comedies of 1915.
  The studio was founded in 1907 in Chicago, United States by George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. Anderson, originally as the Peerless Film Manufacturing Company. On August 10, 1907, the name was changed to Essanay ("S and A").
  Essanay was originally located at 496 Wells Street (modern numbering: 1300 N. Wells). Essanay's first film, An Awful Skate, or The Hobo on Rollers (July 1907), with^{[clarification needed]}Ben Turpin (then the studio janitor), produced for only a couple hundred dollars, grossed several thousand dollars in release. The studio prospered and in 1908 moved to its more famous address at 1333–45 W. Argyle St in Uptown, Chicago.
  Essanay produced silent films with such stars (and stars of the future) as George Periolat, Ben Turpin, Wallace Beery, Thomas Meighan, Francis X. Bushman, Gloria Swanson, Bebe Daniels, Tom Mix, Ann Little, Helen Dunbar, Harold Lloyd, Lester Cuneo, Eugene Pallette, Florence Oberle, Virginia Valli, Edward Arnold, and Rod La Rocque. The mainstays of the organization, however, were studio co-owner G. M. Anderson, starring in the very popular "Broncho Billy" westerns, and Charlie Chaplin.Allan Dwan was hired by Essanay Studios as a screenwriter and developed into a famous Hollywood director. Louella Parsons was also hired as a screenwriter and went on to be a Hollywood gossip columnist. Both George K. Spoor (in 1948) and Broncho Billy Anderson (in 1958) received Oscars, specifically Academy Honorary Awards, for their pioneering efforts with Essanay.
  
  wn.com/Essanay_Studios
• 
  Hollywood
  Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema. Today, much of the movie industry has dispersed into surrounding areas such as the Westside neighborhood, and the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys, but significant auxiliary industries, such as editing, effects, props, post-production, and lighting companies remain in Hollywood, as does the backlot of Paramount Pictures.
  On February 16, 2005, California Assembly Members Jackie Goldberg and Paul Koretz introduced a bill to require California to keep specific records on Hollywood as if it were independent, although it is not the typical practice of the City of Los Angeles to establish specific boundaries for districts or neighborhoods. For this to be done, the boundaries were defined. The bill was unanimously supported by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles City Council. Assembly Bill 588 was approved by the Governor of California on August 28, 2006, and now the district of Hollywood has official borders. The border can be loosely described as the area east of West Hollywood, south of Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, Cahuenga Boulevard, and Barham Boulevard, and the cities of Burbank and Glendale, north of Melrose Avenue and west of the Golden State Freeway and Hyperion Avenue. This includes all of Griffith Park and Los Feliz^{[citation needed]} – two areas that were hitherto considered separate from Hollywood by most Angelenos. The population of the district, including Los Feliz, as of the 2000 census was 123,436 and the median household income was $33,409 in 1999.
  
  wn.com/Hollywood
• 
  Italy
  Italy ⁱ/ˈɪtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in south-central Europe. To the north, it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia–the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea–and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some 301,338 km² (116,347 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.6 million inhabitants, it is the fifth most populous country in Europe, and the 23rd most populous in the world.
  Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious centre of Western civilisation as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, from Germanic tribes such as the Lombards and Ostrogoths, to the Byzantines and later, the Normans, among others. Centuries later, Italy became the birthplace of Maritime republics and the Renaissance, an immensely fruitful intellectual movement that would prove to be integral in shaping the subsequent course of European thought.
  
  wn.com/Italy
• 
  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 Jersey
  New Jersey (ⁱ/nuː ˈdʒɜrzi/) is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the U.S. state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania, and on the southwest by Delaware. New Jersey is the 4th least extensive, but the 11th most populous and the most densely populated of the 50 United States. New Jersey lies mostly within the sprawling metropolitan areas of New York City and Philadelphia. It is also the third wealthiest by 2009–2010 median household income.
  The area was inhabited by Native Americans for more than 2,800 years, with historical tribes such as the Lenape along the coast. In the early 17th century, the Dutch and the Swedes made the first European settlements. The British later seized control of the region, naming it the Province of New Jersey. It was granted as a colony to Sir George Carteret and John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton. At this time, it was named after the largest of the British Channel Islands, Jersey, Carteret's birthplace. New Jersey was the site of several decisive battles during the American Revolutionary War.
  
  wn.com/New_Jersey
• 
  Southern California
  Southern California (SoCal) is a megaregion, or megapolitan area, in the southern area of the U.S. state of California. Large urban areas include Greater Los Angeles and Greater San Diego. The urban area stretches along the coast from Ventura through the Southland and Inland Empire to San Diego. The United States - Mexico border makes up the southern border. Southern California is a major economic center for the state of California and the nation.
  Southern California's population encompasses five metropolitan, or MSA, areas: Los Angeles County and Orange County together make up the Los Angeles metropolitan area; the Inland Empire consists of such cities as Riverside, Ontario, and San Bernardino; the San Diego metropolitan area; the Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura metro area; and the El Centro area. Out of these, three are heavy populated areas; the Los Angeles area with over 12 million inhabitants, the Riverside-San Bernardino area with over 4 million inhabitants, and the San Diego area with over 3 million inhabitants. For CSA metropolitan purposes, the five counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura are all combined to make up the Los Angeles metropolitan area; with San Diego as Southern California's other CSA metropolitan area. With over 22 million people, roughly 60% of California's population resides in Southern California.
  
  wn.com/Southern_California
• 
  Spain
  Spain (ⁱ/ˈspeɪn/ SPAYN; Spanish: España, pronounced: [esˈpaɲa] ( listen)), officially the Kingdom of Spain (Spanish: Reino de España), is a sovereign state and a member of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Its mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar; to the north and north east by France, Andorra, and the Bay of Biscay; and to the northwest and west by the Atlantic Ocean and Portugal.
  Spanish territory also includes the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the African coast, and two autonomous cities in North Africa, Ceuta and Melilla, that border Morocco. Furthermore, the town of Llívia is a Spanish exclave situated inside French territory. With an area of 504,030 square kilometres (194,610 sq mi), it is the second largest country in Western Europe and the European Union after France, and the fourth largest country in Europe after Russia, Ukraine and France.
  
  wn.com/Spain
• 
  Stereo
  The term stereophonic sound or, more commonly, stereo, refers to any method of sound reproduction in which an attempt is made to create an illusion of directionality and audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two or more independent audio channels through a configuration of two or more loudspeakers in such a way as to create the impression of sound heard from various directions, as in natural hearing. Thus the term "stereophonic" applies to so-called "quadraphonic" and "surround-sound" systems as well as the more common 2-channel, 2-speaker systems. It is often contrasted with monophonic, or "mono" sound, where audio is in the form of one channel, often centered in the sound field (analogous to a visual field). Stereo sound is now common in entertainment systems such as broadcast radio and TV, recorded music and the cinema.
  The word stereophonic derives from the Greek "στερεός" (stereos), "firm, solid" + "φωνή" (phōnē), "sound, tone, voice" and it was coined in 1927 by Western Electric, by analogy with the word "stereoscopic".
  
  wn.com/Stereo
• 
  The Village Voice
  Coordinates: 40°43′42″N 73°59′28″W / 40.7283°N 73.9911°W / 40.7283; -73.9911
  The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City. It is also distributed throughout the United States on a pay basis.
  It was the first of the big-city tabloids that came to be known as alternative weeklies.
  The Voice was launched by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer on October 26, 1955 from a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, which was its initial coverage area, expanding to other parts of the city by the 1960s. The offices in the 1960s were located at Sheridan Square; they are now at Cooper Square in the East Village.
  The Voice has published groundbreaking investigations of New York City politics, as well as reporting on local and national politics, with arts, culture, music, dance, film, and theater reviews. The Voice has received three Pulitzer Prizes, in 1981 (Teresa Carpenter), 1986 (Jules Feiffer) and 2000 (Mark Schoofs). Almost since its inception the paper has recognized alternative theater in New York through its Obie Awards. The paper's "Pazz & Jop" music poll, started by Robert Christgau in the early 1970s, continues to this day and remains a highly influential survey of the nation's music critics. In 1999, film critic J. Hoberman and film section editor Dennis Lim began a similar Village Voice Film Poll for the year's movies. In 2001 the paper sponsored its first Siren Festival music festival, a free annual event every summer held at Coney Island. That event has since been moved to the lower tip of Manhattan and re-christened the "4Knots Music Festival," a reference to the speed of the East River's current.
  
  wn.com/The_Village_Voice
• 
  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

• 
  Adolph Zukor
  Adolph Zukor (January 7, 1873 – June 10, 1976), born Adolph Cukor, was a film mogul and founder of Paramount Pictures.
  Zukor was born to a Jewish family in Ricse, Hungary, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1889, at the age of 16, he emigrated to the United States. Like most immigrants, he began modestly. When he first landed in New York, he stayed with his family and worked in an upholstery shop. A friend got him a job as an apprentice at a furrier.
  Zukor stayed there for two years. When he left to become a "contract" worker, sewing fur pieces and selling them himself, he was nineteen years old and an accomplished designer. But he was young and adventuresome, and the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, commemorating Columbus's discovery of America, drew him to the Midwest. Once there, he started a fur business. In the second season of operation, Zukor's Novelty Fur Company expanded to twenty-five men and opened a branch.
  Historian Neal Gabler wrote "one of the stubborn fallacies of movie history is that the men who created the film industry were all impoverished young vulgarians.... Zukor clearly didn't fit this profile. By 1903, he already looked and lived like a wealthy young burgher, and he certainly earned the income of one. He had a commodious apartment at 111th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York City's wealthy German-Jewish section".
  
  wn.com/Adolph_Zukor
• Al Lichtman
  Alexander "Al" Lichtman (April 9, 1885 - February 20, 1958) was a businessman working in the motion picture industry. He also occasionally worked as a film producer. Born in Monok, Hungary. His parents were Joseph Lichtman and Pepe (aka Josephine) Zuckermandel. Lichtman has a "Star" on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He died in Los Angeles, California.
  A field manager for Famous Players in 1912, Lichtman had his own distribution company, Al Lichtman Corp, in the early 1920s. He was president of Preferred Pictures in 1923 and became sales manager at United Artists in 1927. He was promoted to president of the company in 1935, but resigned after only a few months due to a fallout with Sam Goldwyn over the production of Barbary Coast (1935).
  In November of that same year he joined MGM as a special sales adviser and became an executive producer with them in 1938. He left MGM for 20th Century Fox in 1949, and stayed there until his retirement in 1957. During this time he produced the film, The Young Lions.
  
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  Alexander Korda
  Sir Alexander Korda (16 September 1893 – 23 January 1956) was a Hungarian-born British film producer and director. He was a leading figure in the British film industry, the founder of London Films and the owner of British Lion Films, a film distributing company.
  The elder brother of filmmakers Zoltán Korda and Vincent Korda, Korda was born as Sándor László Kellner to a Jewish family in Pusztatúrpásztó in what is now Hungary (it was then a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where he worked as a journalist (supporting the Hungarian Soviet Republic) before going into films as a producer.
  Korda established a film company named Corvin Film, building it into one of the largest in Hungary. Korda was arrested in October 1919 during the White Terror that followed the overthrow of the Communist government. After his release he left Hungary for Austria, and never returned to his country of birth.
  During the next eleven years Korda made films in several countries working in Vienna, Berlin, Paris before eventually moving to Hollywood. He worked closely with many artists on his films, including his Hungarian friend, painter and set designer Emile Lahner.
  
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  Andy Warhol
  Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States of America dedicated to a single artist.
  Andy Warhol's artwork ranged in many forms of media that include hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1985, just before his death in 1987. He founded Interview Magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Andy Warhol is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame". Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market". Warhol's works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.
  
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  Billy Wilder
  Billy Wilder (22 June 1906 – 27 March 2002) was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director, and writer for the same film (The Apartment).
  Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Nazi Party, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.
  
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  Blanche Sweet
  Sarah Blanche Sweet (June 18, 1896 – September 6, 1986) was an American silent film actress who began her career in the earliest days of the Hollywood motion picture film industry.
  Born in Chicago, Illinois into a family of stock theater and vaudeville performers, Blanche Sweet entered the entertainment industry at an early age. At age 4 she toured in a play called The Battle of the Strong whose star was stage luminary Maurice Barrymore. A decade later Sweet would act with Barrymore's son Lionel in a D. W. Griffith directed film. In 1909, she started work at Biograph Studios under contract to director D. W. Griffith. By 1910 she had become a rival to Mary Pickford, who had also started for Griffith the year before.
  Sweet is renowned for her energetic, independent roles, at variance with the 'ideal' Griffith type of vulnerable, often fragile, femininity. After many starring roles, her first real landmark film was the 1911 Griffith thriller The Lonedale Operator. In 1913 she starred in Griffith's first feature-length movie, Judith of Bethulia. In 1914 Sweet was initially cast by Griffith in the part of Elsie Stoneman in his epic The Birth of a Nation but the role was eventually given to rival actress Lillian Gish, who was Sweet's senior by three years. That same year Sweet parted ways with Griffith and joined Paramount (then Famous Players-Lasky) for the much higher pay that studio was able to afford.
  
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  Bruce Willis
  Walter Bruce Willis (born March 19, 1955) is a German-born American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles. He is well known for the role of John McClane in the Die Hard series, which were mostly critical and uniformly financial successes. He has also appeared in over sixty films, including box office successes like Pulp Fiction (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Sin City (2005), Over the Hedge (2006) and Red (2010).
  Motion pictures featuring Willis have grossed US$2.64 billion to 3.05 billion at North American box offices, making him the ninth highest-grossing actor in a leading role and twelfth highest including supporting roles. He is a two-time Emmy Award–winning, Golden Globe Award–winning and four-time Saturn Award–nominated actor. Willis was married to actress Demi Moore and they had three daughters before their divorce in 2000, following thirteen years of marriage. He is currently married to model Emma Heming, with whom he has one daughter.
  
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  Buster Keaton
  Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".
  Buster Keaton (his lifelong stage name) was recognized as the seventh-greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Keaton the 21st-greatest male star of all time. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929, [when] he worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
  Orson Welles stated that Keaton's The General is "the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made."
  A 2002 worldwide poll by Sight & Sound ranked Keaton's The General as the 15th best film of all time. Three other Keaton films received votes in the magazine's survey: Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr., and The Navigator.
  
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  Carl Laemmle
  Carl Laemmle (January 17, 1867 – September 24, 1939), born in Laupheim, Württemberg, Germany, was a pioneer in American film making and a founder of one of the original major Hollywood movie studios – Universal. Laemmle produced or was otherwise involved in over four hundred films.
  Regarded as one of the most important of the early film pioneers, Laemmle was born on the Radstrasse just outside the former Jewish quarter of Laupheim. He emigrated to the US in 1884, working in Chicago as a bookkeeper or office manager for 20 years. He began buying nickelodeons, eventually expanding into a film distribution service, the Laemmle Film Service.
  On April 30, 1912, in New York, Carl Laemmle of IMP, Pat Powers of Powers Motion Picture Company, Mark Dintenfass of Champion Film Company, William Swanson of Rex Motion Picture Company, David Horsley of Nestor Film Company and Charles Baumann and Adam Kessel of the New York Motion Picture Company merged their studios and the Universal Film Manufacturing Company was incorporated. They founded the Universal Motion Picture Manufacturing Company in 1912, and established the studio on 235 acres (0.95 km²) of land in the San Fernando Valley, California in 1915.
  
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• Casandra Stark
  Casandra Stark Mele is a New York City underground Icon, considered one of the "principal players in the Cinema of Transgression" (Sabin 1999). She made all her films in the 1980’s and early 1990s under the name Casandra Stark. Since then she has added her real family name Mele to her professional name due to a deep connection she felt for her family roots. "Mele" is Italian for apple.
  Casandra grew up in Wallingford, Connecticut with the first name Rosanne and still answers to “Ro”. She is a dramatic vocalist and live performer as well as a painter and film maker.
  Her films often featured the music of one of her bands such as Menace Dement and/or the Trees a duo with guitarist and political scientist Frank Morales with whom Casandra has a child named Frankie.
  Her film The Anarchists was aired on Manhattan cable Television in 1992 and features the music of Missing Foundation. It was partly filmed in Naples, Italy (A city she refers to as Napoli) as well as New York. Her film Parades of Crazy ranges from very surrealistic images of people marching slowly through a park wearing masks to a beach scene in black and white of Casandra her self and her friend Laura May wearing white gowns and splashing in the waves and floating in the tide. Most of her films do not feature Casandra herself, however she starred in the title role of her Death of an Arabian Woman.
  
  wn.com/Casandra_Stark
• Charles Gary Allison
  
  Charles Gary Allison (1938 – May 13, 2008) was an American screenwriter and film producer.
  Allison spent the first years of his life in London, returning to the United States in 1944. He grew up living simultaneously in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, attending school in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, England, Tokyo, Saigon and Hong Kong. He obtained his undergraduate degree in International Relations at the University of Southern California in 1960. From 1961 to 1963, he served as a White House social aide during the John F. Kennedy administration. From 1963 to 1969 he chaired a non-partisan White House youth program under both the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations, during which time he worked on a master's degree in international relations at Georgetown University.
  Allison returned to the University of Southern California in 1973 to obtain two masters degrees (in cinema production and professional writing) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy. In 1977, he wrote and produced Fraternity Row for Paramount Pictures, which won him numerous industry awards. He worked continuously on a number of studio films in the US and abroad, and also wrote and produced "The First Olympics - Athens 1896" (1983), a 5-hour mini-series for Columbia Pictures Television. The mini-series aired on NBC in 1984, and depicts the adventures of the United States' first Olympic team at the Athens 1896 Games. "The First Olympics", which received a number of Emmy nominations and awards, also won Allison the WGA Annual Award for Outstanding Script of 1984 (Television Long Form Series) from his colleagues at the Writers Guild of America.
  
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  Charlie Chaplin
  Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919.
  Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin was identified with left-wing politics during the McCarthy era and he was ultimately forced to resettle in Europe from 1952.
  
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  Chroma key
  Chroma key compositing, or chroma keying, is a special effects / post-production technique for compositing (layering) two images or video streams together, used heavily in many fields to remove a background from the subject of a photo or video - particularly the newscasting, motion picture and videogame industries. A color range in the top layer is made transparent, revealing another image behind. The chroma keying technique is commonly used in video production and post-production. This technique is also referred to as color keying, colour-separation overlay (CSO; primarily by the BBC), or by various terms for specific color-related variants such as green screen, and blue screen - chroma keying can be done with backgrounds of any color that are uniform and distinct, but green and blue backgrounds are more commonly used because they differ most distinctly in hue from most human skin colors and no part of the subject being filmed or photographed may duplicate a color used in the background. It is commonly used for weather forecast broadcasts, wherein the news presenter appears to be standing in front of a large map during live television newscasts, though in actuality it is a large blue or green background. When using a blue screen, different weather maps are added on the parts of the image where the color is blue. If the news presenter wears blue clothes, his clothes will also be replaced with the background video. A complementary system is used for green screens. Chroma keying is also used in the entertainment industry for special effects in movies and videogames. The advanced state of the technology and much commercially available computer software, such as Pinnacle Studio, Adobe Premiere, and dozens of other computer programs, makes it possible and relatively easy for the average home computer user to create videos using the "chromakey" function and easily affordable greenscreen or bluescreen kits.
  
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  Constance Talmadge
  Constance Talmadge (April 19, 1898 - November 23, 1973) was a silent movie star born in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and was the sister of fellow actresses Norma Talmadge and Natalie Talmadge.
  Although her actual birth year has been in dispute, Talmadge was born on April 19, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York according to the 1900, 1910, and 1920 Censuses. Talmadge was born into a poor family. Her father, Fred, was an alcoholic, and left them when she was still very young. Her mother, Peg, made a living by doing laundry. When a friend recommended that Peg use Norma as a model for title slides in flickers, which were shown in early nickelodeons, Peg decided to try it. This led all three sisters into an acting career.
  She began making films in 1914, in a Vitagraph comedy short, In Bridal Attire (1914). Her first major role was as The Mountain Girl and Marguerite de Valois in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916).
  Griffith re-edited Intolerance repeatedly after its initial release, and even shot new scenes long after it was in distribution. Grace Kingsley found Talmadge in her dressing room at the Fine Arts Studio, in Los Angeles, in the midst of making up for some new shots.
  
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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.
  
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  Dennis Hopper
  Dennis Lee Hopper (May 17, 1936 - May 29, 2010) was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). During the next 10 years, Hopper appeared frequently on television in guest roles, and by the end of the 1960s had played supporting roles in several films.
  He directed and starred in Easy Rider (1969), winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as co-writer. Journalist Ann Hornaday wrote: "With its portrait of counterculture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, Easy Rider became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion." Film critic Matthew Hays notes that "no other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper."
  
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  Dino De Laurentiis
  Agostino "Dino" De Laurentiis (8 August 1919 – 10 November 2010) was an Italian film producer.
  He was born at Torre Annunziata in the province of Naples, and grew up selling spaghetti produced by his father. His studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.
  Following his first movie, L'ultimo Combattimento, (1940) he produced nearly 150 films during the next seven decades. In 1946 his company, the Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, moved into production. In the early years, De Laurentiis produced neorealist films such as Bitter Rice (1946) and the Fellini classics La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1956), often in collaboration with producer Carlo Ponti. In the 1960s, Dino De Laurentiis built his own studio facilities, although these financially collapsed during the 1970s. During this period, though, De Laurentiis produced such films as Barabbas (1961) a Christian religious epic, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, an imitation James Bond film; Navajo Joe (1966), a spaghetti western; Anzio (1968), a World War II film; Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968), both successful comic book adaptations; and The Valachi Papers made to coincide with the popularity of The Godfather.
  
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  Douglas Fairbanks
  Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (May 23, 1883 – December 12, 1939) was an American actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He was best known for his swashbuckling roles in silent films such as The Thief of Bagdad, Robin Hood, and The Mark of Zorro.
  An astute businessman, Fairbanks was a founding member of United Artists. Fairbanks was also a founding member of The Motion Picture Academy and hosted the first Oscars Ceremony in 1929. With his marriage to Mary Pickford in 1920, the couple became Hollywood royalty and Fairbanks was referred to as "The King of Hollywood", a nickname later passed on to actor Clark Gable. His career rapidly declined with the advent of the "talkies".
  Fairbanks was born Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman (spelled "Ulman" by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in his memoirs) in Denver, Colorado, the son of H. Charles Ullman (born September 15, 1833) and Ella Adelaide Marsh (born 1847). He had a half-brother, John Fairbanks, Jr. (born 1873), and a full brother, Robert Payne Ullman (March 13, 1882 – February 22, 1948).
  
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  Federico Fellini
  Federico Fellini (Italian pronunciation: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career that spanned over forty years.
  Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings: Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).
  
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  Francis Ford Coppola
  Francis Ford Coppola ( /ˈkoʊpələ/ KOH-pə-lə; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors. He epitomized the group of filmmakers known as the New Hollywood, that includes Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Philip Kaufman, and George Lucas who emerged in the early 1970s with unconventional ideas that challenged contemporary film-making.
  He co-wrote the script for Patton (1970), which won an Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). His directorial fame escalated with the release of The Godfather (1972), a film which revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre, earning praise from critics and public alike. It won three Academy Awards, including his second, for Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), and was instrumental in cementing his position as a prominent American film director.
  Coppola followed it with a critically successful sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), which became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was highly praised and won him three Academy Awards—for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture. The Conversation, which Coppola directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. He next directed Apocalypse Now (1979); notorious for its overlong and strenuous production, but critically acclaimed for its vivid and stark depiction of the Vietnam War, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. To this day, Coppola is one of only seven filmmakers to win two Palme d'Or awards, and is the only filmmaker to win both in the same decade.
  
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  Frank Herbert
  Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful American science fiction author. Though also a short story author, he is best known for his novels, most notably Dune and its five sequels. The Dune saga, set in the distant future and taking place over millennia, deals with themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics and power. Dune itself is the "best-selling science fiction novel of all time," and the series is widely considered to be among the classics in the genre.
  Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington, to Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen McCarthy Herbert. Due to a poor home environment, he ran away from home in 1938 to live with an aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon. There he enrolled in high school at Salem High School (now North Salem High School) where he graduated the next year. In 1939 he lied about his age in order to get his first newspaper job at the Glendale Star. Herbert then returned to Salem in 1940 where he worked for the Oregon Statesman newspaper (now Statesman Journal) in a variety of roles, including photographer.
  
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  François Truffaut
  François Roland Truffaut (6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was an influential film critic and filmmaker, one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five films.
  Truffaut was born in Paris on 6 February 1932. His mother was Janine de Montferrand. His mother's future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted him as an adopted son and gave him his surname. He was passed around to live with various nannies and his grandmother for a number of years. It was his grandmother who instilled in him her love of books and music. He lived with his grandmother until her death when Truffaut was ten years old. It was only after his grandmother's death that he lived with his parents for the first time. The identity of Truffaut's biological father was unknown, though a private detective agency in 1968 revealed that their enquiry into the matter led to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. Truffaut's mother's family disputed the findings but Truffaut himself believed and embraced them.
  
  wn.com/François_Truffaut
• Gary Beer
  Gary Douglas Beer was born 10 October 1941 in Christchurch. He was a New Zealand cricketer who played 19 first-class matches for the Central Districts and the Otago in the Plunket Shield in the 1960's.
  
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  George Lucas
  George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.
  George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.
  Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film 1:42.08, as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended Modesto Junior College and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks. George Lucas graduated from USC in California.
  
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  Georges Méliès
  Georges Méliès (English pronunciation: /mɛ.li.'ez/); (8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938), full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès, a prolific innovator in the use of special effects, accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his work. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality through cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the first "Cinemagician". Two of his most well-known films are A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904). Both stories involve strange, surreal voyages, somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy. Méliès was also an early pioneer of horror cinema, which can be traced back to his Le Manoir du diable (1896).
  
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• Gregory Markopoulos
  Gregory J. Markopoulos (March 12, 1928 - November 12, 1992) was a Greek-American experimental filmmaker. Born in Toledo, Ohio to Greek immigrant parents, Markopoulos began making 8 mm films at an early age. He attended USC Film School in the late 1940s, and went on to become a co-founder — with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage and others — of the New American Cinema movement. He was as well a contributor to Film Culture magazine, and an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago.
  In 1967, he and his partner Robert Beavers left the United States for permanent residence in Europe. Once ensconced in self-imposed exile, Markopoulos withdrew his films from circulation, refused any interviews, and insisted that a chapter about him be removed from the second edition of Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney's seminal study of American avant-garde cinema. While he continued to make films, his work went largely unseen for almost 30 years.
  Selected articles:
  
  wn.com/Gregory_Markopoulos
• Hal Roach
  Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach, Sr. (January 14, 1892 - November 2, 1992) was an American film and television producer and director, and actor from the 1910s to the 1990s.
  Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York, the grandson of Irish Immigrants. A presentation by the great American humorist Mark Twain impressed Roach as a young grade school student.
  After an adventurous youth that took him to Alaska, Hal Roach arrived in Hollywood, California in 1912 and began working as an extra in silent films. Upon coming into an inheritance, he began producing short comedies in 1915 with his friend Harold Lloyd, who portrayed a character known as Lonesome Luke.
  Also in 1915, Roach married actress Marguerite Nichols. They had two children, Hal, Jr. (1918–1972) and Margaret (1921–1964).
  Unable to expand his studios in downtown Los Angeles because of zoning, Roach purchased what became the Hal Roach Studios from Harry Culver in Culver City, California. During the 1920s and 1930s, he employed Lloyd (his top money-maker until his departure in 1923), Will Rogers, Max Davidson, the Our Gang kids, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Thelma Todd, ZaSu Pitts, Patsy Kelly and, most famously, Laurel and Hardy. During the 1920s Roach's biggest rival was producer Mack Sennett. In 1925 Roach hired away Sennett's supervising director, F. Richard Jones.
  
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  Henri Pachard
  Henri Pachard was the pseudonym of American pornographic film director Ron Sullivan (June 4, 1939 - September 27, 2008). His other aliases included Jackson St. Louis and Crystal Blue.
  In the late 1960s, using his real name, Sullivan directed a number of sex-and-sadism sexploitation films for the then-thriving 42nd Street grindhouse market. Working for Sam Lake Enterprises in New York, he directed his first film, Lust Weekend in 1967. This was followed by The Bizarre Ones (1967), Scare Their Pants Off (1968), and This Sporting House, with future adult star Jennifer Welles, in 1969.
  In the 1980s he adopted the alias "Henri Pachard". From then until his death in 2008, he produced and directed dozens of mainstream pornographic films, including The Devil in Miss Jones 2 and Blame it on Ginger, starring Ginger Lynn.
  He also made numerous bondage-discipline features, particularly for the long-running Dresden Diary series, and many spanking fetish videos such as Blazing Bottoms and Smarty Pants! (both for LBO Entertainment).
  
  wn.com/Henri_Pachard
• Hiram Abrams
  Hiram Abrams (1878 – 1926) was an early American movie mogul and one of the first presidents of Paramount Pictures and the first managing director of United Artists.
  Hiram was born in Portland, Maine, the son of a Russian emigrant who became a real estate broker. Hiram Abrams left school at the age of sixteen, sold newspapers, and eventually ended up managing several Portland film theaters. By 1909, he began marketing films, and later became a distributor.
  Through the motion picture industry, Abrams became acquainted with W. W. Hodkinson and when Hodkinson founded Paramount Pictures in 1914, Abrams began serving on the five man board-of-directors. When Hodkinson denied Paramount producers Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky more of the profits, Zukor - in a Machiavellian plot - devised a coup.
  Zukor and Lasky sold Hodkinson more of their film rights and, using that money, they purchased Paramount stock to, by 1916, gain a majority of it. Then with Abrams, Steele and Sherry they used this majority to vote Hodkinson out. Abrams took over as president and Steele as treasurer.
  
  wn.com/Hiram_Abrams
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  Howard Hughes
  Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world. He gained prominence from the late 1920s as a maverick film producer, making big-budget and often controversial films like The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932), and The Outlaw (1943). Hughes was one of the most influential aviators in history; he set multiple world air-speed records, built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 "Hercules" (better known to history as the "Spruce Goose" aircraft), and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines which would later on merge with American Airlines. Hughes is also remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder and chronic pain. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
  Hughes' birthplace is recorded as either Humble or Houston, Texas. The date is also uncertain, though Hughes claimed his birthday was Christmas Eve. A 1941 affidavit birth certificate of Hughes signed by his aunt Annette Gano Lummis and Estelle Boughton Sharp states he was born on December 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas. However, his baptismal record of October 7, 1906, in the parish register of St. John's Episcopal Church, in Keokuk, Iowa, has his birth listed as September 24, 1905, without reference to the place of birth.
  
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  Ingmar Bergman
  Ernst Ingmar Bergman (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈɪŋmar ˈbærjman] ( listen); 14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential film directors of all time.
  He directed over sixty films and documentaries for cinematic release and for television, most of which he also wrote. He also directed over one hundred and seventy plays. Among his company of actors were Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow. Most of his films were set in the landscape of Sweden. His major subjects were death, illness, faith, betrayal, and insanity.
  Bergman was active for more than six decades. In 1976 his career was seriously threatened as the result of a botched criminal investigation for alleged income tax evasion. Outraged, Bergman suspended a number of pending productions, closed his studios, and went into self-imposed exile in Germany for eight years.
  
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  Jack Nicholson
  Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson
  John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.
  Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.
  Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .
  
  wn.com/Jack_Nicholson
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  James Wan
  James Wan (born 27 February 1977) is a Malaysian-born Australian producer, screenwriter, and film director of Chinese heritage. He is widely known for directing the horror film Saw and creating Billy the puppet. He also directed Dead Silence, Death Sentence and Insidious.
  Wan was born in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia of Chinese ethnicity. He was raised in Perth, Western Australia from a young age. It was his dream to make films from the age of 11. He went on to study at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, completing his Bachelor of Arts degree.
  Before becoming popular in the film industry, he made his first feature film Stygian with Shannon Young, which won 'Best Guerrilla Film' at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2000.
  He met future business partner Leigh Whannell while studying at RMIT. He would later go on to co-create and direct the 2004 horror film (and franchise),Saw with the help of Whannell, who wrote the script. Wan and Whannell made a short version of the film to showcase the script. Whannell played the role of David in the short film, and the leading role of Adam in the feature film. The three producers who saw the short film and read Whannell's screenplay agreed to produce the film before Wan and Whannell even landed in Los Angeles. Wan and Whannell decided to forgo upfront salary in return for gross profits. Shot for a low US$1.2 million budget, the producers had a straight-to-DVD release in mind. However, Saw was to become a surprise record breaking theatrical horror franchise, earning Wan and Whannell much more than they had originally predicted.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Jean Cocteau
  Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants terribles (1929), and the films Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orpheus (1949). His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María Félix, Édith Piaf and Raymond Radiguet.
  Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a village near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. He left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
  
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  Jim Jarmusch
  James R. "Jim" Jarmusch ( /ˈdʒɑrməʃ/; born January 22, 1953) is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor and composer. Jarmusch has been a major proponent of independent cinema, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.
  The key, I think, to Jim, is that he went gray when he was 15 ... As a result, he always felt like an immigrant in the teenage world. He's been an immigrant – a benign, fascinated foreigner – ever since. And all his films are about that.
  Jarmusch was born to a family of middle-class suburbanites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio in 1953. His mother, of Irish and German descent, had been a reviewer of film and theatre for the Akron Beacon Journal before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. She introduced the future director, the middle of three children, to the world of cinema by leaving him at a local cinema to watch matinee double features such as Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature From the Black Lagoon while she ran errands. The first adult film he recalls having seen was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road (starring Robert Mitchum) the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was Ghoulardi, an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.
  
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  John Travolta
  John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954) is an American actor, dancer, and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta's acting career declined in the early 1980s and continued to deteriorate for the rest of the decade. His career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction, and he has since continued starring in Hollywood films, including Face/Off, Ladder 49, and Wild Hogs. Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for his performance in Get Shorty.
  Travolta, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, an inner-ring suburb of New York City. His father, Salvatore Travolta (November 1912 – May 1995), was a semi-professional American football player turned tire salesman and partner in a tire company. His mother, Helen Cecilia (née Burke, January 1912 – December 1978), was an actress and singer who had appeared in The Sunshine Sisters, a radio vocal group, and acted and directed before becoming a high school drama and English teacher. His siblings, Joey, Ellen, Ann, Margaret, and Sam Travolta, have all acted. His father was a second-generation Italian American and his mother was Irish American; he grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood and has said that his household was predominantly Irish in culture. He was raised Roman Catholic, but converted to Scientology in 1975.
  
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  Jonas Mekas
  Jonas Mekas (Lithuanian pronunciation: [ˈjonɐs ˈmækɐs]; born December 24, 1922) is a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.
  In 1944, Mekas left Lithuania because of war. En route, his train was stopped in Germany and he and his brother, Adolfas Mekas (1925-2011), were imprisoned in a labor camp in Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, for eight months. The brothers escaped and were detained near the Danish border where they hid on a farm for two months until the end of the war.
  After the war, Mekas lived in displaced person camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel. From 1946-48, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz and at the end of 1949, he emigrated with his brother to the U.S., settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. Two weeks after his arrival, he borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16-mm camera and began to record moments of his life. He discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel’s pioneering Cinema 16, and he began screening his own films in 1953 at Gallery East on Avenue A and Houston Street, and a Film Forum series at Carl Fisher Auditorium on 57th Street.
  
  wn.com/Jonas_Mekas
• Katharine Ross
  Katharine Juliet Ross (born January 29, 1940) is an American film and stage actress. Trained at the San Francisco Workshop, she came to prominence as Elaine Robinson in the 1967 film The Graduate, for which she won a Golden Globe award and received an Academy Award nomination.
  She then starred as Etta Place in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and won a BAFTA for role in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here the same year. She has also starred in The Stepford Wives in 1975 and won another Golden Globe for Voyage of the Damned in 1977. She has established herself as an author, publishing several children's books.
  Ross was born in Hollywood, California, when her father was in the Navy. He had also worked for the Associated Press. Her family later settled in Walnut Creek, California, east of San Francisco. She graduated from Las Lomas High School. Ross was a keen horse rider in her youth, and was friends with Casey Tibbs, a rodeo rider.
  She studied at Santa Rosa Junior College for a year, where she had her introduction to acting in a production of The King and I. She dropped out of the course and moved to San Francisco to study acting. She joined The Actors Workshop and was with them for three years working as an understudy; for one role in Jean Genet's The Balcony she appeared nude on stage, and in 1964 she was cast by John Houseman as Cordelia in a production of King Lear. While at the Workshop, she began acting bit parts in television series in Los Angeles to earn extra money. She was brought to Hollywood by Metro, dropped, then picked up by Universal.
  
  wn.com/Katharine_Ross
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  Kembra Pfahler
  Kembra Pfahler (Born August 4, 1961 in Hermosa Beach, California) is an American performance artist, rock musician and actress.
  She is best known as the lead singer of the cult glam-punk band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and for the often sexual nature of her exhibits. She is well known in fashion circles spanning the fine line between cult and haute.
  Kembra, daughter of surf pioneer Freddy Pfahler, was a child actress who appeared in several TV commercials for Kodak film. She became a major figure of the 1980s East Village scene, and has acted in low-budget horror and softcore porn films.
  Pfahler also does film and video work. She follows the artistic philosophy of availablism, using what is closest at hand as both the inspiration for her work as well as the medium.
  Kembra sang backup on the song "Shoot, Knife, Strangle, Beat and Crucify" on the album Brutality And Bloodshed For All by GG Allin And The Murder Junkies.
  In 1990, Kembra and Samoa Moriki founded their band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Kembra's on-stage performances have included cracking paint filled eggs on her vulva.
  
  wn.com/Kembra_Pfahler
• Ken Jacobs
  Ken Jacobs (born May 25, 1933, Williamsburg, Brooklyn) is an American experimental filmmaker. He is the director of Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969, USA), which was admitted to the National Film Registry in 2007, and Star Spangled to Death (2004, USA), a nearly seven hour film consisting largely of found footage.
  He coined the term paracinema in the early 1970s, referring to cinema experiences provided by means outside of standard cinema technology. He was an influential teacher of Art Spiegelman of Maus fame, former painting student of Hans Hofmann, and in 1969 with Larry Gottheim started the Cinema department at Harpur College at Binghamton University providing arts education and tools of critical thinking to students until his retirement in 2003 as a Distinguished Professor of Cinema. He resides in New York City.
  
  
  
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  Kenneth Anger
  Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer; February 3, 1927) is an American underground experimental filmmaker, actor and author of two controversial Hollywood Babylon books. Working exclusively in short films, he has produced almost forty works since 1937, nine of which have been grouped together as the "Magick Lantern Cycle", and form the basis of Anger's reputation as one of the most influential independent filmmakers in cinema history. His films variously merge surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult, and have been described as containing "elements of erotica, documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle." Anger himself has been described as "one of America's first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner", and his "role in rendering gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate", with several being released prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in the United States. He has also focused upon occult themes in many of his films, being fascinated by the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley, and is a follower of Crowley's religion, Thelema.
  
  wn.com/Kenneth_Anger
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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.
  
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  Lillian Gish
  Lillian Diana Gish (October 14, 1893 – February 27, 1993) was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987. She was called "The First Lady of American Cinema".
  She was a prominent film star of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly associated with the films of director D.W. Griffith, including her leading role in Griffith's seminal Birth of a Nation (1915). Her sound-era film appearances were sporadic, but included memorable roles in the controversial western Duel in the Sun (1946) and the offbeat thriller Night of the Hunter (1955). She did considerable television work from the early 1950s into the 1980s, and closed her career playing, for the first time, opposite Bette Davis in the 1987 film The Whales of August.
  The American Film Institute (AFI) named Gish 17th among the greatest female stars of all time. She was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1971, and in 1984 she received an AFI Life Achievement Award.
  
  wn.com/Lillian_Gish
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  Lionel Barrymore
  Lionel Barrymore (April 28, 1878 – November 15, 1954) was an American actor of stage, screen and radio. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in A Free Soul (1931), and remains perhaps best known for the role of the villainous Henry Potter character in Frank Capra's 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. He was also a member of the illustrious theatrical Barrymore family.
  Lionel Barrymore was born Lionel Herbert Blythe in Philadelphia, the son of actors Georgiana Drew Barrymore and Maurice Barrymore. He was the elder brother of Ethel and John Barrymore, the uncle of John Drew Barrymore and Diana Barrymore, and the great-uncle of Drew Barrymore. Barrymore was raised a Roman Catholic. He attended the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
  In her autobiography, Eleanor Farjeon recalled that when she and Barrymore were friends as toddlers, she would take off her shoes and he would kiss her feet.
  He was married twice, to actresses Doris Rankin and Irene Fenwick, a one-time lover of his brother John. Doris's sister Gladys was married to Lionel's uncle Sidney Drew, which made Gladys both his aunt and sister-in-law.
  
  wn.com/Lionel_Barrymore
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  Lydia Lunch
  Lydia Lunch (born Lydia Anne Koch, June 2, 1959, Rochester, New York) is an American singer, poet, writer, and actress whose career was spawned by the New York No Wave scene. The Boston Phoenix named Lunch "one of the 10 most influential performers of the 1990s."
  Her work typically features provocative and confrontational delivery and has maintained an anti-commercial ethic^{[citation needed]}, operating independently of major labels and distributors.
  Lydia Lunch moved to New York City from Rochester at the age of 13 in 1973 with what she described having nothing but "a small red suitcase, a winter coat, and a big fucking attitude." Lunch moved into a communal household of artists and musicians in NYC, including Kitty Bruce, daughter of Lenny Bruce^{[citation needed]}. Soon Willy DeVille gave her the name "Lunch" because she often stole lunches from The Dead Boys. After befriending Alan Vega and Martin Rev at Max's Kansas City, she founded the short-lived but influential No Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, with James Chance. Both Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and The Contortions, Chance's subsequent band, played on the No Wave compilation No New York, produced by Brian Eno. Lunch later appeared on two songs on James White and the Blacks album, Off-White.
  
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  Mark Rydell
  Mark Rydell (born March 23, 1935, in New York City) is an American actor, film director and producer.
  Rydell's initial training was in music. As a youth, he wanted to be a conductor. He began his career as an actor and first became known for his role as Walt Johnson on The Edge of Night and as Jeff Baker on As the World Turns, which he played from 1956 to 1962. He won plaudits for his role of violent Jewish mob kingpin Marty Augustine in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973). His most recent significant film role was in Woody Allen's Hollywood Ending (2002).
  As a director, Rydell's credits include The Reivers (1969), The Cowboys (1972), Cinderella Liberty (1973), The Rose (1979), On Golden Pond (1981, for which he received an Oscar nomination as Best Director), The River (1984), For the Boys (1991) and Intersection (1994). In 2006, Rydell directed the movie Even Money which starred Kim Basinger, Forest Whitaker, and Danny DeVito.
  Rydell was also director of the TV bio-pic James Dean (2001), which earned actor James Franco a Golden Globe award. Rydell also acted in the movie, playing Jack Warner (head of Warner Bros).
  
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  Mary Pickford
  Mary Pickford (April 8, 1892 - May 29, 1979) was a Canadian-American motion picture actress, co-founder of the film studio United Artists and one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Known as "America's Sweetheart," "Little Mary" and "The girl with the curls," she was one of the Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and a significant figure in the development of film acting.
  Because her international fame was triggered by moving images, she is a watershed figure in the history of modern celebrity and, as one of silent film's most important performers and producers, her contract demands were central to shaping the Hollywood industry. In consideration of her contributions to American cinema, the American Film Institute named Pickford 24th among the greatest female stars of all time.
  Mary Pickford was born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of English Methodist immigrants, and worked a variety of odd jobs. Her mother, Charlotte Hennessy, was Irish Catholic. Mary had two younger siblings, Jack and Lottie Pickford, who would also become actors. To please the relatives, Pickford's mother baptized her in both the Methodist and Catholic churches (and used the opportunity to change her middle name to "Mary"). She was raised Roman Catholic after her alcoholic father left his family in 1895. He died three years later of a cerebral hemorrhage.
  
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  Maya Deren
  Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev – October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky (Russian: Элеоно́ра Деренко́вская), was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer.
  Deren was born in Kiev, present-day Ukraine, to psychologist Solomon Derenkowsky and Marie Fiedler, who supposedly named her after Italian actress Eleanora Duse.
  In 1922, the family moved to Syracuse, New York. Her father shortened the family name to "Deren" shortly after they arrived in New York. He became the staff psychiatrist at the State Institute for the Feeble-Minded in Syracuse.
  In 1928, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her mother moved to Paris to be with her daughter while she attended the League of Nations School in Geneva, Switzerland from 1930 to 1933.
  Deren began college at Syracuse University, where she became active in the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League (1907). Through the YPSL she met Gregory Bardacke, whom she later married at the age of eighteen. After his graduation in 1935, she moved to New York City. She and her husband became active in various socialist causes in New York City. She graduated from New York University and separated from Bardacke. The divorce was finalized in 1939. She attended the New School for Social Research and received a master’s degree in English literature at Smith College. Her master's thesis was titled "The Influence of the French Symbolist School on Anglo-American Poetry" (1939).
  
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  Mel Brooks
  Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky; June 28, 1926) is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows. He became well known as part of the comedy duo with Carl Reiner, The 2000 Year Old Man. In middle age he became one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s, with many of his films being among the top ten money makers of the year that they were released. His most well known films include The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World, Part I and Spaceballs. More recently he has had a smash hit on Broadway with the musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers. He was married to the actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005.
  Brooks is a member of the short list of entertainers with the distinction of having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award. Three of his films ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of all-time: Blazing Saddles at number 6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at number 13.
  
  wn.com/Mel_Brooks
• Michael Findlay
  Michael Findlay (1938-1977), along with his wife Roberta Findlay, directed and produced numerous sexploitation movies. They have been described as "the most notorious filmmakers in the annals of sexploitation".
  In the mid-to-late 1960s, Findlay was prominent among a small group of underground New York filmmakers (including Joseph W. Sarno, Joseph P. Mawra, and Lou Campa) that produced exploitation "roughies" (a mix of sex and sadism) for the grindhouse theater market. Sometimes he would direct under the alias Julian Marsh and act in his own films billed as Robert West. His wife Roberta (aka Anna Riva) was the cinematographer, co-writer, and supporting actress for many of their films together. They also employed the same actors repeatedly, most notably Uta Erickson, and Marie Brent, aka Janet Banzet.
  The Findlays were friends with George Weiss, producer of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda and a series of fetishistic Olga films (Olga's House of Shame, Olga's Girls, et al.). In 1964 Weiss encouraged them to make films in this new subgenre of violent sexploitation.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Findlay
• Mirisch
  Mirisch is a Jewish family name:
  
  
  
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  Nick Zedd
  Nick Zedd (born January 25, 1958 or May 8, 1959 in Takoma Park, Maryland) is an American filmmaker and author based in New York City. He coined the term Cinema of Transgression in 1985 to describe a loose-knit group of like-minded filmmakers and artists using shock value and black humor in their work. These filmmakers and artistic collaborators included Richard Kern, Tessa Hughes Freeland, Lung Leg, and Lydia Lunch. Under numerous pen names Zedd edited and wrote the Underground Film Bulletin (1984–90) which publicised the work of these filmmakers. The Cinema of Transgression is explored in Jack Sargeant's book Deathtripping Creation Books.
  Zedd has directed several super-low-budget movies, including the feature length They Eat Scum and Geek Maggot Bingo, as well as numerous short films. With Rev. Jen Miller he is the co-creator of the Public-access television series Electra Elf (2004-), featuring Miller, Faceboy, Andrew J. Lederer and a who's who of New York downtown art and performance-types. He is the author of two books, Bleed (1992, Hanuman Books) and Totem of the Depraved, (1996, 2.13.61Publications) both of which are autobiographical.
  
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  Norma Talmadge
  Norma Talmadge (May 2, 1894 – December 24, 1957) was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.
  A specialist in melodrama, her most famous film was Smilin’ Through (1922), but she also scored artistic triumphs teamed with director Frank Borzage in Secrets (1924) and The Lady (1925). Her younger sister Constance Talmadge was also a movie star. Talmadge married millionaire and film producer Joseph Schenck and they successfully created their own production company. After reaching fame in the film studios on the East Coast, she moved to Hollywood in 1922.
  Talmadge was one of the most elegant and glamorous film stars of the roaring twenties. However, by the end of the silent film period her popularity with audiences had waned. After her two talkies proved disappointing at the box office, she retired a very wealthy woman. She is little remembered, yet in her day she was hugely popular and the epitome of stardom.
  
  wn.com/Norma_Talmadge
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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.
  
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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."
  
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  Peter Bogdanovich
  Peter Bogdanovich (Serbian: Петар Богдановић, Petar Bogdanović, born July 30, 1939) is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola. His most critically acclaimed film is The Last Picture Show (1971).
  Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe and born in Kingston, New York in America, the son of Herma (née Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a painter and pianist. His Austrian-born mother was Jewish and his father was Serbian and an Eastern Orthodox Christian. He was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with acting teacher Stella Adler, and appeared on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich was known as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich showcased the work of American directors such as Orson Welles and John Ford, whom he later wrote a book about based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the director, and Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.
  
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  Peter Fonda
  Peter Henry Fonda (born February 23, 1940) is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget and Justin Fonda (by first wife Susan Brewer, stepdaughter of Noah Dietrich). Fonda is an icon of the counterculture of the 1960s.
  Fonda was born in New York City, the only son of actor Henry Fonda and his wife Frances Ford Seymour; he is the younger brother of actress Jane Fonda.
  On his eleventh birthday, he accidentally shot himself in the stomach and nearly died. Years later, he would reference this incident to John Lennon and George Harrison while taking LSD with The Beatles, and claiming "I know what it's like to be dead", which ended up becoming a direct inspiration for The Beatles song "She Said, She Said".
  Early on, Fonda studied acting in Omaha, Nebraska, his father's home town. While attending the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Fonda joined the Omaha Community Playhouse, where many actors (including his father and Marlon Brando) had begun their careers.
  
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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
• Richard Kern
  Richard Kern (born 1954 in North Carolina) is a New York underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films featuring underground personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, and Henry Rollins in movies like "The Right Side of My Brain" and "Fingered." Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence, and perversion and was one of the leading lights of the movement which Nick Zedd coined the Cinema of Transgression.
  Kern's first dabbling in the arts was a series of self-produced underground magazines featuring art, poetry, photography, and fiction by Kern and several friends. Kern's first zine was the bi-monthly "The Heroin Addict," which was later renamed to "The Valium Addict." The hand-stapled photocopied magazines (a.k.a. zines) featured writing and images that expressed the bleakness of New York City's East Village in the early 1980s. About 12 issues of these two zines were produced, along with the occasional special issue. This phase of Kern's career lasted from late 1979 to around 1983.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Kern
• Robert Benjamin
  Robert Saul Benjamin (1909-1979). Robert Benjamin was a founding partner of the movie-litigation firm Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon. With his longtime friend and partner, Arthur Krim, he took over United Artists in 1951. The deal that they struck with then-owners Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford was that if the company showed a profit in any one of the first three years of their management, the two would be able to purchase a 50% share of the company for one dollar.
  The Krim-Benjamin team quickly showed a profit, and they bought out Chaplin and Pickford to own the company outright in 1955. In 1957, they took the company public.
  In 1979, Robert Benjamin won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award posthumously. His wife Jean accepted the award on his behalf.
  
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  Robert Redford
  Charles Robert Redford, Jr. (born August 18, 1936), better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010 he was awarded French Knighthood in the Legion d'Honneur. At the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s, he was often described as one of the world's most attractive men and remains one of the most popular movie stars. His popular films include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Downhill Racer (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Candidate (1972), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), All the President's Men (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), Sneakers (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993),The Last Castle and Spy Game (2001). As a filmmaker, his notable films include Ordinary People (1980), The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000).
  
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  Robert Rodriguez
  Robert Anthony Rodríguez (born June 20, 1968) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician. He shoots and produces many of his films in his native Texas and Mexico. He has directed such films as Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Faculty, Spy Kids, Sin City, Planet Terror, and Machete. He is a friend and frequent collaborator of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino.
  
  
  Rodríguez was born in San Antonio, Texas, the son of Mexican-American parents Rebecca (née Villegas), a nurse, and Cecilio G. Rodríguez, a salesman. He began his interest in film at age 11 when his father bought one of the first VCRs, which came with a camera.
  While attending St. Anthony High School, he was commissioned to videotape the school's football games. According to his sister he was fired soon after for shooting them with a cinematic style, getting shots of parents' reactions and the ball traveling through the air instead of shooting the whole play. There he met Carlos Gallardo; they both shot films on video throughout high school and college. After graduating Rodriguez went to the College of Communication at the University of Texas where he also developed a love of cartooning. His grades were not high enough to get into the school's film program, so he invented a daily comic strip entitled Los Hooligans with many of the characters based on his siblings – in particular, one of his sisters, Maricarmen. The comic proved to be quite successful, running for three years in the student newspaper The Daily Texan while Rodríguez continued to make short films.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Roger Corman
  Roger William Corman (born April 5, 1926) is an Academy Award winning American film producer, director and actor. He has mostly worked on low-budget B movies. Some of Corman's work has an established critical reputation, such as his cycle of films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 2009 he won an Honorary Academy Award for his body of work. Corman has occasionally taken minor acting roles in such films as The Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather Part II, Apollo 13 and Philadelphia. A documentary about Roger Corman's life and career entitled Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel premiered at Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals in 2011, directed by Alex Stapleton. The film's TV rights were picked up by A&E IndieFilms after a well-received screening at Sundance.
  Corman has been a mentor to young film directors including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Curtis Hanson, John Sayles, and many others. He has also helped launch the careers of actors including Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Talia Shire and Robert De Niro.
  
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  Samuel Goldwyn
  Samuel Goldwyn (c. July 1879 – January 31, 1974) was an American film producer. He was most notably well known for being the founding contributor executive of several motion picture studios in Hollywood.
  Goldwyn was born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a Hasidic, Polish Jewish family. At an early age, he left Warsaw on foot and penniless. He made his way to Birmingham, England, where he remained with relatives for a few years using the name Samuel Goldfish. In 1898, he emigrated to the United States, but fearing refusal of entry, he got off the boat in Nova Scotia, Canada, before moving on to New York in January 1899. He found work in upstate Gloversville, New York, in the bustling garment business. Soon his innate marketing skills made him a very successful salesman at the Albano Glove Company. After four years, as vice-president for sales, he moved back to New York City.^{[citation needed]}
  In 1913, Goldfish along with his brother-in-law Jesse L. Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, and Arthur Friend formed a partnership, The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, to produce feature length motion pictures. Film rights for the stage play The Squaw Man were purchased for $4000 and Dustin Farnum was hired for the leading role. Shooting for the first feature film made in Hollywood began on December 29, 1913.
  
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  Satyajit Ray
  Satyajit Ray ( Shottojit Rae (help·info); 2 May 1921 – 23 April 1992) was an Indian Bengali motion-picture director, writer, and illustrator who brought the Indian cinema to world recognition with Pather Panchali (1955; The Song of the Road) and its two sequels, known as the Apu Trilogy. As a director Ray was noted for his humanism, his versatility, and his detailed control over his films and their music. He was one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves of Vittorio De Sica during a visit to London.
  Ray directed thirty-seven films, including feature films, documentaries and shorts. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Documentary at the Cannes film festival. This film, Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959) form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, and editing, and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a number of awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1992. The Government of India honoured him with the Bharat Ratna in 1992.
  
  wn.com/Satyajit_Ray
• Shirley Clarke
  Shirley Clarke (October 2, 1919 – September 23, 1997) was an Academy Award-winning American independent filmmaker.
  Born Shirley Brimberg in New York City, Shirley Clarke was the daughter of a Polish-immigrant father who made his fortune in manufacturing. Her mother was the daughter of a multimillionaire Jewish manufacturer and inventor. Her sister was the writer Elaine Dundy. Her interest in dance began at an early age but met with the disapproval of her father, a violent bully.
  Clarke attended Stephens College, Johns Hopkins University, Bennington College, and University of South Carolina. As a result of dance lessons at each of these schools, she trained under the Martha Graham method, the Doris Humphrey-Charles Weidman technique, and the Hanya Holm method of modern dance. She married Bert Clarke to escape her father's control, so she could study dance under the masters in New York City. She started her artistic career as a dancer in the New York avant garde modern dance movement. She was an avid participant in dance lessons and performances at the Young Women's Hebrew Association.
  
  wn.com/Shirley_Clarke
• Sol Lesser
  Sol Lesser (17 February 1890, Spokane, Washington – 19 September 1980, Hollywood, California) was an American film producer and presenter.
  In 1915, while living in San Francisco, Lesser learned that the authorities were about to clean out the Barbary Coast district, a raucous area of gambling houses, saloons and brothels. He grabbed a camera and a friend, future Hollywood cameraman Hal Mohr, and roamed the area, especially the parts that were best-known before the area was shut down. (The Barbary Coast wasn't actually closed down until 1917.) This film is now considered a lost film.
  The resulting film was The Last Night of the Barbary Coast, an early example of an exploitation film that was sold directly to movie theater owners by Lesser. With the profits from the film, he bought several theaters, and soon owned a cinema chain.
  Sol Lesser signed Jackie Coogan to a movie contract in 1922, establishing both as major Hollywood names. The Coogan-Lesser hits included Oliver Twist and Peck's Bad Boy. Lesser made a successful transition to sound films, with his own Principal Pictures company; he would either distribute his productions himself under the Principal name, or arrange for a major studio to release them under their own trademarks. In 1939, Lesser produced Thunder Over Mexico a compilation film made from Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico! with the permission of Upton Sinclair, who had commissioned the Soviet film maker, and his wife.
  
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  Stan Brakhage
  James Stanley Brakhage ( /ˈbrækʌdʒ/ BRAK-əj; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003), better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film.
  Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a large and diverse body of work, exploring a variety of formats, approaches and techniques that included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, collage film and the use of multiple exposures. Interested in mythology and inspired by music, poetry, and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the universal in the particular, exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality, and innocence.
  Brakhage's films are often noted for their expressiveness and lyricism.
  Born Robert Sanders in Kansas City, Missouri on January 14, 1933, Brakhage was adopted and renamed three weeks after his birth by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage.
  As a child, Brakhage was featured on radio as a boy soprano and sang in church choirs and as a soloist at other events. He was raised in Denver, Colorado, where he attended high school with the filmmaker Larry Jordan and the musicians Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. Together, Brakhage, Jordan, Tenney and Subotnick formed a drama group called the Gadflies.
  
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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.
  
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  Steven Spielberg
  Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as archetypes of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks movie studio.
  Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide. Forbes puts Spielberg's wealth at $3.0 billion.
  
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  Thomas Edison
  Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.
  Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.
  
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  Tim Robbins
  Timothy Francis "Tim" Robbins (born October 16, 1958) is an American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and musician. He is the former longtime partner of actress Susan Sarandon. He is known for his roles as Nuke in Bull Durham, Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, and as Dave Boyle in Mystic River, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
  Robbins was born in West Covina, California, and raised in New York City, the son of Mary Robbins (née Bledsoe), an actress, and Gilbert Lee Robbins (1931–2011), a musician, folk singer, actor and former manager of The Gaslight Cafe. Robbins has two sisters, Adele and Gabrielle, and a brother, David. Robbins was raised Catholic. He moved to Greenwich Village with his family at a young age, while his father pursued a career as a member of the folk music group The Highwaymen. Robbins started doing theater at age twelve and joined the drama club at Stuyvesant High School. He spent two years at SUNY Plattsburgh and then returned to California to study at the UCLA Film School.
  
  wn.com/Tim_Robbins
• Tommy Turner
  Thomas "Tommy" Turner (born 11 October 1963 in Johnstone, Renfrewshire) is a Scottish former professional footballer.
  He was captain of the St. Mirren side that won the Scottish First Division in 1999-2000.
  Previous to that he played for Greenock Morton, St. Johnstone and Partick Thistle. In his second year at St. Mirren, Turner went on a month's loan to Queen of the South. He finished his professional career with Gretna in 2004.
  After leaving senior football he joined the junior leagues to captain his home town team, Johnstone Burgh.
  
  wn.com/Tommy_Turner
• Verna Fields
  Verna Fields (née Hellman, 21 March 1918 – 30 November 1982) was an American film editor, film and television sound editor, educator, and entertainment industry executive. In the first phase of her career, from 1954 through to about 1970, Fields mostly worked on smaller projects that gained little recognition. She was the sound editor for several television shows in the 1950s. She worked on independent films (including The Savage Eye (1959)), on the government-supported documentaries of the 1960s, and on some minor studio films such as Peter Bogdanovich's first film, Targets (1968). For several years in the late 1960s, she was a film instructor at the University of Southern California. Her one major studio film, El Cid, led to her only industry recognition in this phase of her career, which was the 1962 Golden Reel award for sound editing.
  Fields came into prominence as a film editor and industry executive during the 'New Hollywood' era (1968–1982). She had established close ties with the directors Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg early in their careers, and became known as their "mother cutter"; the term "cutter" is an informal variation of "film editor". The critical and commercial success of the films What's up, Doc? (1972), American Graffiti (1973), and Jaws (1975) brought Fields a level of recognition that appears to be unique among film editors. Jaws in particular was enormously and unexpectedly profitable, and ushered in the era of the "summer blockbuster" film. Fields' contributions to this success were widely acknowledged. She received an Academy Award and an American Cinema Editors Award for best editing for the film. Within a year of the film's release, she had been appointed as Vice-President for Feature Production at Universal Studios. She was thus among the first women to enter upper-level management in the entertainment industry. Her career as an executive at Universal continued until her death in 1982 at age 64.
  
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  Walt Disney
  Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and had an annual revenue of approximately US$36 billion in the 2010 financial year.
  Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland.
  
  wn.com/Walt_Disney
• Walter Wanger
  Walter Wanger (July 11, 1894 – November 18, 1968) was an American film producer, an intellectual and a socially conscious movie executive who produced provocative message movies and glittering romantic melodramas.
  Wanger was born Walter Feuchtwanger in San Francisco, California, and pronounced "Wanger" to rhyme with "danger". He served with the United States Army during World War I, and attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
  His career began at Paramount Pictures in the 1920s and led him to work at virtually every major studio as either a contract producer or an independent. Wanger served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1939 to October 1941 and from December 1941 to 1945.
  Wanger married silent film actress Justine Johnstone in 1919. They divorced in 1938 and in 1940 he married Joan Bennett with whom he remained married until their divorce in 1965. They had two daughters, Stephanie (born 1943) and Shelley Antonia (born 1948), and Wanger adopted Bennett's daughter, Diana, by her marriage to Gene Markey. In 1950, Bennett signed with MCA agent Jennings Lang. In 1951, Wanger shot and wounded Lang after accusing him of having an affair with Bennett. Wanger's attorney, Jerry Giesler, mounted a "temporary insanity" defense and Wanger served a four-month sentence at the Castaic Honor Farm two hours' drive north of Los Angeles. The experience profoundly affected him and in 1954 he made the prison film Riot in Cell Block 11.
  
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  Warren Beatty
  Warren Beatty ( /ˈbeɪti/ BAY-tee; born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, including winning the Best Director Award and its highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award. He has been nominated for 16 Golden Globe Awards and won six, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award, which he received in 2007. Only Beatty and Orson Welles have been nominated for producer, director, writer and actor in the same film. Welles did it once (for Citizen Kane), Beatty did it twice (for Heaven Can Wait and Reds).
  Beatty was born Henry Warren Beaty in Richmond, Virginia. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a Nova Scotia-born teacher, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a Ph.D. of educational psychology, a public school administrator, and dealt in real estate. Beatty's grandparents were also educators. The family was Baptist. In 1945, the family moved from Richmond to Arlington, Virginia. Beatty's sister is the multi-award winning actress and writer Shirley MacLaine.
  
  wn.com/Warren_Beatty
• William Castle
  William Castle (April 24, 1914 – May 31, 1977) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Castle was known for directing films with many gimmicks which were ambitiously promoted, despite being reasonably low budget B-movies.
  William Castle was born William Schloss in New York City to a Jewish family. Schloss is German for "castle", and Castle chose to translate his surname into English to use as his pseudonym. Orphaned at the age of 11, he would drop out of high school and spend most of his teenage years working on Broadway in a number of jobs ranging from set building to acting. This stood him in good stead when he became a director, and he left for Hollywood at the age of 23, going on to direct his first film six years later. He also worked an as assistant to director Orson Welles, doing much of the second unit location work for Welles' noir classic, The Lady from Shanghai.
  Castle began directing films in the early 1940s, and later television, before moving on to the "gimmick films". Five of these were scripted by adventure novelist Robb White. Two of his films have been remade by his daughter Terry Ann Castle who served as Co-Producer, House on Haunted Hill in 1999, and Thirteen Ghosts in 2001 (the latter retitled Thir13en Ghosts).
  
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  William Gibbs McAdoo
  William Gibbs McAdoo, Jr. (October 31, 1863 – February 1, 1941) was an American lawyer and political leader who served as a U.S. Senator, United States Secretary of the Treasury and director of the United States Railroad Administration (USRA). By virtue of his position as Secretary of the Treasury, in August 1914, he served as an "ex-officio member" on the first Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC.
  McAdoo was born near Marietta, Georgia, to author Mary Faith Floyd (1832–1913) and attorney William Gibbs McAdoo (1820–1894). His uncle, John D. McAdoo, was a Civil War general and justice on the Texas Supreme Court. McAdoo attended rural schools until his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1877, when his father became a professor at the University of Tennessee.
  He graduated from the University of Tennessee and is an initiate of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity Lambda Chapter at the University of Tennessee. He was appointed deputy clerk of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in 1882. He married his first wife, Sarah Hazelhurst Fleming, on November 18, 1885. They had seven children: Harriet Floyd McAdoo, Francis Huger McAdoo, Julia Hazelhurst McAdoo, Nona Hazelhurst McAdoo, William Gibbs MacAdoo III, Robert Hazelhurst McAdoo, and Sarah Fleming McAdoo.
  
  wn.com/William_Gibbs_McAdoo
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  Woodrow Wilson
  Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. Running against Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt and Republican candidate William Howard Taft, Wilson was elected President as a Democrat in 1912.
  In his first term as President, Wilson persuaded a Democratic Congress to pass major progressive reforms. Historian John M. Cooper argues that, in his first term, Wilson successfully pushed a legislative agenda that few presidents have equaled, and remained unmatched up until the New Deal. This agenda included the Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and an income tax. Child labor was curtailed by the Keating–Owen Act of 1916, but the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1918. He also had Congress pass the Adamson Act, which imposed an 8-hour workday for railroads. Wilson, after first sidestepping the issue, became a major advocate for the women's suffrage.
  
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  World War I
  World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.
  
  wn.com/World_War_I

Independence: Around the Film 'Kedma', a Film by Amos Gitai (2002)

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