"If somebody gave me a hundred feet of film, I made a movie out of it." When George Lucas was attending USC Film School he didn't even need a hundred feet. While still a student, he turned 32 feet of 16 millimeter film into a one-minute animated short that not only won awards at festivals nationwide, but set a new standard for animated films. He's been making motion picture history ever since, creating many of the most popular films in motion picture history, including the phenomenally...

"If somebody gave me a hundred feet of film, I made a movie out of it." When George Lucas was attending USC Film School he didn't even need a hundred feet. While still a student, he turned 32 feet of 16 millimeter film into a one-minute animated short that not only won awards at festivals nationwide, but set a new standard for animated films. He's been making motion picture history ever since, creating many of the most popular films in motion picture history, including the phenomenally...

Greg Marshall is a scientist, inventor, and filmmaker who has dedicated the last 25 years to studying, exploring, and documenting life in the oceans.
 Beginning in 1986, he developed a revolutionary research tool to record images, sound, and data from an animal's perspective. Today that tool is called Crittercam. It has allowed us to see life from the point of view of whales, sharks, seals, turtles, penguins, even lions. He's won two Emmy Awards for the National Geographic television...

"If somebody gave me a hundred feet of film, I made a movie out of it." When George Lucas was attending USC Film School he didn't even need a hundred feet. While still a student, he turned 32 feet of 16 millimeter film into a one-minute animated short that not only won awards at festivals nationwide, but set a new standard for animated films. He's been making motion picture history ever since, creating many of the most popular films in motion picture history, including the phenomenally...

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and sharp-tongued humor. It also introduced a distinctive approach to her favorite subjects: New York City, food, and the baffling ways of men and women in love. She was pregnant with her second child when her...

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and sharp-tongued humor. It also introduced a distinctive approach to her favorite subjects: New York City, food, and the baffling ways of men and women in love. She was pregnant with her second child when her...

Heralded as the most imaginative director and designer working in the performing arts today, Julie Taymor is the creative mastermind behind the spectacular Broadway production of The Lion King. She directed the play, designed the brilliantly colored costumes, wrote additional lyrics and co-designed the show’s ingenious masks and puppets. Active in theater from an early age, she studied folklore and mythology at Oberlin College while pursuing her interests in ritual performance, masks...

The most successful motion picture director of all time, Steven Spielberg first made his name as a master showman of adventure and fantasy, with blockbusters like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET: The Extraterrestrial. He entered a new phase in his career with The Color Purple, turning to literary and historic subjects, including some of the darkest chapters in human history. His wrenching drama of the Holocaust, Schindler's List, has become a landmark...

Hailed as the most influential documentary filmmaker of our times, Ken Burns has produced and directed a series of acclaimed documentaries, employing archival photographs, newsreel footage and evocative music to bring American history to life for millions of television viewers. His eleven-hour series The Civil War held the nation spellbound in 1990. His 18-hour series, Baseball, employed the history of the national pastime, from the 1840's to the present, as a mirror of larger movements in...

Jeremy Irons had already made a name for himself on the London stage when international audiences got their first look at him in the television miniseries Brideshead Revisited. Although Irons made his reputation as a romantic leading man in films such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, he has never shied from unusual or unsympathetic roles. He amazed audiences with his performance in the French language film Swann in Love, and as psychotic identical twins in Dead Ringers. He played a...

The protean musician and impresario Quincy Jones has been dubbed "a master inventor of musical hybrids," shuffling pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African and Brazilian music into unique and extraordinary musical syntheses. He began his career as a young trumpeter with the Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie bands, at the end of the swing era, and has continued to create and thrive in the era of digital technology in music, film and television worlds. He has won international recognition...

David Breashears is an award-winning filmmaker, author, adventurer, and world-class mountaineer. Since 1978, he has combined his skills in climbing and filmmaking to complete more than 40 film projects. In 1983, Breashears transmitted the first live television pictures from the summit of Mount Everest, and in 1985 became the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest twice. In the spring of 1996, Breashears co-directed and co-produced the first IMAX film shot on Mount Everest....

Ron Howard is an award-winning actor, film director, and producer. He came to prominence as a child actor, playing Opie Taylor in the sitcom "The Andy Griffith Show" for eight years, and later as the teenager Richie Cunningham in the sitcom "Happy Days" for six years. Howard made film appearances in "American Graffiti" in 1973 and made his directorial debut, at age 23, with the 1977 comedy film "Grand Theft Auto." He left "Happy Days" in 1980 to focus on directing, and created a string of...

When Robert Zemeckis was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, his hard-working parents saw his obsessive interest in moviemaking as a hobby, something to amuse the relatives at family gatherings. They were shocked by his decision to go to film school at the University of Southern California and pursue the cinema as a career. That career has been one of the most dazzling in motion picture history. Films directed by Robert Zemeckis have earned over $2 billion to date. From the Back to the...

Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall are the producers of many of the most successful and best-loved motion pictures in history, including E.T., Jurassic Park. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Back to the Future series and Schindler's List. Kennedy began her career as a volunteer at a public television station. She won got a job as a production assistant on a Steven Spielberg film and soon became an essential part of his team. Marshall too began as an unpaid assistant to director Peter...

Executives at Paramount had so little faith in the 32 year-old filmmaker they had hired to direct The Godfather, they actually hired another director to follow Francis Ford Coppola around the set, just to remind him he could be replaced at any moment. Despite studio interference, Coppola trusted his instincts, and The Godfather became a massive success with both critics and public. Along with its even more acclaimed sequel, it is one of the highest-grossing films of all time, and appears on...

One of the most acclaimed and controversial filmmakers of our times, Oliver Stone's compelling dramas are steeped in the great social conflicts of our history, and grounded in his own experience. After dropping out of Yale University, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in combat in Vietnam. After his military service, he attended the film school of New York University, and wrote a series of hard-hitting screenplays, including Midnight Express, Scarface and Year of the Dragon. He turned...

The most honored entertainer of our era, Barbra Streisand has made an indelible mark on our culture as a singer, actress, film producer, director, writer and champion of social causes. A high school honor student from Brooklyn, New York, she threw herself into show business right out of high school and rocketed to fame with a Grammy-winning record album and a starring role in the Broadway show Funny Girl. She reprised the role on screen, winning a Best Actress Oscar for her very first film....

Kevin Costner won twin Oscars for producing and directing the 1990 blockbuster Dances With Wolves, a powerful tale of the tragic interaction of Native Americans and the expanding United States in the 19th century West. The film was a high point in the remarkable string of hits that made Kevin Costner the box office champion of an era. Born in Los Angeles, his family moved often when he was a child. Buy his own account, he was a shy, withdrawn youngster. He discovered acting while studying at...

Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Color of Money, GoodFellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino. A list of films directed by Martin Scorsese is a roll call of some of the most exciting, powerful, personal motion pictures ever made. By his own account, Martin Scorsese was a "sickly kid" with asthma who watched the world unfold from the window of his parents' small apartment in New York's Little Italy. His parentws hoped he would become a priest,...

Sidney Sheldon (February 11, 1917 – January 30, 2007) was a master storyteller and one of the best-selling novelists in the world. He was born Sidney Schechtel in Chicago, into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. During the Great Depression, he worked at a variety of jobs and attended Northwestern University. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood with the dream of becoming a screenwriter, and landed a job reviewing scripts and collaborated on a number of B movies. After World War II, Sheldon...

William "Bill" Hanna (July 14,1910 – March 22, 2001) and Joseph "Joe" Barbera (March 11, 1911 – December 18, 2006) were two of the world's most influential animators, directors, producers and cartoon artists whose movie and television carton characters entertained millions of people for much of the 20th century. Hanna was a college dropout during the Great Depression, he worked at a series of odd jobs in the Los Angeles area, but discovered he had a talent for drawing. He joined an...

When George Lucas was attending USC Film School he didn't even need a hundred feet. While still a student, he turned 32 feet of 16 millimeter film into a one-minute animated short that not only won awards at festivals nationwide, but set a new standard for animated films. He's been making motion picture history ever since, creating many of the most popular films in motion picture history, including the phenomenally successful Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Today, George Lucas is Chairman...

For over 30 years, Michael Douglas has been a dominant figure in the world of motion pictures as both actor and producer. His 50-plus films have had an indelible impact on the spirit of our times. He first achieved national recognition playing a young detective on the long-running television series Streets of San Francisco. At the same time, he emerged as a successful producer of feature films. He purchased the rights to Ken Kesey's celebrated novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...

For over 30 years, Michael Douglas has been a dominant figure in the world of motion pictures as both actor and producer. His 50-plus films he have had an indelible impact on the spirit of our times. He first achieved national recognition playing a young detective on the long-running television series Streets of San Francisco. At the same time, he emerged as a successful producer of feature films. He purchased the rights to Ken Kesey's celebrated novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...