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Paulo Coelho was born on 24 August 1947 in Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a writer and actor, known for The Experimental Witch (2009), Amante Latino (1979) and Veronika Decides to Die (2009). He is married to Christina Oiticica.- Writer
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Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England, UK. He is a writer and producer, known for Atonement (2007), The Good Son (1993) and Enduring Love (2004). He has been married to Annalena McAfee since 1997. He was previously married to Penny Allen.- Writer
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A true master of his craft, Michael Haneke is one of the greatest film artists working today and one who challenges his viewers each year and work goes by, with films that reflect real portions of life in realistic, disturbing and unforgettable ways. One of the most genuine filmmakers of the world cinema, Haneke wrote and directed films in several languages: French, German and English, working with a great variety of actors, such as Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Toby Jones, Ülrich Muhe, Arno Frisch and the list goes on.
This grand figure from Austrian cinema was born in Germany on 23 March 1942, from a German father and an Austrian mother, with both parents being from the artistic world working as actors, a career that Michael also tried but without much success. At the University of Vienna he studied drama, philosophy and psychology, and after graduation he went on to become a film critic and TV editor. His career behind camera started with After Liverpool (1974), which he wrote and directed. He went on to direct five more TV films and two episodes from the miniseries "Lemminge" (1979)_.
The years spent on television works prompted him to finally direct his first cinema feature, during his early 40's, which is somewhat unusual for film directors. But it was worth waiting. In The Seventh Continent (1989), Haneke establishes the foundation of what his future cinema would be about: a cinema that doesn't provides answers but one that dares to throw more and more questions, a cinema that reflects and analyses the human condition in its darkest and unexpected ways outside of any Hollywood formula. Films that exist to confront audiences and not comfort them. In it, Haneke deals with the duality of social values vs. internal values while exposing an apparent perfect family that runs into physical and material disintegration for reasons unknown. It was the first time a film of his was sent to the Cannes Film Festival (out of competition lineup) but he managed to cause some commotion in the audience with polemic scenes that were meant to extract all possible reactions from the crowd.
His next ventures at the decade's turn was in dealing with disturbed youth and the alienation they have in separating reality from fiction, trying to intersect both to drastic results. In Benny's Video (1992), it's the disturbing story of a teen boy who experiences killing for the first time capturing the murder on tape, impressed by the power of detachment that films and videos can cause to people; and later on the highly controversial Funny Games (1997), where two teens hold a family hostage to play sadistic games just for their own sick amusement. The film cemented Haneke's name as one of the greatest authors of his generation but sparkled a great debate with its themes of violence, sadism and the influence those things have in audiences. At the 1997's Cannes Film Festival, it was the film that had the most walk-out's by the audience. In between both films, he released 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) and Kafka's The Castle (1997), the latter being one of the rare times when Haneke developed an adapted work.
In the 2000's, he strongly continued in producing more outstanding works prone to debate and reflection in what would become his most prolific decade with the following films: Code Unknown (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001), Time of the Wolf (2003), Caché (2005), an American remake shot-by shot of Funny Games (2007) and The White Ribbon (2009). His study about romance versus masochism in The Piano Teacher (2001) was an intense work, with powerful performances by Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel, that the Cannes jury in the year were so impressed that Haneke managed to actually reverse their award rules where it was decided that film entries at the festival couldn't win more than one main award (the two lead actors won awards and Haneke got the Grand Prize of the Jury, just lost the Palme d'Or). With The White Ribbon (2009), an enigmatic black-and-white masterpiece following the inception of Nazism in this pre WWI and WWII story focusing on repressed children living in this small village where strange events happen all the time and without any possible reasoning, Haneke conquered the world and audiences with an artistic and daring work that won his first Palme d'Or a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film and received an Oscar nomination for the same category plus the cinematography work of Christian Berger.
2012 was the year that marked his supremacy in the film world with the release of the bold and beautiful Amour (2012), a love story with powerful real drama and one where Haneke removed most of his usual dark characteristics to present more quiet and calm elements without losing input in creating controversy. The touching story of George and Anne provided one the greatest moments of that year and earned Haneke his second and consecutive Palme d'Or at Cannes and his first Oscar nominations for Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay - and it was one of the several nominees for Best Picture Oscar, winning as Best Foreign Language Film.
After abandoning a flash-mob film project, he returned to the screen with Happy End (2017), a film dealing with the refugee crisis in Europe and again he debuted his film at Cannes, receiving mildly positive reviews.
Besides his film work, Haneke also directs theatre productions, from drama to opera, from Così fan tutte to Don Giovanni.- Actor
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The bushy-browed, cigar-smoking wise-cracker with the painted-on moustache and stooped walk was the leader of The Marx Brothers. With one-liners that were often double entendres, Groucho never cursed in any of his performances and said he never wanted to be known as a dirty comic. With a great love of music and singing (The Marx Brothers started as a singing group), one of the things Groucho was best known for was his rendition of the song "Lydia the Tattooed Lady."- In the words of Edward Rochester to Jane Eyre - Whitaker's humble beginnings must have made him -- "tenacious of life." Born to an impoverished family, Whitaker was more Canadian than American since the family moved near Montreal, Canada anticipating a better life during his early years-apparently speaking only French until age nine. Most of his adolescence was spent back in upstate New York in Albany -- yet again a continued hard life. But young Whitaker had expectations and kept them hopeful with his love of reading and stories. During the Korean War he joined the Navy, working in intelligence. He moved to Seattle thereafter and worked at a laundry while going to the University of Washington on the GI Bill. He earned a bachelor degree in theater. While there he wrote and directed his own three-act play "Eve of the Bursting" as a thesis for his master degree and wrote another play - "Never Come Tuesday" (1960). Whitaker went on to earn a doctorate in communications and film at Northwestern University. Later he was awarded a Fullbright scholarship for study in England. His achievement stoked an elitist confidence in succeeding, but there was also an ironic rebel's need to swim against the floe if nothing but for the hell of it. He was a keen observer/assimulator and in that an evolving and efficient mimic of the edge of what the next decade of the 1960s would dub anti-Establishment. Movies and early TV playhouse reflected social tensions. There was Marlon Brando in black leather and on a motorcycle - and there was Whitaker in black leather and on a motorcycle - supposedly roaring into conservative Blair, Nebraska and Lutheran Dana College in the early 1950s to snap up a position as director of communications - and wearing this assumed persona during his years there. He might be a loner - playing the role of cultured drifter and closet idealist forged by his humble beginnings, but he was an elitist in all these roles. A rather shy psychological hedonist from different angles-he enjoyed playing at being different - and intellectually totalitarian in its validation. He was well on his way in the grooming of the alter ego that would evolve in novel and serious writing to provide fulfillment to the dreaming poor boy from Albany. In 1958 he married Diane T. Brandon, suitably a painter - and even more suitably the ceremony was in Greenwich Village in New York. They produced four children, and better academic opportunity emanated from elsewhere in the West-well, South. A larger school and better promise called from the University of Texas at Austin. Soon he was chairman of the Department of Radio, TV, and Film, having built a body of work in ideas and theory on film particularly. By the early 1970s he ready to start breaking away from conventional career. And though not conventional, it was in the potentially lucrative life of a novelist that Whitaker sought to achieve that end. It was a good time to venture forth in popular writing for someone like Whitaker. The historical novel and tell-all books about the hippy philosophy and tearing down society of the 1960s gave way to a hunger for wit and satire - and the more the better - even when it was rather naive or clumsy - maybe even silly. Through the mid-1960s to 1970 Whitaker wrote on film but must have decided on more lucrative applications for his ego. The spy and espionage genre had run its course, but Whitkaker found it right for his first novels. The first was supposed to be a cool and smart spoof on the genre, but The Eiger Sanction (1972) was also very much Whitaker's self-indulgent foray into alter ego fantasy. It would seem true to his two sides -- the two ironic faces -- Whitaker sought both fame and obscurity. One story is that his wife picked the pseudonym 'Trevanian' for him based on her fondness for English historian G. M. Trevelyan. It made a good European-sounding name just the same. And like women blood-and-thunder novelists whose heroes and heroines are bigger than life, Whitaker's Dr. Jonathan Hemlock (such a heavy-handed surname with others of similar double meaning in the book) is all that -- both a professor of art and a former counter-assassin-world-renowned mountaineer and lady-killer extraordinaire. Whitaker, the keen observer of humanity - and himself - moved the story along with more sassy sarcasm than wit-making it less a spoof and more the work of an eager novelist out to prove his powers as weaver of storyline - and it does move along with clever enough speed to thrill the avid 1970s reader - otherwise, it seems fairly dated. Crown Publishing did much to hype the initial gossip about the mysterious author as a European who was an accomplished mountain climber. Though he may have tried it, Whitaker had just read up on mountaineering and its history - probably and mostly British books - he did not know American climbing. The narrative about practice climbing in America betrayed his ignorance when he assumed British terms for climbing difficulty - "fifth and sixth grades" instead of the so-called Yosemite decimal system (in Amerrican climbing 'grades' refers to relative time taken to climb a particular route). He used Brit slang "pegs" and "snap links" for pitons and carabiners, respectively, and put these around the waist rather than slung via a sling over the shoulder. The story line climax on the Eiger borrowed something from the dramatic 1936 German attempt on the notorious North Face that ended with a deadly storm. It was also heavily influenced by the first direct route ascent in 1966 in which the leader of the Anglo-American team, John Harlin, fell to his death near the top. Amid the dropping of three dollar words here and there Whitaker's own attempts at adding biting social comment boiled in his own disgust with Yankee materialism - as voiced through his steely-eyed, disdainful hero-seem overly engineered and amateurish - particularly in a thinly disguised appearance of among other jet-setters flocking to the Swiss hamlet of Grindelwald to watch - Liz and Dick - the Burtons, of course. It really is too much. Universal bought the film rights and produced a film with a script thankfully devoid of social conscious chiefly steered by Warren Murphy. Whitaker labeled the film as "vapid". Nonetheless he received partial screen writing credit. And The Eiger Sanction (1975) was a hit for Clint Eastwood. The book was one of five written between 1972 to 1983, selling more than a million copies each. There was a Hemlock sequel, The Loo Sanction (1973), supposedly even more of a spoof and this time in England. Whitaker's oddball blend of reality and fiction went so far as to have the ever adroit Hemlock lecturing in London extempore on film - putting down film criticism devotees - but noting 'Whitaker' by name as one of the few genuine film theorist/critics to be had - talk about blowing one's own horn. Whitaker despaired that the critics did not see the clever farce and were less appreciative than the first time around. But it is not as engaging a book-though characteristic of his writing in general it showed his doubtless gift for descriptive phrasing. Nonetheless, the critics were still taken with Trevanian, joining a select public awaiting his next literary treat. Despite his antics of insisting his publisher not grant interviews or burden him with book tours, Whitaker remained something of a literary fad. One critic went so far - and Whitaker could not have said it better - to call him "the only writer of airport paperbacks to be compared to Zola, Ian Fleming, Poe, and Chaucer." Well the fan club certainly thought so. Perhaps - inevitably - Whitaker's growing disappointment with the U.S. spurred on the decision to shake America from his heels and live in Europe. Both the politics and the culture prompted him to declare: "I could feel the growth of anti-intellectual fundamentalism of the kind we thought we'd killed off with the Dayton Monkey Trial." And dismissing the nation as possessed of "compassion fatigue", he moved to the French side of the Basque Pyrenees in a village called Garindein near Mauleon-Licharre. So ensconced, Whitaker continued to explore novel writing - and with insistent autobiographical undertones. He added a new pen name, Nicolas Seare, for his 1339 or So: Being an Apology for a Pedlar (1975), a so-called 'witty' medieval tale of love and courage; The Main (1976) was a police drama in a poor neighborhood of Montreal. Whitaker originally intended to publish under yet another pen name - this time, Jean-Paul Morin - but kept his Travanian moniker. His best-received work followed three years later with Shibumi (1979) still exploring the avenues of espionage with what was called a meta-spy novel. By now Whitaker's variety of book subjects and adaptive writing skill convinced some naive critics that "Trevanian" was in reality a general pen name for a group of writers working together - how very unimaginative - but no doubt something to make Whitaker bubble in triumph. Some critics decided that Trevanian was Robert Ludlum writing under a pen name. Whitaker would quip with non-decorum, "I don't even know who he is. I read Proust, but not much else written in the 20th century." In fact with this novel Whitaker finally granted an interview and revealed himself. Taking his time his next effort did not appear until 1983 with The Summer of Katya, a psychological horror story. In that same year and under Seare again came Rude Tales and Glorious, an irreligious re-telling of Arthurian tales. Is writing included several spurts of short stories. Along with the familiar Travanian label he used a pen name within the latter for two short stories - one Benat Le Cagot being noted as a French author and being translated by - who else - Travanian. This was the sort of smart playfulness his dedicated fans delighted in as so boldly innovative. But for fifteen years Whitaker denied them further entertainment and remained occupied elsewhere than writing. Then out came his exercise in writing a Western, Incident at Twenty-Mile in 1998, along with a interview granted Newsweek magazine in which he stated that he used Method-acting techniques to imagine himself as the author to provide the style he wanted. There followed in 2000 a collection of short stories called Hot Night in the City (2000). About that time he and his family lost the home in southern France due to fire, and Whitaker transplanted all to England, to the village of Dinder near the town of Wells in Somerset. Whitaker began developing health problems his remaining years, though he was still writing a few short stories, edited a mystery short story collection (Death Dance, 2002), and planning more novels. He completed his novel Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005), very much reflecting the author's years in Albany, a coming-of-age story of Jean-Luc LaPointe, a boy surviving with his mother and sister in the slums of Albany, New York in the years proceeding and during World War II. Whitaker was having to use bottled oxygen as he attempted to finish his last novel Street of the Four Winds again as Trevanian. This was something of an epic of the old school about a Parisian artist caught in the 1848 revolution. The author labored at the historical research and writing but ran out of time, succumbing to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Having kept to his hard opinion of society in general - especially America - in an odd bit of patronizing tribute he rewarded his fans with this: "The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one."
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David Mitchell was born on 12 January 1969 in Southport, Lancashire, England, UK. He is a writer and actor, known for Cloud Atlas (2012), The Matrix Resurrections (2021) and Sense8 (2015). He is married to Keiko Yoshida. They have two children.- Writer
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A Czech-born Australian screenwriter and director.
Graduating from the International Film School Sydney in 2009, her short films 'Defect' and 'Thrust' both political drama/ thrillers went on the world festivals' circuit in 2010, winning at Soho NYC, USA International Film Festival.
Her feature script, historical drama/political thriller 'Toman' has been optioned in 2013 by Czech producer&director Ondrej Trojan, who was twice nominated for foreign Oscars ("Zelary", "Divided We Fall"). The film 'Toman' premiered in October 2018, with prospects for Czech Lions (AACTA awards equivalent) numerous awards.
Since late 2013 Zdenka has written numerous TV and feature scripts in the fields of military investigations, war/special forces/espionage/political, psychological and action dramas and a couple of love stories/thrillers.
Zdenka's extensive work is often based on true stories, supported by thorough research and a knowledge of those subject.
Education: International Film School Sydney 2007-2009 Advanced Diploma in Screen (writing/directing/producing)
Experience: Experienced writer and director - 11 years in the industry
Filmography: Toman / Feature film - historical drama, political thriller/2018 (released October 2018) - writer Trust / Short film - action, psychological drama, political thriller/2009 - writer/director/producer Defect / Short film - drama-political thriller/2009 (winner "Best Film in Progress" Soho NYC IFF) - writer/director/producer
Competitions: "Those Who Dare" - High-end TV Drama from our current war conflict/2017 - writer - Pilot long-listed for AWG Prime Time TV competition in 2017. The script was described by the judges as "raw, realistic, fresh, unique voice of a subject-knowledgeable newcomer". "Predator Strike" - Feature - political thriller/2015 - writer - Script considered by judges of Gateway LA screenwriting competition to qualify for Australian Top 10 feature and TV scripts in 2015.
Awards: * Breaking Bread - Feature film script - Political Thriller/drama Golden Reel Award Winner, Nevada Film Festival 2009 Honourable Mention (10th-best in the world), Independent Short Film And Arts Festival Long Beach 2009 Winner, Cinema City on Line Film Festival California 2009 ** Defect - Short Film - Drama Winner, Best Short Film, SoHo International Film Festival NYC 2010 Winner, Jury Award for Best Short Film under 20 min, 5th Monaco Charity Film Festival, Monaco Golden Palm Award Winner, Best Short Film, Mexico International Film Festival 2010 Award Nominee, Best Short Film under 20min, Swansea International Film Festival, UK 2010 Award Nominee, Best short film, Okanagan Film Festival, Canada 2010 Royal Reel Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the 2010 Canada International Film Festival Aloha Accolade Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the 2010 Honolulu International Film Festival Award Nominee, Ireland International Film Festival 2010 Official Selection, Rincon International Film Festival, Brazil 2010 Official Selection, Egypt International Film Festival 2010 Official Selection, Strasghborough International Film Festival, France 2010 Official Selection, Canberra Short Film Festival, Australia 2009 Bronze DVD (3rd place) in Annual Australian Cinematography Awards 2009 *** Trust - Short Film - drama Award Nominee, Swansea Film Festival, UK 2010 Award Nominee, 5th Monaco Charity Film Festival, Monaco 2010 Golden Palm Award nominee, Mexico International Film Festival 2010 Official Selection, Egypt International Film Festival 2010 Official Selection, Ireland International Film Festival 2010 Official Selection, Swansea International Film Festival 2010 TRUST/ Short Film - drama Official Selection, Coasties Film Festival Avoca Beach Australia 2009
Current Projects in Script Stage:
"Shiver" - TV Miniseries Drama-Love Story - based on the Australian journalist and award-winning author Nikki Gemmell's book.
The miniseries follows a young journalist, Fin, disillusioned with her suffocating city routine, Sydney Morning Herald domestic reporting and disastrous relationships, who seizes the opportunity to break free and accept a prestige assignment on the Summer Antarctic mission. Unaware of the trip's numerous challenges, strict written and unwritten rules and with a 96:8 ratio of men to women, she's thrilled with the prospect of new beginnings, but soon she finds out what a bunch of quirky scientists she will have to put up with. Then she breaks rule number one - she falls in love... with shattering consequences.
"Sisters" - a complex psychological drama/thriller/love story - inspired by a novel 'Carthage' by the renown American author Joyce Carol Oates and set on NSW South Coast.
The script addresses timeless family dynamics of love and hate between a husband and wife, between a more beautiful loved child and the rebellious difficult 'unloved' child, and how a family and war can defile and change a human soul, pit families of a small town community against each other leading to exile and even murder.
"Quality of Silence" - a psychological family mystery/thriller - screen adaptation of Rosamund Upton's novel.
We follow an Australian astrophysicist Yasmin and her deaf daughter Ruby, whose only means of communication is her laptop, on their perilous journey to find Ruby's father, Matt Alfredson, a British-Australian wildlife filmmaker who goes missing in Alaska. Denying to accept the overwhelming proof - Matt's wedding ring that has been found at a village of Anaktue that was devastated by an explosion and fire with no survivors, Yasmin and Ruby take a ride along the dangerous ice highway with an Afghan refugee truck driver in search of Matt... but someone is following them... a friend, messenger or foe?
"ADFIS" aka "Australian Defence Force Investigative Services" - a high-end military crime procedural drama series with a strong international appeal. A team of investigators with their idiosyncrasies must work together to solve complex, often politically sensitive crimes involving ADF personnel on operations, home and overseas.
"Exit Wounds" - a psychological drama mini-series that follows one of our highest ranking Australian officer's 'War on Terror', alongside his private war with his PTSD. While he is leading our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, he comes to question our involvement in the Afghanistan war and other conflicts because Yanks and Brits decided to go to war. This high-end drama has a broad international appeal for its unique POV of the War on Terror and PTSD from the direct experience of our Army leader.
Industry Professional Referees:
Robert Macklin - Author, Screenwriter, Documentary Filmmaker robert@robertmacklin.com mobile: +61(0)407226892
To whom it may concern:
As a graduate of the AFTRS, a Full Member of the AWG and the Producer/Director of numerous documentaries for television in 32 countries of Asia and the Pacific - as well as a similar number of corporate videos in Australia - I am delighted to have the opportunity to act as a referee for Zdenka Simandlova.
She is an artistic creative of extraordinary range and depth. She is a director of great sensitivity and a screenwriter of enormous talent and accomplishment. I have been collaborating with her on television and feature film projects for the past two years and she has brought great depth and passion to every element of our work. She is a true professional with a European sophistication rarely seen in Australian productions but which adds a new and vital dimension to her work. I thoroughly recommend her for whatever position she seeks. She is an enormous asset to our industry.
Canberra, 14/10/2017
Donald Crombie - Former Directing Lecturer, IFSS, Sydney, Former Head of Directing, Australian Film, Television Radio School, Sydney doncrom@zip.com.au
To whom it may concern:
I tutored Zdenka Simandlova in the craft of direction at the International Film School of Sydney. Ms Simandlova was an outstanding student with a mature aesthetic and a strong understanding of the art of translating a story from page to screen.
Zdenka impressed me in particular with her ability to create mood, atmosphere and tension on screen as evidenced in her excellent short film, Defect. In that film, she created 1950s Prague most believably, a considerable challenge considering it was filmed in inner Sydney, Australia with a student film budget. That film shows that Zdenka Simandlova is a film director.
She satisfied me in all aspects of her craft: preparation, storyboard to screen and post- production. She is a very good communicator and was respected by her key creative crew. She is able to give direction to actors in a manner that earns their trust and I was impressed by her approach to working with actors and the performances they achieved under her guidance. Her short film work demonstrates that Zdenka Simandlova is capable and ready to move to longer form filmed drama and I commend her to producers and funding organisations.
Sydney, 12/11/2016
Contact - Zdenka Simandlova: Mobile +61 487 726 881 Home +61 2 4457 2636 twinscreenplays@gmail.com- William Rose was born on 31 August 1918 in Jefferson City, Missouri, USA. He was a writer, known for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Ladykillers (1955) and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). He was married to Tania Rose. He died on 10 February 1987 in Jersey, Channel Islands, UK.
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Rudolf Medek was born on 8 January 1890 in Königgrätz, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary. He was a writer and actor, known for Za ceskoslovenský stát (1928), Ohnivý drak (1925) and Zborov (1938). He was married to Eva Slavicka. He died on 22 September 1940 in Prague, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.- Additional Crew
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Mark Tapson is known for Grand Deception (2012), The Path to 9/11 (2006) and The Fight of Our Lives: Defeating the Ideological War Against the West (2018).- American writer. He was born and brought up in New York City, the son of Hubert and Adalin Selby. His father was a merchant seaman and former coal-miner from Kentucky who had settled in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn. Hubert Sr. returned to the merchant marine after the outbreak of World War Two, where in 1944 Hubert Jr. followed him. He had attended various New York state schools, including Peter Stuyvesant High, before dropping out aged 15. In his third year at sea, Selby contracted tuberculosis. Told he had only months to live, he was taken off his ship, docked in Bremen, Germany, and transported back to America. At the Marine Hospital, New York, he was treated with an experimental drug, streptomycin, and underwent surgery, having 10 ribs removed in order for surgeons to operate on his lungs (one of which had collapsed). The streptomycin treatment saved him but left him with acute pulmonary problems which persisted for the rest of his life. When he left hospital after three years he was dependent on morphine; however, the spell in hospital had also given him his first opportunity to read seriously and he had determined to be a writer. He married for the first time in 1949 but with no qualifications, no work experience outside the forces and severe ill-health his job prospects were poor and so he stayed at home to bring up his daughter while his wife worked in a department store. During this period he made the acquaintance of several writers, including Gilbert Sorrentino and Amiri Baraka, who encouraged his literary efforts. During the 1950s he had a succession of jobs - secretary, insurance analyst, freelance copywriter, gas station attendant - whilst working on a collection of short stories called "The Queen in Dead" based on the people he had met in bars near the army base in Brooklyn. Several of these stories appeared in small literary journals, including "Black Mountain Review", "New Directions" and "The Provincetown Review". The decision of the latter in 1961 to print his story "Tralala" (about the gang-rape and murder of a prostitute) involved it in an obscenity trial: the editor was arrested for selling pornographic literature to a minor. The case was later dismissed on appeal. When the collection of loosely linked stories had taken shape as "Last Exit to Brooklyn", Amiri Baraka suggested that Selby contact Sterling Lord, Jack Kerouac's agent. The books was published by Grove Press (who had also published works by William S. Burroughs) in 1964. Although critical opinion was sharply divided, the book drew praise from Allen Ginsberg as a work that would "still be eagerly read in a hundred years". When the rights for the British edition were bought by Marion Boyars and John Calder, the manuscript was submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions. His reply was unhelpful, and the book was published to favourable reviews and sales of nearly 14,000 copies. Then the director of Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford complained and although the DPP still declined to act a private prosecution was initiated in July 1966 by Sir Cyril Black, Conservative MP for Wimbledon, before Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court. After a guilty verdict was returned, the public prosecutor brought an action under Section 2 of the Obscene Publications Act. At the trial, in London's Old Bailey court, witnesses for the prosecution included the publisher Sir Basil Blackwell, and witnesses for the defence the scholars 'Al Alvarez' (II) and Professor Frank Kermode (who compared the book to Dickens). The jury was entirely male, Judge Graham Rigers having directed that women "might be embarrassed at having to read a book which dealt with homosexuality, prostitution, drug-taking and sexual perversion". The trial lasted 9 days and, although a guilty verdict was returned, in August 1968 an appeal led by the lawyer and writer John Mortimer was finally successful, the whole case representing a turning-point in British censorship laws. By this point the book had sold 33,000 hardback copies and 500,000 paperbacks in the US alone. Meanwhile, Selby's struggles with dependency continued, and in 1967 he spent two months in jail for possession of heroin. Shortly after this he managed to beat his addiction by cold turkey. In 1969, his frail health no longer able to withstand the severity of New York winters, he moved south to West Hollywood, where he lived until his death. The subject-matter of his books remained uncompromising: his second novel, "The Room" (1971), dealt with the sadistic sexual fantasies of an unjustly imprisoned man, plotting revenge on the two policemen who arrested him. "The Demon" (1976) was about a man obsessed by brutal, loveless sex, and "Requiem for a Dream" (1978) about drug addiction. The latter was written in 6 weeks after a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. As Selby got older, the pace of his writing slowed: when in 1986 the collection of short stories, "Song of the Silent Snow", was published, some dated back 20 years. He wrote two subsequent novels, "The Willow Tree" (1998) and "The Waiting Period" (2001) as well as collaborating on a screen adaptation of "Requiem for a Dream". At the time of his death he was teaching creative writing part-time at the University of Southern California.
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William Kennedy was born on 16 January 1928 in Albany, New York, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for The Cotton Club (1984), Ironweed (1987) and Melissa Etheridge: I'm Not Broken (2024). He was previously married to Ana Daisy Segarra .- Writer
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Charles Bukowski, the American poet, short-story writer, and novelist, was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, Jr. in Andernach, Germany on August 1920. He was the son of Henry Bukowski, a US soldier who was part of the post-World War I occupation force, and Katharina Fett, a German woman. His father, his wife and young "Henry Charles" returned to the United States in 1922, settling in Los Angeles, California, the setting of much of "Hank" Bukowski's oeuvre. With Raymond Chandler, Bukowski is the great chronicler of the City of Angels, and after John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers, who influenced Bukowski's poetry, he arguably is the most important and certainly one of the most influential writers produced by the Golden state.
Bukowski's childhood was marred by a violent father, who regularly beat him with a razor strop until his teen years, and then by the Great Depression. When Bukowski went through adolescence, he developed an awful case of acne vulgaris which disfigured his face and made him feel like an outsider. His father frequently was out of work during the Depression, and he took out his pain and anxiety on his son. The younger Bukowski took to drink at a young age, and became a rather listless underachiever as a means of rebellion against not only his father, but against society in general, the society his father wanted him to become a productive member of. The young Bukowski could care less.
During his school years, Bukowski read widely, and he entered Los Angeles City College after graduating from high school to study journalism and literature with the idea of becoming a writer. He left home after his father read some of his stories and went berserk, destroying his output and throwing his possessions out onto the lawn, a lawn that the young Bukowski had to mow weekly and would be beaten for if the grass wasn't perfectly cut. Bukowski left City College after a year and went on the bum, traveling to Atlanta, where he lived in a shack and subsisted on candy bars. He would continue to return to his parents' house when he was busted flat and had nowhere else to go.
At City College, Bukwoski briefly flirted with a pathetic, ad hoc, pro-fascist student group. Proud of being a German, he did not feel inclined to go to war against Hitler's Germany. When America entered World War II, Bukowski resisted entreaties from his friends and father to join the service. He began living the life of a wandering hobo and a bum, frequently living on skid row as he worked his way through a meaningless series of jobs in L.A. and other cities across the U.S. He wound up in New York City during the war after his short story, 'Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,' was accepted by "Story" magazine. He disliked New York and soon decamped for more hospitable climes. He was content to go to public libraries and read -- he discovered the L.A. writer John Fante, whom heavily influenced his own work and whom he would champion when he became famous -- and loaf.
The story, published in "Story" in 1944, was the highlight of the first part of his writing career. He returned to Los Angeles and became a Bottle Baby in his mid-twenties, forsaking the typewriter for John Barleycorn and Janet Cooney Baker, an alcoholic ten years his senior who became his lover, off and on, for the the next decade. They would shack up in a series of skid row rooms until the money and the booze would run out, and Jane would hurt the turf. She was a tortured soul who could match Bukowski drink for drink, and she was the love of his life. They would drift apart in the mid-1950s until coming together again at the beginning of a new decade, before she drank herself to death in 1962.
Bukowski got a temporary Christmas job at the Post Office in 1952, and stuck with his job as a mail carrier for three years. In 1955, he was hospitalized in a charity ward with a bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him. He was told never to drink again, but he fell off the water wagon the day he got out of the hospital and never regretted it.
After recovering from his brush with death -- he would have died if an idealistic doctor hadn't demanded from the nurses that had left Bukowski to die that they give him a massive blood transfusion -- he began to write again: poetry. Bukowski developed into one of the most original and influential poets of the post-War era, though he was never anthologized in the United States (though those that were influenced by him were). Bukwoski, who chronicled the low-life that he lived, never gained any critical respect in America, either in the journals or in academia.
Barbara Frye, a woman born to wealth who published the small poetry magazine "Harlequin," began to publish Bukowski. She sent a letter to him saying she feared no one would marry her because of a congenital conformity essentially leaving her with no neck. Bukowski, who had never met her, wrote back that he would marry her, and he did. The marriage lasted two years. In 1958, he went back to work for the Post Office, this time as a mail sorting clerk, a job he would hold for almost a dozen hellish years.
His first collection of poetry, "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail" was published as a chapbook in 1959 in a run of 200 copies. The influence of Jeffers is very strong in the early work. One can also detect W.H. Auden, although Bukowski never mentioned him, and he was phlegmatic whereas Auden was dry. But that same sense of an outsider looking in critically at his society was there.
Bukowski's poetry, like all his writing, was essentially autobiographical and rooted in clinical detail rather than metaphor. The poems detailed the desperate lives of men on the verge -- of suicide, madness, a mental breakdown, an economic bust-out, another broken relationship -- whose saving grace was endurance. The relationship between male and female was something out of Thomas Hobbes, and while Bukowski's life certainly wasn't short, one will find in the poetry and prose much that is brutish.
Jon Edgar Webb, a former swindler who became a littérateur with his "The Outsider" magazine, became enamored of Bukowski's work in the early 1960s. Webb, who had published the work of Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, published Bukowski, then dedicated an issue of his magazine to Buk was "Outsider of the Year," and eventually decided to publish, with his own bespoke hand press, a collection of Bukowski's poetry.
Bukowski began to establish a reputation in the small magazines that proliferated with the "mimeograph revolution" of the late 1960s, micro-circulation "magazines" run off on mimeograph and Gestetner machines. Bukowski began moving away from a more traditional, introspection poetry to more expressionistic, free-form "verse," and began dabbling in the short story, a form he became a master of. He also began a weekly column for an underground Los Angeles newspaper, "Open City," called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man." The texts of his column were collected in a collection of the same title published by Ferlenghetti's City Lights press in 1969. (City Lights also would publish his first book of short stories, entitled "Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," in 1972).
In the column, Bukowski would introduce ideas, vignettes and stories, many of which would be further developed into the short stories that helped make his reputation. The Bukowski of the mid- to late- 1960s and 1970s became one of the greatest short story writers that America has produced, and his reputation grew steadily in Europe. (Though a literary lion on the West Coast, Buk never was much appreciated in the New York City that he had spurned which was, after all, the arbiter of culture. Since he didn't exist in their ken, he didn't exist at all, with the surprising result for Europeans that the most popular American writer in Europe was little known by Americans.)
There was envy as Bukowski became increasingly popular. Aside from the master of kitsch Rod McKuen, Bukowski was probably the best selling poet America produced after World War II. By the end of the 1970s, he was the most popular American writer in Germany and also had a huge reputation in France and other parts of Europe. Yet, he remained virtually unknown in the United States, except among the core of the Bukowski cult who faithfully bought his books.
Bukowski's success as a writer in the 1970s can be attributed to the patronage of John Martin, a book collector and chap book publisher who offered to subsidize Bukowski to the tune of $100 a month for life. Bukowski took him up on the offer, quit his job at the Post Office in 1969, and set out to be a writer who made his living by the typewriter alone (and an occasional poetry reading). Martin established his Black Sparrow Press to print Bukowski, and Bukowski proceeded to begin his first novel while continuing to write poetry and short stories. The first novel, "Post Office," was published by Black Sparrow in 1971. The Bukowski phenomenon began to gain momentum.
Around the time he quit the Post Office, Bukowski took up with the poet and sculptress Linda King, who was 20 years his junior. They began a tumultuous relationship juiced in equal parts with sadism and masochism that extended into the mid-1970s. In his 1978 autobiographical novel "Women," Bukowski writes about how his alter ego, "Henry Chinaski," had not had a woman in four years. Now, as Bukowski became a literary phenomenon in the small/alternative press world, he became a literary if not literal Don Juan, bedding down his legions of women fans who flocked to his apartment on DeLongre Avenue in the sleaziest part of Hollywood. (It was at this time that Bukowski was friends with a dirty book store manager who was the father of Leonardo DiCaprio.)
Bukowski's alter ego in his novels, Chinaski (who significantly shares Bukowski's real first name, the name he went by; he used his middle name "Charles" for his poetry as it seemed more literary, and possibly to deny his father, who shared the same Christian name), shares an affinity with with the underground denizens of Feodor Dostoyevsky's work and the protagonists of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novels "Journey to the End of Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan." Celine arguably is the largest influence on Bukowski's prose, aside from Hemingway (who influenced Bukowski's entire generation) and Fante. Like Celine, in World War II, Bukowski flirted with fascism (though Bukowski never descended into the anti-semitism of Celine or any other type of racism in his work); like Celine, he despised America and the brand of capitalism once known as "Fordism," assembly line industrialism and the petty consumer society Bukowski found abominable and which he tried to escape.
Chinaski is a hard-drinking, would-be womanizer who is ready to duke it out with the bums, crooks and assorted low-lives he lives and drinks amongst, though occasionally he visits high society through the ministrations of a woman. Like Bukowski himself, he will accept company but prefers to be alone to drink and listen to classical music on the radio: Beethoven, Mozart, and Mahler among others.
Chinaski was introduced in the autobiographical short-story "Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beats," his first published short story, printed in chap book form in 1965. Chinaski's life is chronicled in Bukowski's novels "Post Office" (1971), "Factotum" (1975), "Women" (1978), and "Ham on Rye" (1982). Bukowski is not naturally gifted as a novelist, and while "Women" is superb and the very short "Post Office" is highly readable, "Factotum" and "Ham on Rye" are not up to the standards of Bukowski's short stories.
As his social situation evolved, Bukowski's works broadened from tales of low-lives and bums and losers; he added to his repertoire meditative and sarcastic accounts of his new life. A constant in his work became poems and short stories about the race track, to which he had been introduced by Jane back in the 1950s. The race track as metaphor suited Bukowski as it represented something more than luck or chance. A horse player had to work at it to be any good and beat the odds, and the odds were definitely stacked against the crowd as the track took its vig right off the top, when it wasn't outright and forthrightly fixing the race.
Going with the crowd was to be avoided in order to improve one's odds, and the track, the establishment, was out to f--- the bettor, but spiritual kin to Camus' Sissyphus, the bettor on nags had to have the wit to at least get the stone to the crown of the hill and avoid getting crushed as it courses its way back. The bettor was hip to the fact that the rock always fell back and would always fall back, but a good living or at least survival could be had by beating the track, beating the establishment, if the bettor knew how to play the horses. It was all a matter of developing his own system, and standing aloof from the crowd, whose dumb, manipulated enthusiasms skewed the odds. And knowing when to change to a new system, to keep ahead of the track, and the crowd. Bukowski was the antithesis of Carl Sandburg and Sandburg's "The People."
Bukowski was and would remain a literary outsider. In 1973, Taylor Hackford presented Bukowski to a wider audience via an award-winning documentary for Los Angeles public television station KCET. "Bukowski" won the San Francisco Film Festival's Silver Reel Award after being voted the best cultural film on public TV. After his relationship with Linda King petered out, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health food restaurateur twenty-five years his junior in 1976. They became a couple and Bukowski's life became more balanced. With a stable relationship and steady royalties in the low six-figure range, Bukowski became a home owner, albeit in a middle class neighborhood in San Pedro. He now had a swimming pool, a hot tub, and drove a black BMW he paid cash for to the track. He palled around with Sean Penn and U2 dedicated a song to him at a Los Angeles concert.
The Muse, whom Buk bet on as faithfully as he did the ponies, left him when it came to the short story sometime in the 1980s. The poetry always ran through his head and down into his fingers, but it became less artful, though the powerful voice remained. Buk wrote a screenplay for Barbet Schroeder, which was made into the movie Barfly (1987), and Bukowski became known in the United States at last. He refused to appear on The Tonight Show (1962) with Johnny Carson, but let "People" magazine interview him as in his reasoning, it would be read by normal people at the supermarket checkout lines. It was the "Crowd" he despised but honored in his own way by refusing to be part of the "better" part of society that kept them down.
Always immensely prolific when it came to his poetry, and aided by a personal computer in the 1980s, Bukowski generated so much material that originals are still being published 10 years after his death. He finished his last novel, an L.A./Chandler/private detective/noir spoof called "Pulp" shortly before he lost his battle with leukemia; it, like the final poetry collection published in his lifetime, "The Last Night of the Earth Poems," is full of intimations of mortality, and of course, his mordant humor.
On March 9, 1994, in his native Los Angeles, the man Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre called America's "greatest poet" died. In his short story collection "Hot Water Music," Bukwoski wrote, "There are so many," she said, "who go by the name of poet. But they have no training, no feeling for their craft. The savages have taken over the castle. There's no workmanship, no care, simply a demand to be accepted." The remarkable endurance of the man who never asked for acceptance, the endurance that took him nearly forty years beyond the near-death his drinking and despair had brought him in 1955, finally gave out, and not to the booze and the carousing and anomie, but to a cancer. Many of his fans thought it was remarkable that the "Dirty Old Man" had made it to 74, but it was a brave front: they greatly mourned the passing of their favorite writer, a man that could be read by anyone of any class or educational background.
His friend, Sean Penn, dedicated his film The Crossing Guard (1995) to Bukowski, with the words felt by many who had loved him: "Hank, I still miss you."
We still do.- Actor
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Award-winning director, screenwriter, producer, and actor Sean Gullette first won international recognition when he co-wrote and played the lead role in PI, directed by longtime collaborator Darren Aronofsky (re-released by A24 in 2023.) He has since played principal and supporting roles in some twenty films (including Arnold in Requiem for a Dream) and series.
His first feature film as writer-director, 'Traitors' -- about Malika, the frontwoman of an all-girl punk rock band in Tangier, Morocco who gets into hot water with some drug smugglers -- made its world premiere at the Venice film festival, where it won a Special Mention, and screened in competition at Stockholm, Marrakech, Dubai, Tribeca and the Gijon Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award.
Sean developed and executive produced the documentary series 'Black Gold' with Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa, TIME Studios and Paramount +. He directed the episodes "Manson Girls" and "Generation Woodstock," for the landmark ABC-TV series '1969' and will executive produce and upcoming series from Part2 Pictures and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Seven Bucks.
Gullette is in development on Upland, from his script partly based on the novel by the late Nobel-prize winner Kenzaburo Oe. The announced cast will include Forrest Goodluck and Paul Sparks.
Also on his writer-director slate is Tangier, a "dark sexy thriller series" formerly cast with Kristin Scott Thomas and Jeremy Irons. and has written and directed TV commercials, TV and web content for ABC-TV, MTV, VH1 and Viacom.
He is a screenwriter who has worked with directors including Darren Aronosky, Olivier Megaton and Tom Donahue, and producers including Sarah Green, Audrey Rosenberg, and Alexandra Milchan.
Outside of film, Gullette lives in New York and part time in Tangier, where he founded The 212 Society, a US non-profit which supports cultural and educational projects in Morocco. Gullette's essays, journalism and fiction have been published in magazines including The Face, Spy, Slate, Bidoun, Brill's Content, Gear, Entertainment Weekly, Nejma, and KGB magazine (which he founded as editor and publisher in 1991.) Gullette speaks fluent French and other languages.- Producer
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Darren Aronofsky was born February 12, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up, Darren was always artistic: he loved classic movies and, as a teenager, he even spent time doing graffiti art. After high school, Darren went to Harvard University to study film (both live-action and animation). He won several film awards after completing his senior thesis film, "Supermarket Sweep", starring Sean Gullette, which went on to becoming a National Student Academy Award finalist. Aronofsky didn't make a feature film until five years later, in February 1996, where he began creating the concept for Pi (1998). After Darren's script for Pi (1998) received great reactions from friends, he began production. The film re-teamed Aronofsky with Gullette, who played the lead. This went on to further successes, such as Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010). Most recently, he completed the films Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017).- Writer
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Andres Heinz attended UCLA and NYU film school where he completed his B.F.A with the highest honors; his thesis film "Ground Level B" was the winner of the 1st Place Mobil Award.
After graduation, Andres worked in film and television production, including Production Coordinator for the film unit at Saturday Night Live.
Andres went on to direct his first feature, "Origin of the Species" and has since sold several original screenplays.
"Black Swan" is based on his original screenplay "The Understudy."- Writer
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Mark Heyman is known for Black Swan (2010), The Skeleton Twins (2014) and Strange Angel (2018). He has been married to Diana Fithian since 1 May 2010.- Writer
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Patryk Vega was born on 2 January 1977 in Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland. He is a writer and director, known for Small World (2021), Pitbull: Tough Women (2016) and Pitbull (2005). He has been married to Katarzyna Slominska since 26 June 2010.- Writer
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Guy Ritchie was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK on September 10, 1968. After watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as a child, Guy realized that what he wanted to do was make films. He never attended film school, saying that the work of film school graduates was boring and unwatchable. At 15 years old, he dropped out of school and in 1995, got a job as a runner, ultimately starting his film career. He quickly progressed and was directing music promos for bands and commercials by 1995.
The profits that he made from directing these promos was invested into writing and making the film The Hard Case (1995), a 20-minute short film that is also the prequel to his debut feature Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Sting's wife, Trudie Styler, saw The Hard Case (1995) and invested in the feature film. Once completed, 10 British distributors turned the film down before it eventually was released in the UK in 1998 and in the US in 1999; the film put Ritchie on the map as one of the hottest rising filmmakers of the time, and launched the careers of actors Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, and Vinnie Jones, among others.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) was followed by Snatch (2000), this time with a bigger budget and a few more familiar faces such as Brad Pitt, Dennis Farina, Benicio Del Toro alongside returning actors Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones and Jason Flemyng. At the end of 2000, Ritchie married the pop superstar Madonna in Scotland, and proceeded to work with his famous wife on a variety of film and video projects, including the short Star (2001), made for BMW and co-starring Clive Owen, and the controversial video "What It Feels Like for a Girl," which was called out for its violence. In 2002, the couple embarked on a remake of the 1974 Lina Wertmüller film Swept Away (2002); the new film was a critical and commercial flop, winning five Razzie Awards. Ritchie followed up with the Vegas heist film Revolver (2005), which was panned, but won favor with the crime thriller RocknRolla (2008), which featured a game, energetic cast and brought American attention to rising stars Gerard Butler and Tom Hardy.
The next year saw the release of Sherlock Holmes (2009), starring Robert Downey Jr. in the title role and Jude Law as his cohort Dr. Watson. The film received mostly good reviews but, more important for Ritchie's career, was a solid blockbuster hit that grossed more than $520 million dollars worldwide and spawned a sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). Ritchie is tentatively scheduled to direct an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
Ritchie has two sons with Madonna: Rocco, born in 2000, and an adopted son, David, born in 2005. In late 2008, the couple confirmed reports that they were splitting up, and agreed to a divorce settlement that was finalized in December of that year. In September 2011, Ritchie's girlfriend, model Jacqui Ainsley, gave birth to a son, Rafael, and in July 2012 the couple announced they were expecting their second child.- Producer
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David Leslie Johnson was raised in Mansfield, Ohio. He developed an early interest in storytelling and began writing plays in the second grade. He attended The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography and Cinema.
Not long after, he found himself back in his hometown working as a production assistant on The Shawshank Redemption, which was filmed on location at the historic Mansfield Reformatory, where Johnson's great-grandfather had been a prison guard. He spent the next five years as assistant to Frank Darabont, the film's Academy Award-nominated director and writer.- Producer
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- Leonard Wibberley was born on 9 April 1915 in Dublin, Ireland. He was a writer, known for Mister Peepers (1952), The Mouse on the Moon (1963) and The Mouse That Roared (1959). He was married to Olga Morton-Gittens and Hazel Holton. He died on 22 November 1983 in Santa Monica, California, USA.
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David Newman was born on 4 February 1937 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Superman (1978) and What's Up, Doc? (1972). He was married to Leslie Newman. He died on 27 June 2003 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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Robert Douglas Benton is an American screenwriter and filmmaker from Waxahachie, Texas who is known for screenwriting Bonnie & Clyde, Kramer vs. Kramer and Superman. He won two Academy Awards for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer. He directed other feature films including Twilight, Bad Company and Nobody's Fool. He is married to Sallie Rendig since 1964.- Writer
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Writer, director, producer, actor. Born in Los Angeles, California, USA, and raised in the seaport town of San Pedro. Got his start acting and writing for legendary exploitation director/producer Roger Corman. Came into his own during the 1970s when he was regarded as one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood. Began directing with mixed success in 1982. One of the best script doctors in Hollywood, he contributed crucial scenes to such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972).- Thomas Berger was born on 20 July 1924 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He was a writer, known for Little Big Man (1970), Meeting Evil (2012) and Neighbors (1981). He was married to Jeanne Redpath Berger. He died on 13 July 2014 in Nyack, New York, USA.
- Calder Willingham was born on 23 December 1922 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He was a writer, known for The Graduate (1967), Paths of Glory (1957) and Little Big Man (1970). He died on 21 February 1995 in Laconia, New Hampshire, USA.
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Ben Ripley grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. A cum laude graduate of Stanford University and an honors graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, he sold his first screenplay to Fox in 2002. Since then he has worked steadily in the genres of horror, thriller and science fiction. His credits include Species III and Species: The Awakening. He developed Source Code from an original idea, and the film marks his first theatrically released project.- Writer
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Kevin Willmott wrote and directed the critically acclaimed feature film C.S.A: Confederate States Of America, about America, had the South won the Civil War. After its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, IFC Films purchased the film for domestic theatrical distribution. CSA was released theatrically in the U.S. by IFC and was distributed in several foreign countries.
The Only Good Indian, 2009, starring Wes Studi (Avatar, Last of the Mohicans), J. Kenneth Campbell (Bulworth, Yulee's Gold) and newcomer Winter Fox Frank, premiered at The Sundance Film Festival. The Only Good Indian was written and produced by Thomas L. Carmody. PorchLight Entertainment has secured sales rights for foreign distribution. Domestically, the film is currently being seen on the Encore and Movieplex television networks, and can be streamed online at Netflix.
The Battle for Bunker Hill, 2008, starring NYPD Blue's James McDaniel, Saeed Jaffrey (Gandhi), Laura Kirk (Lisa Picard is Famous), Kevin Geer (American Gangster) and Blake Robbins (Oz, The Office). Willmott is producer and director of Bunker Hill, from a script he wrote with Greg Hurd.
Ninth Street, an independent feature film starring Martin Sheen and Isaac Hayes, was written, produced and co-directed by Willmott. He also played the role of "Huddie" one of the films main characters. Ninth Street was released by Ideal.
For television, Willmott co-wrote with Mitch Brian House Of Getty and The 70's, both mini-series for NBC. THE 70's aired on ABC in May of 2000. In 2005, he produced High-Tech Lincoln, a special which premiered on The History Channel.
As a screenwriter, Willmott co-wrote Shields Green And The Gospel Of John Brown with Mitch Brian. The script was purchased by Chris Columbus' 1492 Productions for 20th Century Fox. He has also co-wrote Civilized Tribes for producer Robert Lawrence and 20th Century Fox. Producer and director Oliver Stone hired him to co-write Little Brown Brothers, about the Philippine Insurrection and to adapt the book Marching To Valhalla by Michael Blake. Willmott also adapted The Watsons Go To Birmingham for CBS, Columbia Tri-Star and Executive Producer Whoopi Goldberg. Willmott recently adapted and directed a stage version of The Watsons Go To Birmingham in New York and at Kansas City's Coterie Theater.
The play T-Money And Wolf, written with Ric Averill, dealing with the holocaust and contemporary gang violence, was selected as part of the New Vision/New Voices series produced by the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The play is published by Dramatic Publishing.
Willmott directed the premiere performances of Now Let Me Fly, a new play by Marcia Cebulska commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision to segregate public schools. The performances featured actors James McDaniel (NYPD Blue), Roger Aaron Brown (The District) and Yolanda King, and musical performers Queen Bey and Kelley Hunt.
Willmott grew up in Junction City, Kansas and attended Marymount College receiving his BA in Drama. After graduation, he returned home, working as a peace and civil rights activist, fighting for the rights of the poor, creating two Catholic Worker shelters for the homeless and forcing the integration of several long standing segregated institutions. He attended graduate studies at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, receiving several writing awards and his M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing.
Willmott is an Associate Professor in the Film Studies Department of the University of Kansas.- Director
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Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a schoolteacher. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), a ten-minute film. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983) which won a student Academy Award. In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, She's Gotta Have It (1986), a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for $175,000, and earned $7 million at the box office, which launched his career and allowed him to found his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. His next movie was School Daze (1988), which was set at a historically black school, focused mostly on the conflict between the school and the Fraternities, of which he was a strong critic, portraying them as materialistic, irresponsible, and uncaring. With his School Daze (1988) profits, Lee went on to make his landmark film, Do the Right Thing (1989), a movie based specifically his own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The movie portrayed the racial tensions that emerge in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood on one very hot day. The movie garnered Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay, for Danny Aiello for supporting actor, and sparked a debate on racial relations. Lee went on to produce and direct the jazz biopic Mo' Better Blues (1990), the first of many Spike Lee films to feature Denzel Washington, including the biography of Malcolm X (1992), in which Washington portrayed the civil rights leader. The movie was a success, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Washington. The pair would work together again on He Got Game (1998), an excursion into the collegiate world showing the darker side of college athletic recruiting, as well as the 2006 film Inside Man (2006). Spike Lee's role as a documentarian has expanded over the years, highlighted by his participation in Lumière and Company (1995), the Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls (1997), to his Peabody Award-winning biographical adaptation of Black Panther leader in A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), through his 2005 Emmy Award-winning examination of post-Katrina New Orleans in When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) and its follow-up five years later If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise (2010). Through his production company 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks, Lee continues to create and direct both independent films and projects for major studios, as well as working on story development, creating an internship program for aspiring filmmakers, releasing music, and community outreach and support. He is married to Tonya Lewis Lee, and they have two sons, Satchel and Jackson.- Writer
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French director François Truffaut began to assiduously go to the movies at age seven. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He left school at 14 and started working. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped the delinquent Truffaut and also when he was put in jail because he deserted the army. In 1953 Truffaut published his first movie critiques in "Les Cahiers du Cinema." In this magazine Truffaut, and some of his friends as passionate as he was, became defenders of what they call the "author policy". In 1954, as a test, Truffaut directed his first short film. Two years afterwords he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects.
The year 1957 was an important one for him: he married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor, and founded his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse; named after Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952). He also directed The Mischief Makers (1957), considered the real first step of his cinematographic work. His other big year was 1959: the huge success of his first full-length film, The 400 Blows (1959), was the beginning of the New Wave, a new way of making movies in France. This was also the year his first daughter, Laura Truffaut, was born.
From 1959 until his death, François Truffaut's life and films are mixed up. Let's only note he had two other daughters Eva Truffaut (b. 1961) and Josephine (b. 1982, with French actress Fanny Ardant). Truffaut was the most popular and successful French film director ever. His main themes were passion, women, childhood and faithfulness.- Writer
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Richard Condon was born on 18 March 1915 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Prizzi's Honor (1985), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004). He was married to Evelyn Hunt. He died on 9 April 1996 in Dallas, Texas, USA.- Writer
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George Axelrod was born on 9 June 1922 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and The Seven Year Itch (1955). He was married to Joan Axelrod and Gloria Washburn. He died on 21 June 2003 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Daniel Pyne is known for Where's Marlowe? (1998), The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and Fracture (2007).- Producer
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James Francis Cameron was born on August 16, 1954 in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada. He moved to the United States in 1971. The son of an engineer, he majored in physics at California State University before switching to English, and eventually dropping out. He then drove a truck to support his screenwriting ambition. He landed his first professional film job as art director, miniature-set builder, and process-projection supervisor on Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and had his first experience as a director with a two week stint on Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) before being fired.
He then wrote and directed The Terminator (1984), a futuristic action-thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton. It was a low budget independent film, but Cameron's superb, dynamic direction made it a surprise mainstream success and it is now regarded as one of the most iconic pictures of the 1980s. After this came a string of successful, bigger budget science-fiction action films such as Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). In 1990, Cameron formed his own production company, Lightstorm Entertainment. In 1997, he wrote and directed Titanic (1997), a romance epic about two young lovers from different social classes who meet on board the famous ship. The movie went on to break all box office records and earned eleven Academy Awards. It became the highest grossing movie of all time until 12 years later, Avatar (2009), which invented and pioneered 3D film technology, and it went on to beat "Titanic", and became the first film to cost two billion dollars until 2019 when Marvel took the record.
James Cameron is now one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. He was formerly married to producer Gale Anne Hurd, who produced several of his films. In 2000, he married actress Suzy Amis, who appeared in Titanic, and they have three children.- Writer
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Jay Cocks was born on 1 December 1944 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a writer, known for Silence (2016), Strange Days (1995) and Gangs of New York (2002). He was previously married to Verna Bloom.- Producer
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J.H. Wyman was born in Oakland, California, USA. He is a producer and director, known for Fringe (2008), Almost Human (2013) and Debris (2021).- Writer
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Ernest Tidyman was born on 1 January 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The French Connection (1971), High Plains Drifter (1973) and Shaft (2019). He was married to Chris Clark and Susan Gould. He died on 14 July 1984 in London, England, UK.- Writer
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Robin Moore was born on 31 October 1925 in Concord, Massachusetts, USA. He was a writer, known for The French Connection (1971), Caddyshack (1980) and Inchon (1981). He was married to Helen Moore and Mary Olga. He died on 21 February 2008 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, USA.- Actor
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Anatoli Nikiforov is known for Russian Ark (2002), Geslo: The Disappeared Expedition (2017) and Khram (1987).- Director
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Svetlana Proskurina was born on 27 May 1948 in Krivets, Novgorod Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR [now Russia]. She is a director and writer, known for Remote Access (2004), Truce (2010) and Sunday (2019). She was previously married to Viktor Proskurin.- Director
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He was born with a disability because of an anatomic defect of his leg, in 1951 in Podorvikha village in Siberian Russia. His father was a Red Army veteran of WW2. One of most important contemporary filmmakers, Sokurov worked extensively in television and later graduated from the prestigious film school, VGIK, in 1979. His films often created tensions with the Soviet authorities but he received great support from such outstanding film masters as Andrei Tarkovsky. Particularly, after the collapse of the regime, Sokurov's films started earning him numerous awards around the world. While most known for his feature films, Sokurov has directed over 20 interesting documentaries. His 2002 sensational "Russian Ark" is a historic achievement that will be watched and talked about by many generations.
Sokurov has collected a number of awards at Berlin, Cannes, Moscow, Toronto, Locarno and European Film Awards. He lives and works in Russia.- Director
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Roman Polanski is a Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few truly international filmmakers. Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933.
His parents returned to Poland from France in 1936, three years before World War II began. On Germany's invasion in 1939, as a family of mostly Jewish heritage, they were all sent to the Krakow ghetto. His parents were then captured and sent to two different concentration camps: His father to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, where he survived the war, and his mother to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Roman witnessed his father's capture and then, at only 7, managed to escape the ghetto and survive the war, at first wandering through the Polish countryside and pretending to be a Roman-Catholic kid visiting his relatives. Although this saved his life, he was severely mistreated suffering nearly fatal beating which left him with a fractured skull.
Local people usually ignored the cinemas where German films were shown, but Polanski seemed little concerned by the propaganda and often went to the movies. As the war progressed, Poland became increasingly war-torn and he lived his life as a tramp, hiding in barns and forests, eating whatever he could steal or find. Still under 12 years old, he encountered some Nazi soldiers who forced him to hold targets while they shot at them. At the war's end in 1945, he reunited with his father who sent him to a technical school, but young Polanski seemed to have already chosen another career. In the 1950s, he took up acting, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1955) before studying at the Lodz Film School. His early shorts such as Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), Le gros et le maigre (1961) and Mammals (1962), showed his taste for black humor and interest in bizarre human relationships. His feature debut, Knife in the Water (1962), was one of the first Polish post-war films not associated with the war theme. It was also the first movie from Poland to get an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Though already a major Polish filmmaker, Polanski chose to leave the country and headed to France. While down-and-out in Paris, he befriended young scriptwriter, Gérard Brach, who eventually became his long-time collaborator. The next two films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), made in England and co-written by Brach, won respectively Silver and then Golden Bear awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1968, Polanski went to Hollywood, where he made the psychological thriller, Rosemary's Baby (1968). However, after the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson Family in 1969, the director decided to return to Europe. In 1974, he again made a US release - it was Chinatown (1974).
It seemed the beginning of a promising Hollywood career, but after his conviction for the sodomy of a 13-year old girl, Polanski fled from he USA to avoid prison. After Tess (1979), which was awarded several Oscars and Cesars, his works in 1980s and 1990s became intermittent and rarely approached the caliber of his earlier films. It wasn't until The Pianist (2002) that Polanski came back to full form. For that movie, he won nearly all the most important film awards, including the Oscar for Best Director, Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, the BAFTA and Cesar Award.
He still likes to act in the films of other directors, sometimes with interesting results, as in A Pure Formality (1994).- John Fante was born on 8 April 1909 in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He was a writer, known for Full of Life (1956), The Golden Fleecing (1940) and My Man and I (1952). He was married to Joyce H. Smart. He died on 8 May 1983 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Director, screenwriter and producer, one of the most distinctive post-revolution Czech directors. He debuted with the film Whisper (Septej, 1996) followed by Loners (Samotari, 2000), which was produced by his own company Lucky Man Films. Next came the comedy One Hand Can't Clap (Jedna ruka netleska, 2003) and the film Grandhotel (2006), which premiered at the Berlinale film festival. His film In the Shadow (Ve stinu, 2012) took all of the main awards at the Czech Film Critics' Awards and at the annual Czech Lion Awards, and was the Czech Republic's nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2013, David Ondricek received Variety magazine's 10 Directors to Watch award, which recognizes the most noteworthy directors of the previous year. David Ondricek worked as an executive producer on the new film by Petr Zelenka Lost in Munich, and Anthropoid by Sean Ellis. In 2018 he directed two-part film Dukla 61, and earned a nomination, together with Ben Stiller and Stephen Frears, for Golden Nymph at Monte-Carlo TV Festival. His latest feature film Zátopek had it's premiere in August 2021 as an opening film of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival where it won the Audience Awards. The success at the festival was followed by an amazing audience response once it hit the cinemas. Zátopek then won several awards in many categories, and was sent by the Czech Republic to compete for the Academy Awards.- Actor
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Jirí Strach was born on 29 September 1973 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He is an actor and director, known for Oldies But Goldies (2012), The Cage (2019) and Docent (2023).- Actor
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Milan Lasica was born on 3 February 1940 in Zvolen, Slovenský stát [now Slovakia]. He was an actor and director, known for Hostage (2014), Frankenstein's Aunt (1987) and Modrá ruza (1996). He was married to Magda Vásáryová and Zora Kolínska. He died on 18 July 2021 in Bratislava, Slovakia.- Dominik Dán was born on 18 May 1962 in Trencín, Czechoslovakia [now Slovakia]. Dominik is a writer, known for Rudý kapitán (2016) and Kriminálka Staré Mesto (2010).
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Zuzana Fialová was born on 17 May 1974 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia [now Slovakia]. She is an actress and writer, known for Kriminálka Staré Mesto (2010), Ordinácia v ruzovej záhrade (2007) and Aftermath (2012).- Writer
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Alex Koenigsmark was born on 27 May 1944 in Plzen, Protektorát Cechy a Morava [now Czech Republic]. He was a writer, known for A Prominent Patient (2016), Whichever Way the Ball Bounces (1974) and V rannej hmle (1991). He died on 23 January 2013 in Prague, Czech Republic.- Writer
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James L. Brooks was born on 9 May 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Broadcast News (1987), As Good as It Gets (1997) and Terms of Endearment (1983). He was previously married to Holly Holmberg Brooks and Marianne Catherine Morrissey.- Writer
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Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, at Laleham in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the third of four children. His brother Julian Huxley was a biologist known for his theories of evolution. His grandfather, named Thomas Henry Huxley, was a naturalist known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His father, named Leonard Huxley, was a writer. His mother, named Julia Arnold, was related to poet Matthew Arnold. Young Huxley graduated from the Hillside School, where his mother was supervisor. He was traumatized by the death of both his mother and sister in 1908. He then followed in the footsteps of his brothers by going to Eaton and then to Balliol College, Oxford University. At age 16 he contracted keratitis which left him practically blind for two years, and disqualified him from service in WWI. Upon his recovery he graduated with a First in English Literature, he taught English literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Huxley's literary life began in 1915, when he joined the circle of Lady Ottoline Morell at Garsington Manor. There he met Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield. He also met and fell in love with a Belgian refugee Maria Nys. In 1919 she became his wife, and they had a son, named Matthew. In 1920 Huxley began writing for Conde Nast at House and Garden to support his family, and later contributed to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. He soon established himself as a successful writer and social satirist with his novels: Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925, and Point Counter Point (1928). The latter novel brought him international fame and was lated included in the Modern Library list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century.
His best known novel 'Brave New World' (1932) was actually preceded by "We" (written in 1920, published in English in 1924), which was the very first anti-Utopian novel in literature, written by Yevgeni Zamyatin. Both novels describe the futurist idea of One World State, where totalitarian government manipulates people's lives by eliminating individual freedom, family, art, literature, religions and cultural diversity. Totalitarian government controls humans from their conception and regulates assisted reproduction, as well, as education, indoctrination, and also enforces the medical drug use for pacification. Huxley himself called it a "negative utopia" which was written as a parody on 'Men Like Gods' (1923), a Utopian novel by H.G. Wells, which was also preceded by writings of Yevgeni Zamyatin.
In 1937 Huxley moved to Hollywood, California, with wife Maria and a life-long friend Gerald Heard. There Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti and became one of his disciples, adopting a blend of eastern philosophical traditions with modernized mysticism. He also joined the circle of 'Swami Prabhavadanta' and became influenced by Vedanta and meditating. Huxley dramatically updated his lifestyle, become a vegetarian and practiced yoga. He also experimented with non-addictive psychedelic drugs and wrote about these experiences extensively. He even reported that his eyesight had improved for the first time in over 25 years. After the Second World War Huxley applied for the United States citizenship, but was denied for refusing to take up arms to defend the country. He remained a British Citizen for his entire life. Later in the 1950's he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the British government.
In 1955 his wife, Maria, died of breast cancer. A year later Huxley became married to Laura Archera Huxley who was herself a writer and also became his biographer. In 1960 Huxley was diagnosed with throat cancer. In his last Utopian novel 'Island' (1962), Huxley re-visited and updated his basic ideas from the 'Brave New World' and from his other novels. In 'Island' Huxley summarized his views on the modern world and society, including his position on medical drug use and his political stands on democracy, modernity, ecology and pacifism. The novel served as an inspiration for the 1960's psychedelic culture and was also incorporated in ideology of the New Age Movement. Huxley's opposition to the rigid social organization and self-destructive nature of modern class society and inevitable fatality of the modern world was paralleled by that of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Aldous Huxley volunteered in experimental drug use in research carried by his friend Dr. Humphry Osmond since 1953. Huxley repeatedly experimented with mescaline injections and described his observations in 'The Doors of Perception' (1954) and 'Heaven and Hell' (1956). His own health deteriorated dramatically in the early 1960's. Huxley spent his last days bedridden, almost blind, and unable to speak. On his deathbed he made a written request to his wife for an intramuscular injection of 100 mg of LSD. Laura Archera Huxley followed his instruction, and Huxley died peacefully in a few hours after the injection. That was on November 22, 1963, in his home in California. His death was obscured by the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day.
Huxley wrote the original screenplay for Disney's animated 'Alise in Wonderland' (1951), and co-wrote the screenplays for 'Pride and Prejudice' (1940) and 'Jane Eyre' (1944). Many of his novels were adapted for film or television: two TV productions of 'Brave New World' (in 1980 and in 1998), a BBC production of 'Point counterpoint' (1968) and 'The Devils' (1971) starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by Ken Russell, as well as other film and TV adaptations.- Actor
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Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, France, to Édith (Arnold) and Fabien Delon. His father was of French and Corsican Italian descent, and his mother was of French and German ancestry. His parents divorced early on, and Delon had a stormy childhood, being frequently expelled from school.
In 1953/1954 he served with the French Marines in Indochina. In the mid-'50s he worked at various odd jobs including waiter, salesman and porter in Les Halles market. He decided to try an acting career and in 1957 made his film debut in Yves Allégret's Quand la femme s'en mêle (1957). He declined an offer of a contract from producer David O. Selznick, and in 1960 he received international recognition for his role in Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1960). In 1961 he appeared on the stage in "'Tis a Pity She's a Whore", directed by Visconti, in Paris. In 1964 he formed his own production company, Delbeau Productions, and he produced a short film directed by Guy Gilles. In 1968 he found himself involved in murder, drug and sex scandal that indirectly implicated major politicians and show-business personalities, but he was eventually cleared of all charges. In the late 1960s he formed another company. Adel Film, and the next year he began producing features. In 1981 he directed his first film, To Kill a Cop (1981).
Delon was a sensation early in his career; he came to embody the young, energetic, often morally corrupted man. With his breathtaking good looks he was also destined to play tender lovers and romantic heroes, and he was a French embodiment of the type created in America by James Dean. His first outstanding success came with the role of the parasite Tom Ripley in 'Rene Clement''s sun-drenched thriller Purple Noon (1960). Delon presented a psychological portrait of a murderous young cynic who attempts to take on the identity of his victim. A totally different role was offered to him by Visconti in Rocco and His Brothers (1960). In this film Delon plays the devoted Rocco, who accepts the greatest sacrifices to save his shiftless brother Simon.
After several other films in Italy, Delon returned to the criminal genre with Jean Gabin in Any Number Can Win (1963). This work, a classic example of the genre, was distinguished not only by a soundly worked-out screenplay, but also by the careful production and the excellent performances of both Delon and Gabin. It was only in the late 1960s that the sleek and lethal Delon came to epitomize the calm, psychopathic hoodlum, staring into the camera like a cat assessing a mouse. His tough, ruthless side was first used to real effect by Jean-Pierre Melville in The Samurai (1967). In 1970 he had a huge success in the bloodstained Borsalino (1970)--which he also produced--playing a small-time gangster in the 1930s who, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, becomes king of the Marseilles underworld. Delon later won critical acclaim for his roles, against type, in Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein (1976) in which he played (brilliantly) the icily sinister title role, and the art-movie Swann in Love (1984). He has an older son Anthony Delon (who has also acted in a number of movies) from his first marriage to Nathalie Delon, and has a young son and daughter, Alain-Fabien and Anouchka with Rosalie.- Writer
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"If they move", commands stern-eyed William Holden, "kill 'em". So begins The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's bloody, high-body-count eulogy to the mythologized Old West. "Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle", observed critic Pauline Kael. That exploding bottle also christened the director with the nickname that would forever define his films and reputation: "Bloody Sam".
David Samuel Peckinpah was born and grew up in Fresno, California, when it was still a sleepy town. Young Sam was a loner. The child's greatest influence was grandfather Denver Church, a judge, congressman and one of the best shots in the Sierra Nevadas. Sam served in the US Marine Corps during World War II but - to his disappointment - did not see combat. Upon returning to the US he enrolled in Fresno State College, graduating in 1948 with a B.A. in Drama. He married Marie Selland in Las Vegas in 1947 and they moved to Los Angeles, where he enrolled in the graduate Theater Department of the University of Southern California the next year. He eventually took his Masters in 1952.
After drifting through several jobs -- including a stint as a floor-sweeper on The Liberace Show (1952) -- Sam got a job as Dialogue Director on Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) for director Don Siegel. He worked for Siegel on several films, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which Sam played Charlie Buckholtz, the town meter reader. Peckinpah eventually became a scriptwriter for such TV programs as Gunsmoke (1955) and The Rifleman (1958) (which he created as an episode of Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre (1956) titled "The Sharpshooter' in 1958). In 1961, as his marriage to Selland was coming to an end, he directed his first feature film, a western titled The Deadly Companions (1961) starring \Brian Keith and Maureen O'Hara. However, it was with his second feature, Ride the High Country (1962), that Peckinpah really began to establish his reputation. Featuring Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott (in his final screen performance), its story about two aging gunfighters anticipated several of the themes Peckinpah would explore in future films, including the controversial "The Wild Bunch". Following "Ride the High Country" he was hired by producer Jerry Bresler to direct Major Dundee (1965), a cavalry-vs.-Indians western starring Charlton Heston. It turned out to be a film that brought to light Peckinpah's volatile reputation. During hot, on-location work in Mexico, his abrasive manner, exacerbated by booze and marijuana, provoked usually even-keeled Heston to threaten to run him through with a cavalry saber. However, when the studio later considered replacing Peckinpah, it was Heston who came to Sam's defense, going so far as to offer to return his salary to help offset any overages. Ironically, the studio accepted and Heston wound up doing the film for free.
Post-production conflicts led to Sam engaging in a bitter and ultimately losing battle with Bresler and Columbia Pictures over the final cut and, as a result, the disjointed effort fizzled at the box office. It was during this period that Peckinpah met and married his second wife, Mexican actress Begoña Palacios. However, the reputation he earned because of the conflicts on "Major Dundee" contributed to Peckinpah being replaced as director on his next film, the Steve McQueen film The Cincinnati Kid (1965), by Norman Jewison.
His second marriage now failing, Peckinpah did not get another feature project for two years. However, he did direct a powerful adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's 'Noon Wine" for Noon Wine (1966)). This, in turn, helped relaunch his feature career. He was hired by Warner Bros. to direct the film for which he is, justifiably, best remembered. The success of "The Wild Bunch" rejuvenated his career and propelled him through highs and lows in the 1970s. Between 1970-1978 he directed The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Straw Dogs (1971), Junior Bonner (1972), The Getaway (1972), Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), The Killer Elite (1975), Cross of Iron (1977) and Convoy (1978). Throughout this period controversy followed him. He provoked more rancor over his use of violence in "Straw Dogs", introduced Ali MacGraw to Steve McQueen in "The Getaway", fought with MGM's chief James T. Aubrey over his vision for "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" that included the casting of Bob Dylan in an unscripted role as a character called "Alias." His last solid effort was the WW II anti-war epic "Cross of Iron", about a German unit fighting on the Russian front, with Maximilian Schell and James Coburn, bringing the picture in successfully despite severe financial problems.
Peckinpah lived life to its fullest. He drank hard and abused drugs, producers and collaborators. At the end of his life he was considering a number of projects including the Stephen King-scripted "The Shotgunners". He was returning from Mexico in December 1984 when he died from heart failure in a hospital in Inglewood, California, at age 59. At a standing-room-only gathering that held at the Directors Guild the following month, Coburn remembered the director as a man "who pushed me over the abyss and then jumped in after me. He took me on some great adventures". To which Robert Culp added that what is surprising is not that Sam only made fourteen pictures, but that given the way he went about it, he managed to make any at all.- Additional Crew
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Hayden Herrera is known for Frida (2002), Frida (2024) and The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo (2005).- Clancy Sigal was born on 6 September 1926 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer, known for Frida (2002), Maria/Callas and In Love and War (1996). He was married to Janice Tidwell. He died on 16 July 2017 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Diane Lake was born in Sioux City, Iowa. Her father was a salesman, and the family moved a lot during her youth, but always in Iowa. She obtained her B.F.A. at Drake University and an M.A. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has been a working screenwriter since 1993 when she sold her first story idea. Since then she has been commissioned to write films for Columbia, Disney, Miramax, Paramount, NBC and numerous independent producers. Diane's film, Frida, opened the Venice Film Festival in 2002, was named one of the 10 Best Films of 2002 by numerous top 10 lists, including the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. It was nominated for 6 Academy Awards in 2003.
Diane's short fiction has appeared in the Grey Sparrow Review, and her book "The Screenwriter's Path" was published by Routledge in 2016. - Writer
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Gregory Nava was born on 10 April 1949 in San Diego, California, USA. He is a writer and director, known for Selena (1997).- Writer
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Anna Thomas was born on 12 July 1948 in Stuttgart, Germany. She is a writer and producer, known for The Haunting of M. (1979), El Norte (1983) and Frida (2002).- Director
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Vladimír Cech was born on 25 September 1914 in Ceské Budejovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now Czech Republic]. He was a director and writer, known for Klíc (1971), The Black Battalion (1958) and Expres z Norimberka (1954). He died on 24 December 1992 in Prague, Czech Republic.- Writer
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Jaroslav Dietl was born on 22 May 1929 in Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia [now Croatia]. He was a writer, known for Bylo ctvrt a bude pul (1968), Druhý tah pescem (1985) and Muz na radnici (1976). He was married to Magdalena Dietlová. He died on 29 June 1985 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic].- Director
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Jaromír Vasta was born on 21 July 1931 in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He was a director and writer, known for Bylo ctvrt a bude pul (1968), Písen pro Rudolfa III. (1967) and Dva z jednoho mesta (1983). He died on 29 May 1996 in Prague, Czech Republic.- Additional Crew
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Milos Broz was born on 27 April 1920 in Czechoslovakia. He was a producer, known for Starci na chmelu (1964), The Shop on Main Street (1965) and Prague Nights (1969). He died on 5 April 1980 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic].- Jirí Karásek was born on 22 January 1907 in Prague, Cechy, Austria-Hungary [now Czech Republic]. He was a writer, known for Nahá pastýrka (1966), Klec pro dva (1968) and Jeste svatba nebyla (1954). He died on 9 May 1971 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic].
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Jaroslav Mach was born on 24 April 1921 in Zahnasovice u Holesova, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He was a director and writer, known for Nahá pastýrka (1966), Klec pro dva (1968) and Jeste svatba nebyla (1954). He died on 11 January 1972 in Prague, Czechoslovakia.- Director
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Václav Sklenár was born on 4 November 1928 in Brandýsek (near from Kladno), Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He is a director and writer, known for Zpivali jsme Arizonu (1964), Muz na úteku (1969) and Kotrmelec (1961).- Ludek Stanek is known for A Game Without Rules (1967), One of Them Is the Murderer (1971) and Muz na úteku (1969).
- Russian-born Jewish advocate, author, and Zionist leader. Jabotinsky began a career as a journalist, but following the Russian pogroms began to devote himself to the cause of a Jewish homeland. He founded the Jewish Legion of the British Army during World War I, and led the struggle between the wars to gain acceptance of a Jewish right to the lands of Palestine. He also struggled unsuccessfully to arrange the exodus of the entire Jewish population of Poland in 1936, in view of his belief that annihilation awaited Jews there. He wrote numerous books, including a novel about Samson which served as the source for the Cecil B. DeMille movie Samson and Delilah (1949). Jabotinsky, who had changed his first name from Vladimir to Ze'ev in 1903, died of a heart attack in New York City in 1940. Although initially refused burial in Palestine and, later, the state of Israel, his body was reinterred in Jerusalem in 1964.
- Menachem Begin was an Israeli politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of Israel. Before the creation of the state of Israel, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944, against the British mandatory government, which was opposed by the Jewish Agency. As head of the Irgun, he targeted the British in Palestine. Later, the Irgun fought the Arabs during the 1947-48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and its chief Begin was also noted as "leader of the notorious terrorist organization" by the British government and banned from entering the United Kingdom.
- Amos Oz was born on 4 May 1939 in Jerusalem, Palestine [now Israel]. He was a writer, known for A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015), Black Box (1993) and The Little Traitor (2007). He was married to Nily Zuckerman. He died on 28 December 2018 in Tel Aviv, Israel.
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Anderson was born in 1970. He was one of the first of the "video store" generation of film-makers. His father was the first man on his block to own a V.C.R., and from a very early age Anderson had an infinite number of titles available to him. While film-makers like Spielberg cut their teeth making 8 mm films, Anderson cut his teeth shooting films on video and editing them from V.C.R. to V.C.R.
Part of Anderson's artistic D.N.A. comes from his father, who hosted a late night horror show in Cleveland. His father knew a number of oddball celebrities such as Robert Ridgely, an actor who often appeared in Mel Brooks' films and would later play "The Colonel" in Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997). Anderson was also very much shaped by growing up in "The Valley", specifically the suburban San Fernando Valley of greater Los Angeles. The Valley may have been immortalized in the 1980s for its mall-hopping "Valley Girls", but for Anderson it was a slightly seedy part of suburban America. You were close to Hollywood, yet you weren't there. Would-bes and burn-outs populated the area. Anderson's experiences growing up in "The Valley" have no doubt shaped his artistic self, especially since three of his four theatrical features are set in the Valley.
Anderson got into film-making at a young age. His most significant amateur film was The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), a sort of mock-documentary a la This Is Spinal Tap (1984), about a once-great pornography star named Dirk Diggler. After enrolling in N.Y.U.'s film program for two days, Anderson got his tuition back and made his own short film, Cigarettes & Coffee (1993). He also worked as a production assistant on numerous commercials and music videos before he got the chance to make his first feature, something he liked to call Sydney, but would later become known to the public as Hard Eight (1996). The film was developed and financed through The Sundance Lab, not unlike Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). Anderson cast three actors whom he would continue working with in the future: Altman veteran Philip Baker Hall, the husky and lovable John C. Reilly and, in a small part, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who so far has been featured in all four of Anderson's films. The film deals with a guardian angel type (played by Hall) who takes down-on-his-luck Reilly under his wing. The deliberately paced film featured a number of Anderson trademarks: wonderful use of source light, long takes and top-notch acting. Yet the film was reedited (and retitled) by Rysher Entertainment against Anderson's wishes. It was admired by critics, but didn't catch on at the box office. Still, it was enough for Anderson to eventually get his next movie financed. "Boogie Nights" was, in a sense, a remake of "The Dirk Diggler Story", but Anderson threw away the satirical approach and instead painted a broad canvas about a makeshift family of pornographers. The film was often joyous in its look at the 1970s and the days when pornography was still shot on film, still shown in theatres, and its actors could at least delude themselves into believing that they were movie stars. Yet "Boogie Nights" did not flinch at the dark side, showing a murder and suicide, literally in one (almost) uninterrupted shot, and also showing the lives of these people deteriorate, while also showing how their lives recovered.
Anderson not only worked with Hall, Reilly and Hoffman again, he also worked with Julianne Moore, Melora Walters, William H. Macy and Luis Guzmán. Collectively, Anderson had something that was rare in U.S. cinema: a stock company of top-notch actors. Aside from the above mentioned, Anderson also drew terrific performances from Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg, two actors whose careers were not exactly going full-blast at the time of "Boogie Nights", but who found themselves to be that much more employable afterwards.
The success of "Boogie Nights" gave Anderson the chance to really go for broke in Magnolia (1999), a massive mosaic that could dwarf Altman's Nashville (1975) in its number of characters.
Anderson was awarded a "Best Director" award at Cannes for Punch-Drunk Love (2002).- Writer
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William Monahan was born on 3 November 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for The Departed (2006), London Boulevard (2010) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005).- Director
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Alan Mak Siu Fai was born in Hong Kong in 1965. In 1986, he studied in the School of Drama at the Hong Kong Academy for Performance Arts. Upon graduation in 1990, he started his movie career.
Mak made his directorial debut in 1997, with his first film being Nude Fear, which was written and produced by Joe Ma. After that, Mak had directed more films such as Rave Fever (1999), A War Named Desire (2000), Final Romance (2001), and Stolen Love (2001), which would be his first collaboration with writer Felix Chong.
In 2002, Mak and Chong wrote their first script together. It was for the movie Infernal Affairs, which was produced by Mak's directing partner Andrew Lau (Andrew Lau), who also served as cinematographer. Lau and Mak also served as directors for the film, and it would be the first of many collaborations involving the directing duo.
The film starred the four top actors of its year--Andy Lau, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Eric Tsang and Anthony Chau-Sang Wong--along with the year's two top actresses--Kelly Chen and Sammi Cheng.
Infernal Affairs was the number one box-office hit in Hong Kong that year, breaking several box office records alone. Furthermore, the film won many Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Picture, Best Directors (Lau and Mak), Best Screenplay (Mak and co-writer Chong), and Best Supporting Actor (Wong). Infernal Affairs also went on win awards at the 40th Golden Horse Awards and the Golden Bauhinia Awards.
Not only was the film successful worldwide, but it later became the inspiration for Martin Scorsese's 2006 film, The Departed (2006).
In 2003, Lau and Mak had completed the trilogy with the prequel Infernal Affairs II and the sequel/prequel Infernal Affairs III. That same year, Mak received the '2003 Leader of the Year' award in the Sports/Culture/Entertainment category. This honor has made Mak's accomplishment scale new heights.
In 2004, Lau and Mak worked on another blockbuster, Initial D, which was shot in Japan and released in Hong Kong during the summer. Once again, it was also another successful film for Lau and Mak, winning multiple awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards, winning for Best New Performer (Jay Chou), Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Chau-Sang Wong), and Best Visual Effects.
In 2006, Lau, Mak and scriptwriter Felix Chong re-teamed to make the 2005 film, Moonlight in Tokyo. They re-teamed again for the 2006 film Confessions of Pain, once again re-teaming with Infernal Affairs star Tony Leung Chiu-wai.
To this day, along with his partners, Andrew Lau, and Felix Chong, Alan Mak, as a prolific director, continues to make films, that will continue to challenge and appeal a mass audience.- Writer
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Felix Chong was born on 1 January 1968 in Hong Kong, British Crown Colony. He is a writer and director, known for Infernal Affairs (2002), Project Gutenberg (2018) and Overheard (2009).- Writer
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David Ignatius was born on 26 May 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Body of Lies (2008), Quantum Spy and The Director.- Director
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Czech filmmaker Hynek Bocan largely eschewed the conventions of his country's New Wave cinema in favor of making well-crafted, traditional literary adaptations. A graduate of his native Prague's prestigious FAMU in 1961, Bocan started out assisting such filmmakers as Karel Kachyna, Jan Nemec, and Jiri Weiss. In 1969, Bocan was forced by his government to stop the shooting of his third film on political grounds. Banned from making features, Bocan then turned to television. In 1974, the Czech authorities allowed him to return to filmmaking.- Writer of humorous short stories and film scripts. Left Czechoslovakia after the Russian invasion in 1968 and went to live in Switzerland, where he died in 1984. His best known collection of short stories is Gypsova Dama (The Plaster Lady, 1967). His short stories Rodny Kraj (Native Region) was published in Cologne in 1977.
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Mr Krejcik made over 20 films in a career that began in 1947. His best known films include the 1960 WWII drama Higher Principle, the biographical film about the singer Ema Destinova entitled The Divine Ema, as well as a number of comedies.
Jirí Krejcík received the Czech Lion film award for lifetime achievement, as well as a similar prize from the Karlovy Vary film festival. He was also awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit in recognition of his work.- Writer
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Zdenek Mahler was born on 7 December 1928 in Batelov by Jihlava, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He was a writer and actor, known for Amadeus (1984), The Butcher of Prague (2011) and Svatba jako remen (1967). He died on 17 March 2018 in Prague, Czech Republic.- Writer
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Gustav Oplustil was born on 2 August 1926 in Hranice na Morave, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He was a writer and actor, known for Dva muzi hlásí príchod (1975), Tak láska zacíná... (1975) and Bejvávalo (1965). He was married to Jarmila. He died on 21 October 2022 in the Czech Republic.- Writer
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Jirí Krenek was born on 2 June 1933 in Velké Karlovice, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He was a writer, known for Jahody na stéble trávy (1984), Zabitá nedele (1990) and Katerina a jeji deti (1975). He died on 4 December 2008 in Veverská Bítýska, Czech Republic.- Director
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Drahomíra Vihanová was born on 31 July 1930 in Moravský Krumlov, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. She was a director and writer, known for Zpráva o putování studentu Petra a Jakuba (2000), Pevnost (1994) and Zahrada plná plenek (1983). She died on 10 December 2017.- Writer
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Troy Kennedy Martin was born on February 15, 1932 in Rothesay, Isle of Bute, Scotland, UK. He was an accomplished writer, known for The Italian Job (1969), Red Heat (1988) and Kelly's Heroes (1970). He penned two of British television's most groundbreaking series of the 20th century, first with Z Cars (1962), one of the first realistic police dramas, and later Edge of Darkness (1985), a political thriller that was adapted into a film. His screenplay for Ferrari (2023), about the life of Enzo Ferrari, is in production.
He attended Trinity College in Dublin and later resided in London's Notting Hill Gate for 50 years.
He was previously married to actress Diane Aubrey. He died on September 15, 2009 in Ditchling, East Sussex, England, UK.- Writer
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Donna Powers was born in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. She is known for Deep Blue Sea (1999), The Italian Job (2003) and Valentine (2001). She was previously married to Wayne Powers.- Writer
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Wayne Powers (co-writer, producer, director)
Wayne Powers has written features including Paramount's The Italian Job starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron and Edward Norton.
Wayne was writing network TV movies at the age twenty-two. He spent four years on the writing staffs for award-winning network dramas. He then turned to studio features including Warner Brothers' Deep Blue Sea starring Samuel Jackson.
He wrote and executive produced Out Of Order, a Showtime Network limited series starring Felicity Huffman, Eric Stoltz, William Macy and Peter Bogdanovich. Wayne produced a documentary for the Showtime Network that was also featured on the Oprah show (and yes, she is very nice). He just completed his micro-budget independent dark comedy Loves Me, Loves Me Not.- Writer
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Seth Woodbury MacFarlane was born in the small New England town of Kent, Connecticut, where he lived with his mother, Ann Perry (Sager), an admissions office worker, his father, Ronald Milton MacFarlane, a prep school teacher, and his sister, Rachael MacFarlane, now a voice actress and singer. He is of English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry, and descends from Mayflower passengers.
Seth attended and studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and, after he graduated, he was hired by Hanna-Barbera Productions (Now called Cartoon Network Studios) working as an animator and writer on the TV series Johnny Bravo (1997) and Cow and Chicken (1997). He also worked for Walt Disney Animation as a writer on the TV series Jungle Cubs (1996). He created The Life of Larry (1995) which was originally supposed to be used as an in-between on Mad TV (1995). Unfortunately the deal fell through but, a few months later, executives at FOX called him into their offices and gave him $50,000 to create a pilot for what would eventually become Family Guy (1999).
Since Family Guy's debut, MacFarlane has gone on to create two other television shows-American Dad! (2005) and The Cleveland Show (2009). MacFarlane began to establish himself as an actor, voice actor, animator, writer, producer, director, comedian, and singer throughout his career. MacFarlane has also written, directed and starred in Ted (2012) and its sequel Ted 2 (2015), and A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014). He voiced the mouse, Mike, in the animated musical Sing (2016).- Producer
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Alec Sulkin was born on 14 February 1973 in the USA. He is a producer and actor, known for Ted 2 (2015), Family Guy (1999) and Ted (2012).- Producer
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Wellesley Wild was born on 27 April 1972 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for Family Guy (1999), Ted 2 (2015) and A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014).- Writer
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Jan Prusinovský was born on 3 July 1979 in Horovice, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He is a writer and director, known for The Snake Brothers (2015), Nejlepsí je penivá (2005) and The Teacher (2016).- Writer
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Petr Kolecko was born on 28 March 1984 in Broumov, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. He is a writer and producer, known for A Prominent Patient (2016), Most! (2018) and Over Fingers (2019). He has been married to Aneta Vignerová since 14 March 2023. They have one child.- Writer
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Götz Hagmüller is known for Kopfstand (1981).- Actor
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Ernst Josef Lauscher was born in 1947 in Vienna, Austria. He is an actor and director, known for Kopfstand (1981), Zeitgenossen (1983) and Stahlnetz (1958).- Heinrich von Kleist was born on the 18th of October, 1777 in Frankfurt/Oder (Germany) as the son of a priest. His father died when Heinrich was 11 so he had to earn some money early. He managed to go to the High School until 15, but was forced then to join the Prussian army in their war in the west. He climbed up the ranks until he was lieutenant, but quit then in 1799 and studied philosophy, physics, mathematics and political sciences in the town where he was born. After stays at Weimar (where Kleist met Wieland, Goethe and Schiller, other famous writers of his time), he finally entered the Prussian state as a secretary. His writings were no success at all, political life was not satisfying, and his girlfriend was ill, going to die- after all, he decided to go with her. They both met their death together, using a gun on the 21st of November, 1811 (Kleist was, as you can see, only 34). It is rather difficult to describe Kleist's role in German literature. He wrote immortal pieces of literature, such as "Prinz Friedrich von Homburg". But especially this stage play, for which he is best known, was often used as a nationalist piece of propaganda. Kleist does not belong to any literary epoch at all, but stays between the Romantik, the Klassik and the upcoming Realismus. Often underrated, Kleist was a walker between the lines. Seen in this context, his death is nothing but consequent.
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Michael Weller was born on 26 September 1942. He is a producer and writer, known for Hair (1979), Ragtime (1981) and Safe Haven.- Writer
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E.L. Doctorow was born on 6 January 1931 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Daniel (1983), Ragtime (1981) and Wakefield (2016). He was married to Helen Setzer. He died on 21 July 2015 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Director
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Borivoj Zeman was born on 6 March 1912 in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now Czech Republic]. He was a director and writer, known for Fantom Morrisvillu (1966), Mrtvý mezi zivými (1947) and The Proud Princess (1952). He died on 23 December 1991 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic].