Steven Allan Spielberg KBE (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director and producer. Spielberg is a three-time Academy Award winner and is the highest grossing filmmaker of all time; his films having made nearly $8 billion internationally. Forbes Magazine places Spielberg's net worth at $3 billion. As of 2006, Premiere listed him as the most powerful and influential figure in the motion picture industry. TIME named him in the '100 Greatest People of the Century'. At the end of the 20th century LIFE named him the most influential person of his generation.
In a career that spans almost four decades, Spielberg's films have touched many themes and genres. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, three of his films, Jaws, E.T., and Jurassic Park became the highest grossing films for their time. During his early years as a director, his sci-fi and adventure films were often seen as the archetype of modern Hollywood blockbuster film-making. In recent years, he has tackled emotionally powerful issues such as the Holocaust, slavery, war, and terrorism.

Early life
Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Jewish parents Leah Adler (n?e Posner), a restaurateur and concert pianist, and Arnold Spielberg, a computer engineer. Throughout his early teens, Spielberg made amateur 8 mm "adventure" movies with his friends, the first of which he shot at a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. He charged admission (25 cents) to his home movies (which involved the wrecks he staged with his Lionel train set) while his sister sold popcorn.
Spielberg became a boy scout and in 1958, he fulfilled a requirement for photography merit badge by making a 9 minute 8 mm film entitled The Last Gunfight. At age 13, Spielberg won a prize for a 40-minute war movie he titled Escape to Nowhere.
At Arcadia High School in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1963, the then 16-year-old Spielberg wrote and directed his first independent movie, a 140-minute science fiction adventure called Firelight (which would later inspire Close Encounters). The movie, which had a budget of US$400, was shown in his local movie theater and generated a profit of $100. A writer for the local Phoenix press wrote that he could expect great things to come.
After his parents divorced, he moved to California with his father. His three sisters and mother remained in Arizona, where he attended Passover seders at the home of Zalman and Pearl Segal on an annual basis. He graduated from Saratoga High School in Saratoga, California, in 1965, which he called the "worst experience" of his life and "hell on Earth".[cite this quote] It was during this time Spielberg attained the rank of Eagle Scout.
After moving to California, he applied to attend film school at the Long Beach School of Theater, Film and Television three separate times but was unsuccessful due to his C grade average. After Spielberg became famous, USC awarded him an honorary degree in 1994, and in 1996 he became a trustee of the university. He attended California State University, Long Beach, to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. His actual career began when he returned to Universal studios as an unpaid, three-day-a-week intern and guest of the editing department. While attending college at Long Beach State in the 1960s, Spielberg also became member of Theta Chi Fraternity. In 2002, thirty-five years after starting college, Spielberg finished his degree via independent projects at CSULB, and was awarded a B.A. in Film Production and Electronic Arts with an option in Film/Video Production.
As an intern and guest of Universal Studios, Spielberg made his first short film for theatrical release, the 24 minute movie Amblin' in 1968. After Sidney Sheinberg, then the vice-president of production for Universal's TV arm, saw the film, Spielberg became the youngest director ever to be signed to a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio (Universal). He dropped out of Long Beach State in 1969 to take the television director contract at Universal Studios and began his career as a professional director.

Early career (1968-1975)
His first professional TV job came when he was hired to do one of the segments for the 1969 pilot episode of Night Gallery. The segment, "Eyes", starred Joan Crawford (who was very supportive of her twenty-two year-old rookie director), and she and Spielberg were reportedly close friends until her death. The episode is unusual in his body of work, in that the camerawork is more highly stylized than his later, more "mature" films. After this, and an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., Spielberg got his first feature-length assignment: an episode of Name of the Game called "L.A. 2017". This futuristic science fiction episode impressed Universal Studios and they signed him on a short contract. He did another segment on Night Gallery and did some work for shows such as Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law and The Psychiatrist before landing the first series episode of Columbo (previous episodes were actually TV movies).
Based on the strength of his work, Universal signed Spielberg to do three TV movies. The first was a Richard Matheson adaptation called Duel about a monstrous tanker truck which tries to run a small car off the road. Special praise of this film by the influential British critic Dilys Powell was highly significant to Spielberg's career. Another TV film (Something Evil) was made and released to capitalize on the popularity of The Exorcist, then a major best-selling book which had not yet been released as a movie. He fulfilled his contract by directing the TV movie length pilot of a show called Savage, starring Martin Landau. Spielberg's debut theatrical feature film was The Sugarland Express, about a married couple who are chased by police as the couple tries to regain custody of their baby. Spielberg's cinematography for the police chase was praised by reviewers, and The Hollywood Reporter stated that "a major new director is on the horizon". However, the film fared poorly at the box office and received a limited release.
Studio producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown offered Spielberg the director's chair for Jaws, a horror film based on the Peter Benchley novel. The film about a killer shark won three Academy Awards (for editing, original score and sound), and grossed $470,653,000 at the box office, setting the domestic record for box office gross and leading to what the press described as "Jawsmania". Jaws made him a household name, as well as one of America's youngest multi-millionaires, and allowed Spielberg a great deal of autonomy for his future projects. It was nominated for Best Picture and featured Spielberg's first of three collaborations with actor Richard Dreyfuss.

Blockbuster King (1975-1993)
Rejecting offers to direct Jaws 2 and Superman, Spielberg and actor Richard Dreyfuss re-convened to work on a film about UFOs, which became Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One of the rare movies both written and directed by Spielberg, Close Encounters was a critical and box office hit, giving Spielberg his first Best Director nomination from the Academy as well as earning six other Academy Awards nominations. It won Oscars in two categories (Cinematography, Vilmos Zsigmond, and a Special Achievement Award for Sound Effects Editing, Frank E. Warner). This second blockbuster helped to secure Spielberg's rise.
Spielberg's success with mainstream and commercially appealing films also subjected him to disdain from film reviewers. His film 1941, a big-budgeted World War II farce, flopped with both audiences and critics alike. Next, Spielberg teamed with Star Wars creator and friend George Lucas on an action adventure film. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first of the Indiana Jones films, was his homage to the cliffhanger serials of the Golden Age of Hollywood, with Harrison Ford (whom Lucas had previously cast in his Star Wars films) as the archaeologist and adventurer hero Indiana Jones. The biggest film at the box office in 1981, and recipient of numerous Oscar nominations including Best Director (Spielberg's second nomination) and Best Picture (the second Spielberg film to be nominated for Best Picture), Raiders is still considered a landmark example of the action genre.
One year later, Spielberg returned to his science fiction genre, with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the story of a boy and the alien whom he befriends, who is trying to get back home to outer space. E.T. went on to become the top-grossing film of all time until it was beaten by another of his films, Jurassic Park, in 1993. E.T. was also nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.
Next, Spielberg and George Lucas made another Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The film was plagued with uncertainty for the material and script. The reviews were less positive than they were for its predecessor, though the film was a blockbuster hit in 1984. It was criticized for lacking the energy of the original, as well as for its questionable depiction of East Indian culture.
Between 1982 and 1984, Spielberg produced three high-grossing movies: Poltergeist (for which he also co-wrote the screenplay), a big-screen adaptation of The Twilight Zone and The Goonies.
In 1985, Spielberg released The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, which is about a generation of empowered African-American women (Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey) during depression-era America (Danny Glover played the abusive patriarch). The film was a box office smash and critics hailed Spielberg's successful foray into the dramatic genre. Roger Ebert proclaimed it the best movie of the year and later entered it into his Great Films archive. The film received eleven Academy Award nominations, including two for Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. However, Spielberg did not get a Best Director nomination.
In 1987, as China began opening to the world, Spielberg shot the first American movie in Shanghai since the 1930s, an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. The film garnered much praise from critics and was nominated for several Oscars, but did not yield substantial box office revenues. Reviewer Andrew Sarris called it the best film of the year and later included it among the best films of the decade.
After two forays into dramatic films, Spielberg directed another Indiana Jones film titled Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with actor Sean Connery in a supporting role. The film earned positive reviews and big box office receipts. Next, he re-united with actor Richard Dreyfuss for the drama Always, about a daredevil pilot who extinguishes forest fires. Spielberg's first romantic film, Always was a box office flop and had mixed reviews.
In 1991, Spielberg directed Hook, about a middle-aged Peter Pan (played by Robin Williams), who returns to Neverland. With innumerable rewrites and creative changes and hit-or-miss reviews, the film made $119 million domestically (with costs of $70 million). In 1993, Spielberg returned to the adventure genre with the Japanese Godzilla movie-inspired version of Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park, about dinosaurs. With revolutionary special effects provided by friend George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, the film would eventually become the highest grossing film of all time (at the worldwide box office) with $914 million.
Spielberg's film Schindler's List was based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a man who risked his life to save 1,100 people from the Holocaust. Schindler's List earned Spielberg his first Academy Award for Best Director (it also won Best Picture). While the film was a huge success at the box office, Spielberg stated that he used the profits to set up the Shoah Foundation, a non-profit organization that archives filmed testimony of the Holocaust survivors. Some critics maintain that Schindler's List is the most accurate portrayal of the Holocaust, and in 1999 the American Film Institute listed it among the 10 Greatest American Films ever Made (#8).

1991 to 2000s
In 1991 Steven Spielberg co-founded Starbright with Peter Samuelson - a foundation improving sick children's lives through technology-based programs focusing on entertainment and education. In 2002 Starbright merged with the Starlight Foundation forming what is now today - Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation.
In 1994, Spielberg took a four-year hiatus from directing to spend more time with his family and build his new studio DreamWorks. In 1997, Spielberg helmed the sequel to 1993's Jurassic Park with The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which generated nearly $230 million in domestic box office despite its mixed reviews. Amistad was based on a true story (like Schindler's List), specifically about an African slave rebellion. Despite decent reviews from critics, it did not do well at the box office. Spielberg released Amistad under his new studio DreamWorks Pictures, which has released all of his movies since Amistad.
In 1998, Spielberg released the World War II drama Saving Private Ryan, about a squad of U.S. soldiers led by Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks) who try to find a missing soldier in France. Spielberg won his second Academy Award for his direction. The film's graphic, realistic depiction of combat violence influenced later war movies such as Black Hawk Down and Enemy at the Gates. The film was also the first major hit for Spielberg's studio DreamWorks, which co-produced the film with Paramount Pictures. Later, Spielberg and Hanks produced a TV mini-series based on Stephen Ambrose's book, Band of Brothers. The ten-part HBO mini-series follows Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division's 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The series won a number of awards at the Golden Globes and the Emmys.
In 2001, Spielberg filmed fellow director and friend Stanley Kubrick's final project, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence which Kubrick was unable to begin during his lifetime. A futuristic movie about a humanoid android longing for love, A.I. featured groundbreaking visual effects and a multi-layered, allegorical storyline. According to a Sight & Sound magazine poll of the greatest films ever made, film critic Armond White of the New York Press hails A.I. as his all-time favorite movie.
Spielberg and actor Tom Cruise collaborated for the first time for the futuristic neo-noir Minority Report, based upon the sci-fi short story written by Philip K. Dick about a Washington, D.C., police captain who has been foreseen to murder a man he has not yet met. The film received strong reviews with the review tallying website rottentomatoes.com reporting that 199 out of the 217 reviews they tallied were positive. The film was praised as a futuristic homage to film noir, with its intelligent premise and "whodunit" structure. The film earned over $300 million worldwide. Roger Ebert, who named it the best film of 2002, praised its breathtaking vision of the future as well as for the way Spielberg blended CGI with live-action.
Spielberg's 2002 film Catch Me if You Can is about the daring adventures of a youthful con artist (played by Leonardo DiCaprio). It earned Christopher Walken an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The film is known for John Williams's score and its unique title sequence. The film was a hit both commercially and critically.
Spielberg collaborated again with Tom Hanks along with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Stanley Tucci in The Terminal, a warm-hearted comedy about a man of Eastern European descent who is stranded in an airport. It received mixed reviews but performed relatively well at the box office. In 2005, Empire magazine ranked Spielberg number one on a list of the greatest film directors of all time.
In 2005, Spielberg did a modernized adaptation of War of the Worlds (a co-production of Paramount and DreamWorks), based on the H.G. Wells book of the same name, featuring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning. As with past Spielberg films, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) provided the visual effects. Unlike E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which depicted friendly alien visitors, War of the Worlds had violent alien invaders.
Spielberg's film Munich, about the events following the 1972 Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games, was his second film essaying Jewish relations in the world (the first being Schindler's List). The film is based on Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, a book by Canadian journalist George Jonas - a book whose veracity has been largely questioned by journalists. The film received strong critical praise, but underperformed at the U.S. and world box-office; it remains one of Spielbergs most controversial films to date. Munich received five Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture, Film Editing, Original Music Score (by John Williams), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director for Spielberg. It was Spielberg's sixth Best Director nomination and fifth Best Picture nomination. A year later he received his sixth Best Picture nomination for producing Letters from Iwo Jima. To date, seven films that Spielberg personally directed have been nominated for this award.

Production credits
Since the mid-1980s Spielberg has increased his role as a film producer. He has produced several cartoons, including Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Toonsylvania, Freakazoid!, and the critical and commercial success animated film The Land Before Time. He was also, for a short time, the executive producer of the long-running medical drama ER. In 1989, he brought the concept of The Dig to LucasArts. He contributed with the project from that time to 1995 when the game was released. He also collaborated with software publishers Knowledge Adventure on the multimedia game Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair, which was released in 1996. Spielberg appears, as himself, in the game to direct the player. Spielberg was branded for a Lego Moviemaker kit, the proceeds of which went to the Starbright Foundation.
In 1993, Spielberg acted as executive producer for the highly anticipated television series seaQuest DSV; a science fiction series set "in the near future" starring Roy Scheider (who Spielberg had directed in Jaws) and Jonathan Brandis akin to Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired on Sundays at 8:00 p.m. on NBC. While the first season was moderately successful, the second season did less well. Spielberg's name no longer appeared in the third season and the show was cancelled mid way through the third season.
Spielberg served as an uncredited executive producer on The Haunting, Shrek, and Evolution. In 2005, he served as a producer of Memoirs of a Geisha, an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Arthur Golden, a film he was previously attached to as director. In 2006 Spielberg co-executive produced with famed filmmaker Robert Zemeckis a CGI children's movie called Monster House, marking their first collaboration together since 1990's Back to the Future Part III. He also teamed with Clint Eastwood for the first time in their careers, co-producing Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima with Robert Lorenz and Eastwood himself. He earned his twelfth Academy Award nomination for the latter film as it was nominated for Best Picture. Recently Spielberg served as executive producer for Disturbia and the Transformers live action film with Brian Goldner, an employee of Hasbro. The film was directed by Michael Bay and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
Other major television series Spielberg produced were Band of Brothers and Taken. He was an executive producer on the critically acclaimed 2005 TV miniseries Into the West which won two Emmy awards, including one for Geoff Zanelli's score.
In 2007, Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett co-produced On the Lot the ill-fated TV reality show about filmmaking.

Upcoming projects
Spielberg is currently in post-production on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which wrapped filming in October 2007 and is scheduled for release on May 22, 2008. Pending resolution of the Writer's Guild strike, Trial of the Chicago 7 will begin production in March 2008 and is currently slated for a late 2008 release. The story details the events of the Vietnam War protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Spielberg has also begun plans for an Abraham Lincoln biopic, titled Lincoln, which stars Liam Neeson as the 16th President of the United States and Sally Field as his wife. It is scheduled for release in 2009. In June 2006, it was confirmed Spielberg had already begun working on a space travel movie titled Interstellar. It will be based on real scientific theories of black holes, worm holes, time travel, and gravity. He is also planning a motion capture film trilogy based on The Adventures of Tintin, with Peter Jackson.
Jurassic Park IV is also in development. Another upcoming project is a miniseries which he will produce with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, titled The Pacific. The miniseries will cost $150 million and will be a 10-part war miniseries in conjunction with the Australian Seven Network. The project is centered on the battles in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Writer Bruce McKenna, who penned several installments of the first miniseries (Band of Brothers), is the head writer. Filming is expected to begin in August 2008 and will continue for a year, with locations mostly in Australia, to include Far North Queensland, Melbourne, and the Northern Territory. Producers have chosen to base the series at Melbourne's Central City Studios. He is also producing two untitled Fox TV series, one focusing on fashion, another on time-travellers from World War II.

Style

Themes
Spielberg's films often deal with several recurring themes. Most of his films deal with ordinary characters searching for or coming in contact with extraordinary beings or finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances. This is especially evident in Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Empire of the Sun, Hook, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me if You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich. In an AFI interview in August 2000 Spielberg commented on his interest in the possibility of extra terrestrial life and how it has influenced some of his films. To that tradition of fascination with space, Spielberg has placed on several occasions, shooting stars in the background of his films such as in Jaws. Spielberg described himself as feeling like an alien during childhood, and his interest came from his father, a science fiction fan, and his opinion that aliens would not travel light years for conquest, but instead curiosity and sharing of knowledge.
A strong consistent theme in his family-friendly work is a childlike, even na?ve, sense of wonder and faith, as attested by works such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hook, and A.I.. According to Warren Buckland, these themes are portrayed through the use of low height camera tracking shots, which have become one of Spielberg's directing trademarks. In the cases when his films include children (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, etc.), this type of shot is more apparent, but it is also used in films like Munich, Saving Private Ryan, The Terminal, Minority Report, and Amistad. If one views each of his films, one will see this shot utilised by the director, notably the water scenes in Jaws are filmed from the low-angle perspective of someone swimming. Another child orientated theme in Spielberg's films is that of loss of innocence and coming-of-age. In Empire of the Sun, Jim, a well-groomed and spoiled English youth, loses his innocence as he suffers through World War II Japan. Similarly, in Catch Me if You Can Frank naively and foolishly believes that he can reclaim his shattered family if he accumulates enough money to support them.
The most persistent theme throughout his film is tension between parent-child relationships. Parents (often fathers) are reluctant, absent or ignorant. Peter Banning in Hook starts off in the beginning of the film as a reluctant married-to-his-work parent who through the course of his film regains the respect of his children. The notable absence of Elliott's father in E.T., is the most famous example of this theme. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, it is revealed that Indy has always had a very strained relationship with his father, who is also an archaeologist, as his father always seemed more interested in his work, specifically in his studies of the Holy Grail, than in his own son, although his father does not seem to realize or understand the negative effect that his aloof nature had on Indy (he even believes he was a good father in the sense that he taught his son "self reliance", which is not how Indy saw it). Even Oskar Schindler, from Schindler's List, is reluctant to have a child with his wife. Munich depicts Avner as man away from his wife and newborn daughter. There are of course exceptions; Brody in Jaws is a committed family man, while John Anderton in Minority Report is a shattered man after the disappearance of his son. This theme is arguably the most autobiographical aspect of Spielberg's films, since Spielberg himself was affected by his parents' divorce as a child and by the absence of his father. Furthermore to this theme, protagonists in his films often come from families with divorced parents, most notably E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (protagonist Elliot's mother is divorced) and Catch Me if You Can (Frank Abagnale's mother and father split early on in the movie). Little known also is Tim in Jurassic Park (early in the movie the child mentions his parents' divorce). The family often shown divided is often resolved in the ending as well. Following this theme of reluctant fathers and father figures, Tim looks to Dr. Alan Grant as a father figure. Initially, Dr. Grant is reluctant to return those paternal feelings to Tim (earlier in the film Dr. Grant has a discussion with Ellie about his negative feelings in regards to children). However, by the end of the film, he has changed, and the kids even fall asleep with their heads leaning on his shoulders.
Most of his films are generally optimistic in nature. Critics frequently accuse his films of being overtly sentimental, though Spielberg feels it's fine as long as it is disguised. The influence comes from directors Frank Capra and John Ford. There are exceptions; his debut feature The Sugarland Express has a downbeat ending where Lou Jean loses custody of her daughter, and most recently A.I. where David never receives acceptance from his real mother. His 21st century output, from A.I. to Munich, are slightly different in tone with respect to his earlier films. In A.I., David is shunned and rejected by his family and, indeed, by most of the world at large and ultimately never earns the love of his real mother. The crime-caper, Catch Me if You Can, has a certain irony when Frank, who continuously rebels against authority figures throughout the film, becomes part of the very system he fought against. War of the Worlds was the first time Spielberg attempted to show aliens who were evil rather than friendly to humanity. Munich, his latest and most controversial film, is also his most ambiguous, as in the end it's uncertain whether the cycle of violence would ever truly end.

Contemporaries
In terms of casting and production itself, Spielberg has a known trademark for working with actors and production members from his previous films. For instance he has cast Richard Dreyfuss in several movies: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Always. Spielberg has also cast Harrison Ford for several of his movies from small roles, as the headteacher in a cut scene from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as well as in leading role in the Indiana Jones trilogy. Recently Spielberg has used the actor Tom Hanks on several occasions and has cast him in Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me if You Can, and The Terminal. Spielberg also has collaborated with Tom Cruise twice on Minority Report and War of the Worlds. Spielberg prefers working with production members with whom he has developed an existing working relationship. An example of this is his production relationship with Kathleen Kennedy who has served as producer on all his major films from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to the recent Munich. Other working relationships include Allen Daviau, a childhood friend and cinematographer who shot the early Spielberg film Amblin' and most of his films up to Empire Of The Sun; Janusz Kaminski who has shot every Spielberg film since Schindler's List (see List of noted film director and cinematographer collaborations); and the film editor Michael Kahn who has edited every single film directed by Spielberg from Close Encounters to Munich (except E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial). Most of the DVDs of Spielberg's films have documentaries by Laurent Bouzereau.
A famous example of Spielberg working with the same professionals is his long time collaboration with John Williams and the use of his musical scores in all of his films since The Sugarland Express (except The Color Purple). One of Spielberg's trademarks is his use of music by John Williams to add to the visual impact of his scenes and to try and create a lasting picture and sound of the film in the memories of the film audience. These visual scenes often uses images of the sun (e.g Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, the final scene of Jurassic Park, and the end credits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (where they ride into the sunset)), of which the last two feature a Williams score at that end scene. Spielberg is a contemporary of filmmakers George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, and Brian De Palma, collectively known as the "Movie Brats". Aside from his principal role as a director, Spielberg has acted as a producer for a considerable number of films, including early hits for Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis.

Personal life

Marriages and children
From 1985 to 1989 Spielberg was married to actress Amy Irving. In their 1989 divorce settlement, she received $100 million from Spielberg after a judge controversially vacated a prenuptial agreement written on a napkin. Their divorce was recorded as the third most costly celebrity divorce in history. Following the divorce, Spielberg and Irving shared custody of their son, Max.
Spielberg subsequently developed a relationship with actress Kate Capshaw, whom he met when he cast her in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They married on October 12, 1991. Capshaw is a convert to Judaism. They currently move among their four homes in Pacific Palisades, California; New York City; East Hampton, NY; and Naples, Florida.
There are seven children in the Spielberg-Capshaw family:
Jessica Capshaw (1976) - daughter from Capshaw's previous marriage to Robert Capshaw
Max Samuel Spielberg (June 13, 1985) - son from Spielberg's previous marriage to Amy Irving
Theo (1988) - adopted by Capshaw before her marriage to Spielberg; adopted by Spielberg
Sasha (May 14, 1990)
Sawyer (March 10, 1992)
Mikaela George (February 28, 1996) - adopted with Capshaw
Destry Allyn (December 1, 1996)
Spielberg has several pets including a dog. His previous dog, Elmer, starred in several of his films in various guises including Jaws, Close Encounters, and 1941.

Genealogy
Adoption: Italics

Politics
In 1991, Steven Spielberg co-founded Starbright with Peter Samuelson - a foundation improving sick childrens' lives through technology-based programs focusing on entertainment and education. In 2002 Starbright merged with the Starlight Foundation forming what is now today - Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation.
Spielberg generally supports U.S. Democratic Party candidates. He has donated over $800,000 for the Democratic party and its nominees. He was close friends of former President Bill Clinton and worked with the President for the USA Millennium celebrations. He directed an 18-minute film for the project, scored by John Williams and entitled The American Journey. It was shown at America's Millennium Gala on December 31, 1999, in the National Mall at the Reflecting Pool at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C..
Spielberg resigned as an advisory board member of his local boy scout council in 2001 because of his disapproval of the BSA's anti-homosexuality stance.
Spielberg joined Jeffrey Katzenberg and Haim Saban in endorsing the re-election of Hollywood friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican Governor of California, on August 7, 2006.
On February 20, 2007, Spielberg, Katzenberg, and David Geffen invited Democrats to a fundraiser for Barack Obama,[dead link] but on June 14, 2007, Spielberg endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) for President.[dead link]

Awards
Spielberg is a winner of three Academy Awards. He has been nominated for six Academy Awards for the category of Best Director, winning two of them (Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan), and seven of the films he directed were up for the Best Picture Oscar (Schindler's List won). In 1987 he was awarded The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for his work as a creative producer.
Drawing from his own experiences in Scouting, Spielberg helped the Boy Scouts of America develop a merit badge in cinematography. The badge was launched at the 1989 National Scout Jamboree which Spielberg attended, personally counseling many boys in their work on requirements.
That same year, 1989, was the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The opening scene shows a teenage Indiana Jones in scout uniform bearing the rank of a Life Scout. Spielberg stated he made Indiana Jones a Boy Scout in honor of his experience in Scouting. For his career accomplishments and service to others, Spielberg was awarded the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.
In 1999, Spielberg received an honorary degree from Brown University. Spielberg was also awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service by Secretary of Defense William Cohen at the Pentagon on August 11, 1999. Cohen presented Spielberg the award in recognition of his movie Saving Private Ryan. The citation accompanying the medal states "Mr. Spielberg helped to reconnect the American public with its military men and women, while rekindling a deep sense of gratitude for the daily sacrifices they make on the front lines of our Nation's defense."[cite this quote]
In 2001, he was given the honor of Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.
In 2004 he received the L?gion d'honneur from president Jacques Chirac. On July 15, 2006, Spielberg was also awarded the Gold Hugo, Lifetime Achievement Award at the Chicago International Film Festival's Summer Gala, and also was awarded a Kennedy Center honour on December 3. The tribute to Spielberg featured a short filmed biography narrated by Tom Hanks and included thank-yous from World War II veterans for Saving Private Ryan, as well as a performance of the finale to Leonard Bernstein's Candide, conducted by John Williams (Spielberg's frequent composer).
In November 2007, he is chosen for Lifetime Achievement Award to be presented at the sixth annual Visual Effects Society Awards in February 2009. He was set to be honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the January 2008 Golden Globes; however, the new, watered-down format of the ceremony result from conflicts from the 2007-08 writers strike, the HFPA postponed his honor to the 2009 ceremony.

Criticism
Spielberg, as a then co-owner of DreamWorks, was involved in a heated debate in which the studio proposed building on the remaining wetlands in Southern California, though development was later dropped.
One colleague recalled that during the volatile 1968 Democratic National Convention, Spielberg was far more interested in mastering a tricky visual effects shot. Biskind also illustrates Steven Spielberg's unusual experience writing Jaws. According to Universal Press associate Roger Ebert, Spielberg once stated to him in his defense that "Every single word in his book about me is either erroneous, or a lie."
Spielberg's films are often accused of leaning towards sentimentalism at the expense of other aspects of the film.
French New Wave giant Jean-Luc Godard famously and publicly criticised Spielberg at the premiere of his film In Praise of Love. Godard, who has continuously complained about the commercial nature of modern cinema, holds Spielberg partly responsible for the lack of artistic merit in mainstream cinema. Godard accused Spielberg of using his film to make a profit of tragedy while Schindler's wife lived in poverty in Argentina, although in reality Spielberg chose not to make a profit from the film. American artist and actor Crispin Glover also criticised Spielberg in his 2005 essay What Is It?. Among Glover's accusations are that Spielberg purchased a sled used in Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane for $50,000 but refused to fund Welles's would-be final film, that he received money from the United States government to promote his personal religious and cultural beliefs, and that he exploited tragedy for personal gain in the film Schindler's List.
Critics such as anti-mainstream film theorist Ray Carney also complain that Spielberg's films lack depth and do not take risks. In Spielberg's defense, critic Roger Ebert argues that Spielberg is very talented and has also said, "Has Godard or any other director living or dead done more than Spielberg, with his Holocaust Project, to honor and preserve the memories of the survivors?" Some of Spielberg's most famous fans include film legends Ingmar Bergman and Terry Gilliam (although he has criticised some of Spielberg's more recent work). The late French filmmaker Fran?ois Truffaut admired his work and took a role in Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
An episode in the sixth season of South Park satirizes Spielberg and Lucas for their revisions of previous films, such as E.T. and the Star Wars series. In the commentary for this episode, Parker and Stone, the makers of South Park, indicate that the films are being revised to make them more politically correct and to make money, disregarding the original work of art.

Robert Lee "Bob" Zemeckis (born May 14, 1952) is an Academy Award and Golden Globe-winning American film director, producer and screenwriter. Zemeckis first came to public attention in the 1980s as the director of the comedic time-travel Back to the Future films as well as the live-action/animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), though in the 1990s he diversified into more dramatic fare, including 1994's Forrest Gump, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director.
His films are characterized by an interest in state-of-the-art special effects, including the early use of match moving in Back to the Future Part II (1989) and the pioneering performance capture techniques seen in The Polar Express (2004). Though Zemeckis has often been pigeonholed as a director only interested in effects, his work has been defended by several critics, including David Thomson, who wrote that "No other contemporary director has used special effects to more dramatic and narrative purpose."

Biography

Early life
Zemeckis was born in Chicago, Illinois to a Lithuanian father and Italian American mother and was raised in a working-class Catholic family. Zemeckis has said that "the truth was that in my family there was no art. I mean, there was no music, there were no books, there was no theater....The only thing I had that was inspirational, was television-and it actually was." As a child, Zemeckis loved television and was fascinated by his parents' 8 mm film home movie camera. Starting off by filming family events like birthdays and holidays, Zemeckis gradually began producing narrative films with his friends that incorporated stop-motion work and other special effects.
Along with enjoying movies, Zemeckis remained an avid TV watcher. "You hear so much about the problems with television," he said, "but I think that it saved my life." Television gave Zemeckis his first glimpse of a world outside of his blue-collar upbringing; specifically, he learned of the existence of film schools on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. After seeing Bonnie and Clyde with his father and being heavily influenced by it, Zemeckis decided that he wanted to go to film school.
His parents disapproved of the idea, Zemeckis later said, "But only in the sense that they were concerned....for my family and my friends and the world that I grew up in, this was the kind of dream that really was impossible. My parents would sit there and say, 'Don't you see where you come from? You can't be a movie director.' I guess maybe some of it I felt I had to do in spite of them, too."

USC education and early films
Zemeckis applied only to University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, and got into the Film School on the strength of an essay and a music video based on a Beatles song. Not having heard from the University itself, Zemeckis called and was told he had been rejected, because of his average grades. The director gave an "impassioned plea" to the official on the other line, promising to go to summer school and improve his studies, and eventually convinced the school to accept him. Arriving at USC that Fall, Zemeckis encountered a program that was, in his words, made up of "a bunch of hippies [and] considered an embarrassment by the university." The classes were difficult, with professors constantly stressing how hard the movie business was. Zemeckis remembered not being much fazed by this, citing the "healthy cynicism" that had been bred into him from his Chicago upbringing.
While at USC, Zemeckis developed a close friendship with the writer Bob Gale, who was also a student there. Gale later recalled, "The graduate students at USC had this veneer of intellectualism....So Bob and I gravitated toward one another because we wanted to make Hollywood movies. We weren't interested in the French New Wave. We were interested in Clint Eastwood and James Bond and Walt Disney, because that's how we grew up."
As a result of winning a Student Academy Award at USC for his film, A Field of Honor, Zemeckis came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg said, "He barged right past my secretary, and sat me down and showed me this student film....and I thought it was spectacular, with police cars and a riot, all dubbed to Elmer Bernstein's score for The Great Escape." Spielberg became Zemeckis' mentor and executive produced his first two films, both of which Zemeckis co-wrote with Bob Gale.
1978's I Wanna Hold Your Hand and 1980's Used Cars (starring Kurt Russell) were well-received critically, with Pauline Kael going into particular rhapsody over the latter film, but both were commercially inert. (I Wanna Hold Your Hand was the first of several Zemeckis films to incorporate historical figures and celebrities into his movies; in the film, he used archival footage and doubles to simulate the presence of The Beatles.) After the failure of his first two films, and the Spielberg-directed 1941 in 1979 (for which Zemeckis and Gale had written the screenplay), the pair gained a reputation for writing "scripts that everyone thought were great [but] somehow didn't translate into movies people wanted to see."

Breakthrough films and Forrest Gump
As a result of his reputation within the industry, Zemeckis had trouble finding work in the early 1980s, though he and Gale kept busy. They wrote scripts for other directors, including Car Pool for Brian De Palma and Growing Up for Spielberg; neither ended up getting made. Another Zemeckis-Gale project, about a teenager who accidentally travels back in time to the 1950s, was turned down by every major studio. The director was jobless until Michael Douglas hired him in 1984 to film Romancing the Stone. A romantic adventure starring Douglas and Kathleen Turner, Romancing was expected to flop (to the point that, after viewing a rough cut of the film, the producers of the then-in-the-works Cocoon fired Zemeckis as director), but the film became a sleeper hit. While working on Romancing the Stone, Zemeckis met composer Alan Silvestri, who has scored all of his subsequent pictures.
After Romancing, the director suddenly had the clout to direct his time-traveling screenplay, which was titled Back to the Future. Starring Michael J. Fox, the 1985 movie was wildly successful upon its release, and was followed by two sequels, released in 1989 and 1990. Before the Back to the Future sequels were released, Zemeckis directed another film, the madcap 1940s-set mystery Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which painstakingly combined traditional animation and live action; its $70 million budget made it one of the most expensive films made up to that point. The film was both a financial and critical success, and won four Academy Awards. In 1990, Zemeckis commented, when asked if he would want to make non-comedies, "I would like to be able to do everything. Just now, though, I'm too restless to do anything that's not really zany."
In 1992, Zemeckis directed the black comedy Death Becomes Her, starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis. Although his next film would have some comedic elements, Zemeckis' next film was his first with non-comedic elements, and was also his biggest commercial and critical success to date, 1994's Forrest Gump. Starring Tom Hanks in the title role, and borrowing heavily from Woody Allen's Zelig, Forrest Gump tells the story of a mentally handicapped man who unwittingly participates in some of the major events of the twentieth century, falling in love, and interacting with several major historical figures in the process. The film grossed $677 million worldwide and became the top grossing U.S. film of 1994; it won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Hanks as Best Actor, and Zemeckis as Best Director. In 1997, Zemeckis directed Contact, a long-gestating project based on Carl Sagan's 1985 novel of the same name. The film centers around Eleanor Arroway, a scientist played by Jodie Foster, who believes she has made contact with extraterrestrial beings.

Work in the 2000s and interest in digital filmmaking
In 1999, Zemeckis donated $5 million towards the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at USC, a 35,000 square-foot center that houses production stages, an immense 60-system digital editing lab, and a 50-seat screening room. When the Center opened in March 2001, Zemeckis spoke in a panel about the future of film, alongside friends Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Of those (including Spielberg) who clung to celluloid and disparaged the idea of shooting digitally, Zemeckis said, "These guys are the same ones who have been saying that LPs sound better than CDs. You can argue that until you're blue in the face, but I don't know anyone who's still buying vinyl. Film, as we have traditionally thought of it, is going to be different. But the continuum is man's desire to tell stories around the campfire. The only thing that keeps changing is the campfire." The Robert Zemeckis Center currently hosts many film school classes, much of the Interactive Media Division, and Trojan Vision, USC's student television station, which has been voted the number one college television station in the country.
In 1996, Zemeckis had begun developing a project titled The Castaway with Tom Hanks and writer William Broyles Jr., about a man who becomes stranded on a desert island and undergoes a profound physical and spiritual change. While working on The Castaway, Zemeckis also became attached to a Hitchcockian thriller titled What Lies Beneath, the story of a married couple experiencing an extreme case of empty nest syndrome that was based on an idea by Steven Spielberg. Because Hanks' character needed to undergo a dramatic weight loss over the course of The Castaway (which was eventually retitled Cast Away), Zemeckis decided that the only way to retain the same crew while Hanks lost the weight was to shoot What Lies Beneath in between. He shot the first part of Cast Away in early 1999, and shot What Lies Beneath in fall 1999, completing work on Cast Away in early 2000. Zemeckis later quipped, when asked about shooting two films back-to-back, "I wouldn't recommend it to anyone." What Lies Beneath, starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, was released in July 2000 to mixed reviews, but did well at the box office, grossing over $155 million domestically. Cast Away was released in that December and grossed $233 million domestically; as Chuck Noland, Hanks received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
In 2004, Zemeckis reteamed with Hanks and directed The Polar Express, based on the children's book of the same name by Chris Van Allsburg. The Polar Express utilized the computer animation technique known as performance capture, whereby the movements of the actors are captured digitally and used as the basis for the animated characters. As the first major film to use performance capture, The Polar Express caused The New York Times to write that, "Whatever critics and audiences make of this movie, from a technical perspective it could mark a turning point in the gradual transition from an analog to a digital cinema."
In February 2007, Zemeckis and Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook announced plans to set up a new performance capture film company devoted to CG-created, 3-D movies. The company, ImageMovers Digital, will create films using the performance capture technology, with Zemeckis expected to direct a number of the projects. Disney will distribute and market the motion pictures worldwide.
Zemeckis used the performance capture technology again in his latest film, Beowulf, which retells the Anglo-Saxon epic poem of the same name and stars Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie, and Anthony Hopkins. Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer Neil Gaiman, who co-wrote the adaptation with Roger Avary, described the film as a "cheerfully violent and strange take on the Beowulf legend." The film was released on November 16, 2007.
In July 2007, Variety announced that Zemeckis had written a screen adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1843 story A Christmas Carol, with plans to use performance capture and release it under the aegis of ImageMovers Digital. Zemeckis wrote the screenplay with Jim Carrey in mind, and Carrey has agreed to play a multitude of roles in the film, including Ebenezer Scrooge as a young, middle-aged, and old man, and the three ghosts who haunt Scrooge. The film is expected to begin shooting in early 2008.

Personal life
Zemeckis has said that, for a long time, he sacrificed his personal life in favor of a career. "I won an Academy Award when I was 44 years old," he explained, "but I paid for it with my 20s. That decade of my life from film school till 30 was nothing but work, nothing but absolute, driving work. I had no money. I had no life." In the early 1980s, Zemeckis married actress Mary Ellen Trainor, with whom he had a son, Alexander. He described the marriage as difficult to balance with filmmaking, and his relationship with Trainor eventually ended in divorce. In 2001, he married actress Leslie Harter Zemeckis.

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is a four-time Academy Award nominated American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is the creator of the epic Star Wars saga and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Today, Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful independent directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.6 billion.

Biography

Early life and education
George Walton Lucas Jr. was born in Modesto, California to George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913-1991) and Dorothy Ellinore Bomberger Lucas. His father was mainly of British and Swiss-German heritage and his mother was a member of a prominent Modesto family (one of her cousins is the mother of former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and director of UNICEF Ann Veneman) and was mainly of German and Scots-Irish heritage.
His parents sold retail office supplies and owned a walnut ranch in California. His experiences growing up in the sleepy suburb of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Before young Lucas became obsessed with the movie camera, he wanted to be a race car driver, but a near fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina just days before his high school graduation quickly changed his mind. Instead, he attended community college and developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks.
During this time an experimental filmmaker named Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of underground, avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner. For the next few years, Baillie's series, dubbed Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses, where art films shared the stage with folksingers and stand-up comedians.
These events became a magnet for the teenage Lucas and his boyhood friend John Plummer. The 19-year-olds began slipping away to San Francisco to hang out in jazz clubs and find news of Canyon Cinema screenings in flyers at the City Lights bookstore. Already a promising photographer, Lucas became infatuated with these abstract films.
"That's when George really started exploring," Plummer recalls. "We went to a theater on Union Street that showed art movies, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there." It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been a D-plus slacker in high school.
At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry - famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalls.
Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to motion picture film. During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another huge inspiration was the Serbian montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department) Slavko Vorkapich who had been a colleague of Sergei Eisenstein's before moving to Hollywood to make stunning montage sequences for studio features at MGM and Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in moving film images.
Lucas saw many inspiring movies in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the National Film Board of Canada like Arthur Lipsett's 21-87, the French-Canadian cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque's cinema verite 60 Cycles, the work of Norman McLaren, and the documentaries of Claude Jutra. Lucas fell madly in love with pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16 mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems and cinema verite with such titles as Look At Life, Herbie, 1:42.08, The Emperor, Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town, filmmaker, and 6-18-67. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that create emotions purely through cinema.
After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the United States Air Force as an officer, but was turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the Army, but tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather. Lucas was prescribed medication for the disease, but his symptoms are sufficiently mild that he does not require insulin and would not be considered diabetic under the disease's current classification[dubious - discuss].
In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production. Working as a teaching instructor for a class of U.S. Navy students who were being taught documentary cinematography, Lucas directed the short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which won first prize at the 1967-68 National Student Film Festival, and was later adapted into his first full-length feature film, THX 1138. Lucas was awarded a scholarship by Warner Brothers to observe the making of Finian's Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who at the time was revered among film school students of the time as a cinema graduate who had "made it".

Film career
Lucas co-founded the studio American Zoetrope with Coppola-whom he met during his internship at Warner Brothers-hoping to create a liberating environment for filmmakers to direct outside the perceived oppressive control of the Hollywood studio system. From the financial success of his films American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977), Lucas was able to set up his own studio, Lucasfilm, in Marin County in his native Northern California. Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light and Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, have become among the most respected firms in their fields. Lucasfilm Games, later renamed to LucasArts, is highly regarded in the gaming industry.
Following the success of American Graffiti, Lucas proposed new Flash Gordon film adaptation, but the rights were not available. Under the American Zoetrope banner Lucas developed Apocalypse Now to direct following work on Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. As work on Star Wars dragged on, Coppola took over directing Apocalypse Now, leading to the breakdown of the American Zoetrope partnership.
The animation studio Pixar was founded as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Pixar's early computer graphics research resulted in groundbreaking effects in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Young Sherlock Holmes, and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple Computer. Jobs paid U.S. $5 million to Lucas and put U.S. $5 million as capital into the company. The sale reflected Lucas' desire to stop the cash flow losses associated with his 7-year research projects associated with new entertainment technology tools, as well as his company's new focus on creating entertainment products rather than tools. A contributing factor was cash flow difficulties following Lucas' 1983 divorce concurrent with the sudden drop off in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi. (Some twenty years later on January 24, 2006, Disney announced that it had agreed to buy Pixar for approximately $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal.)
Lucas was also influential in the development of industry-standard post-production tools such as the Avid Film and Video nonlinear editor, first developed as the Edit Droid, and also the Sound Droid, which later became the Digidesign Pro Tools sound editing and mixing software.
Lucas and director Steven Spielberg enjoy a friendship that dates to their college years, and that has resulted in collaborations on films including the Indiana Jones movies Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull(2008).
On a return on investment basis, Star Wars proved to be one of the most successful films of all time. During the filming of Star Wars, Lucas waived his up front fee as director and negotiated to own the licensing rights - rights which the studio thought were nearly worthless. This decision earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, as he was able to directly profit from all the licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise. In 2006 Forbes Magazine estimated Lucas' personal wealth at US$ 3.5 billion. In 2005 Forbes.com estimated the lifetime revenue generated by the Star Wars franchise at nearly $20 billion.
On October 3, 1994, Lucas started to write the three Star Wars prequels, and on November 1 that year, he left the day-to-day operations of his filmmaking business and started a sabbatical to finish the prequels.
He recently announced that he would produce a TV series about Star Wars, which would take place between episodes III and IV. Lucas purportedly also recently announced that he plans on making two additional Star Wars films that will take place after The Return of the Jedi, but this rumor was debunked at Star Wars Celebration 4 in Los Angeles, California which took place May 24th-May 28th, 2007. When Steve Sansweet, Director of Content Management and Head of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm, was asked about the proposed two films post-Return of the Jedi he stated that it was a misunderstanding of what Lucas was explaining. According to Sansweet, Lucas was referring to the two Star Wars television projects currently in production: Star Wars: Clone Wars which is a CG animated show set to debut in the Fall of 2008, and the yet to be titled Star Wars live action television series set to debut in 2009.
Lucas will appear in an interview on the January 15, 2008 DVD release of the Family Guy episode "Blue Harvest", which parodied Episode IV. .

Awards, donations and other activities
In 1991, The George Lucas Educational Foundation was founded as a nonprofit operating foundation to celebrate and encourage innovation in schools. The Foundation's content is available under the brand, Edutopia, in an award-winning magazine, http://www.edutopia.org and via documentary films.
The American Film Institute awarded Lucas its Life Achievement Award on June 9, 2005. This was shortly after the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, to which he jokingly made reference in his acceptance speech, stating that, since he views the entire Star Wars series as one movie, he could actually receive the award now that he had finally "gone back and finished the movie."
On June 5, 2005, Lucas was named 100th "Greatest American" by the Discovery Channel.
Lucas was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Directing and Writing for American Graffiti, and Best Directing and Writing for Star Wars. He also received the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1991. He appeared at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in 2007 with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola to present the Best Director award. During the speech, Spielberg and Coppola talked about the joy of winning an Oscar, making fun of Lucas, who has not won a competitive Oscar.
In 2005, Lucas gave US$1 million to help build the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to commemorate American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
On September 19, 2006, USC announced that George Lucas had donated $175 million to his alma mater to expand the film school. It is the largest single donation to USC and the largest gift to a film school. Previous donations led to the already existing George Lucas Instructional Building and Marcia Lucas Post-Production building.
On January 1, 2007 George Lucas served as the Grand Marshal for the 2007 Tournament of Roses Parade, and made the coin toss at the 2007 Rose Bowl. The toss favored Lucas's alma mater, the Trojans. His team, which came into the game as underdogs, went on to defeat the Michigan Wolverines (32-18).

Personal life
In 1969, Lucas married film editor Marcia Lou Griffin, who went on to win an Oscar for her editing work on the original (Episode IV) Star Wars film. They adopted a daughter, Amanda, in 1981, and divorced in 1983 . Lucas has since adopted two more children: Katie, born in 1988, and Jett, born in 1993 . All three of his children have appeared in the prequels. Lucas had also been in a long relationship, engagement and all, with singer Linda Ronstadt. He has recently been observed at several events with Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Capital Management, who accompanied him to the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in February 2007.
Lucas was born and raised in a strongly Methodist family. After inserting religious themes into Star Wars he would eventually come to identify strongly with the Eastern religious philosophies he studied and incorporated into his movies, which were a major inspiration for "the Force." Lucas eventually came to state that his religion was "Buddhist Methodist."

Ronald William Howard (born March 1, 1954) is an American actor and Academy Award-winning film director and producer, known for his roles on sitcoms, movies and television.
The naturally red-headed Howard came to prominence in the 1960s as Andy Griffith's son, Opie Taylor, on The Andy Griffith Show, and later in the 1970s as Tom Bosley's son and Henry Winkler's best friend, Richie Cunningham, on Happy Days (a role he played from 1974 to 1980).

Early life
Howard was born in Duncan, Oklahoma, the son of Jean Speegle Howard, an actress, and Rance Howard, a director, writer, and actor. His younger brother, Clint Howard, is a well-known character actor. Howard attended the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts but did not graduate.

Career

Early acting roles and The Andy Griffith Show
Howard first earned recognition for playing Winthrop Paroo, the child with the lisp in the film version of The Music Man with Robert Preston and Shirley Jones. After The Music Man, he appeared in the role of Opie Taylor in the television series The Andy Griffith Show, which was the successful spin-off of The Danny Thomas Show. There he portrayed the son of the local sheriff in the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina. For eight seasons, he also created a loving relationship with Andy Griffith, on-screen, and spent a lot of time with him, off-screen, when not filming. The credits referred to him as "Ronny Howard." He also appeared in the 1963 film The Courtship of Eddie's Father with Glenn Ford and (billed as "Ronnie Howard") in Little Boy Lost, a 1966 episode of the TV show I Spy with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby.
Howard made a notable guest-star appearance on the popular television series M*A*S*H during that show's first season as an underage American serving in the Marines during the Korean War.

Happy Days
Howard is also well known for his role as Richie Cunningham in television's Happy Days on which, beginning in 1974, he played the likable "buttoned down" boy, in contrast to Henry Winkler's Fonz. He attained film success with his role as Steve Bollander in George Lucas' teen movie American Graffiti. In 1977, while still starring on Happy Days, he directed his first film, a low-budget comedy/action film called Grand Theft Auto.
His last significant on-screen role was when he reprised his famous role as Opie Taylor in the 1986 TV reunion movie Return to Mayberry reuniting him with Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, and most of the old cast.

Directing
After leaving Happy Days in 1980, he directed several TV movies. His big theatrical directing break came in 1982 when he directed the bigger budget film Night Shift featuring soon-to-be well-known actors such as Michael Keaton and Shelley Long, and reuniting Howard with his Happy Days co-star Henry Winkler.
He has since directed a number of high-visibility films, the most acclaimed of which include Splash, Willow, Cocoon, Apollo 13 (nominated for several Academy Awards), A Beautiful Mind, for which he won the Oscar for Best Director, and Cinderella Man. His latest film, The Da Vinci Code, reteaming Howard with Splash and Apollo 13 star Tom Hanks, has been a box office hit earning more than $700 million at the box office, but was a critical letdown.
Howard casts his younger brother Clint in a minor role in most of his movies.

Imagine Entertainment
Howard is the co-chairman, with Brian Grazer, of Imagine Entertainment, a major film and television production company, which has produced notable projects like Friday Night Lights, 8 Mile, Inside Deep Throat, and the television series 24 and Felicity.
Through his company Imagine Television, Howard continues to have a presence in television, most recently as the executive producer and uncredited narrator of the critically acclaimed FOX sitcom Arrested Development. The show, despite having won six Emmy awards and near-unanimous praise from critics, did not enjoy high ratings and was limited by Fox Television in 2006. A series finale took place in February 2006, but Howard, on-screen for the first time in the show, suggested a movie version may be in the works.

Personal life
On June 7, 1975, Howard wed his high-school sweetheart, Cheryl (n?e Alley), a writer with a degree in geriatric psychology. They have four children; daughters Bryce Dallas Howard (b. 1981), Jocelyn Carlyle (twin, b. 1985), Paige Carlyle (twin, b. 1985), and son Reed Cross (b. 1987). Their daughters Bryce Dallas Howard and Paige Howard are actresses. They live on a 35-acre estate in the exclusive gated community of Conyers Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut. In February 2007, Howard became a grandfather when his daughter, Bryce, gave birth to a son.
Ron Howard was the sixth cousin to his Andy Griffith Show co-star, Don Knotts, through Howard's ancestor, Lucinda Knotts.
In the June 2006 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Ron Howard was asked, "What do you consider your greatest achievement?" He replied, "Forty-eight consecutive years of steady employment in television and film, while preserving a rich family life."

Howard in popular culture
In The Simpsons episode "When You Dish Upon a Star", Homer meets and befriends Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger and Ron Howard. Later in the episode, Ron Howard is injured when trying to jump from a truck to the RV that Homer was driving. In the end, he pitches Homer's movie idea and gets it greenlit. Another episode ("Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder") Homer and Ron Howard are fighting each other while appearing on The Springfield Squares. Later, Ron gives Homer the inspiration to spend more time with his kids and gives him some money that Homer refuses but takes anyway. Ron yoinks the money back from Homer and then drives away.
When he hosted Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, Eddie Murphy called him "Opie Cunningham". In the South Park episode, "Ginger Kids", Cartman asks a crowd of fellow gingers to name great Americans with the hair color, the first and only name they can think of is "Ron Howard", and when asked to name a second, one responds "Ron Howard" again.
On a VH1 special about the 100 greatest child stars, many of the interviewees considered Ron Howard to be the most successful child star of all-time, considering his two major television acting roles and his directing career. In Season 1, Episode 3 of Stroker and Hoop on Adult Swim, Stroker and Hoop ran a detective agency whose first client needed them to make Ron Howard stop controlling his mind.

Chris Columbus (born September 10, 1958, Spangler, Pennsylvania) is an American filmmaker.

Film career

Start in the industry
Columbus graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in Warren, Ohio. After that he attended New York University's film school at the Tisch School of the Arts. There he was a schoolmate of Charlie Kaufman.
After finishing film school, Columbus started in the industry as a screenwriter with Steven Spielberg's Amblin Productions, working on Gremlins (1984), The Goonies (1985) and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). He created and wrote the first episode of the animated series Galaxy High (1986-87).
Columbus made his directorial debut with the teen comedy Adventures in Babysitting (1987). He had huge success with the first Home Alone film (1990) starring Macaulay Culkin.

Return to prominence
In 1995, Columbus started his own production company named 1492 Pictures. This name is intended as a play on Columbus's more famous namesake, Christopher Columbus (1492 is the year of Columbus' arrival to the New World.)
His later directorial work includes Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Bicentennial Man (1999), the first two Harry Potter films and Rent (2005), an adaptation of the popular Broadway musical.
Commercially, he has been hugely successful, despite the occasional flop, but like his one-time mentor, Steven Spielberg, he has met with critical accusations of excessive sentimentality and catering to children.
Chris Columbus had been rumored to direct the sixth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince; but David Yates, the director of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, has retained the position. He may direct the seventh film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
As of August 2006, Columbus optioned the film rights to Christopher Moore's best-selling novel A Dirty Job.
Columbus lives in San Francisco, California.

Gregor Verbinski (b. March 16, 1964), is an American film director and writer.

Biography
He was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. His father, Vic Verbinski, was of Polish descent and worked as a nuclear physicist at the Oak Ridge Lab. In 1967 the Verbinski family moved to Southern California, where a young Gregor grew up in the town of La Jolla. Gregor was the third of four children (Loraine, Diane, Gregor and Steven), his parents Vic and Laurette were a constant presence in their children's lives. Gregor was an active Boy Scout and surfed regularly. He went to Torrey Pines Elementary, Muirlands Junior High, and La Jolla High before attending UCLA Film School. His first band Thelonius Monster included drummer Danny Hiefetz, he also played in the local band "The Drivers", and Allstar band "The Cylon Boys Choir". His first films were a series of 8mm films called "The Driver Files" circa 1979, when he was a young teen. Although most associate Verbinski with feature films, he started his career directing music videos for bands like Bad Religion, 24-7 Spyz and Monster Magnet working at Palomar Pictures. This was not surprising to his friends in LA, since he also played music for two obscure punk bands called The Little Kings, produced by famed underground tattoo artist Marc "Rude" Hoffman, and the Daredevils, which included then-departed member of Bad Religion Brett Gurewitz.
Verbinski moved from music videos to commercials, where he worked for many brand names including Nike, Coca-Cola, Canon, Skittles and United Airlines.
One of his most famous commercials was for Budweiser, featuring frogs who croak the brand name. For his efforts in commercials, Verbinski won four Clio Awards and one Cannes advertising Silver Lion.

Film career
After completing a short film, The Ritual (which he both wrote and directed), Verbinski made his feature film directing debut with his comedy flick, Mouse Hunt. The film was a hit globally and he soon followed up the success with the action/comedy The Mexican, starring Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. The film received mixed reviews, and performed modestly at the box-office, earning $68 million domestically which was quite meager considering its star power (it was technically successful due to its moderately low $38 million budget). Verbinski followed it up with the Japanese horror film remake The Ring (2002), which struck gold globally, grossing well over $200 million worldwide. Verbinski also had a directorial hand in The Time Machine that year, temporarily taking over for an exhausted Simon Wells. Verbinski directed some of the underground Morlock sequences and is given a Thanks to credit in the film.
He then directed the majorly successful Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl which earned over $600 million at the international box office.
His next film was The Weather Man which starred Nicolas Cage. The film received mixed to positive reviews but was a box office failure.
In March 2005 he started filming the sequels Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The former then became his biggest success so far, becoming the third film ever to gross over $1 billion at the international box.
His future project will be an adaption of William Monahan's novel The LIGHTHOUSE, is a story about an artist running away from the Mafia who hides in a lighthouse, where kooky characters live in. He will also direct Butterfly, about a man trying to drive his wife insane
Verbinski graduated with his BFA in Film from UCLA in 1987.

Peter Jackson CNZM (born October 31, 1961) is an Academy Award-winning New Zealand filmmaker best known as the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which he, along with Fran Walsh, his long time partner, and Philippa Boyens, adapted from the novels by J. R. R. Tolkien. He is also known for his 2005 remake of King Kong.
Jackson first gained attention with his "splatstick" horror comedies, and came to prominence with success and critical acclaim for Heavenly Creatures, for which he shared an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen with Walsh.

Biography

Early life
Jackson was born on 31 October 1961 in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, an only child to Bill and Joan Jackson, both of whom were immigrants from England. As a child, Jackson was a film fan, growing up on Ray Harryhausen films as well as Thunderbirds and using his parents' Super 8 cine-camera. Citing King Kong as his favourite film at age 9, he attempted to remake it with his own stop-motion models.
Jackson started his career in film as a fanatical hobbyist, creating small films with simple technical means and with the help of his friends. He had no formal training in film-making, and was turned down for a job with the National Film Unit, the government body which produced publicity and tourist films about New Zealand. Eventually, Jackson learned about author J. R. R. Tolkien, after watching the first adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, although he learned that it ended half way through the story. After watching the film, he decided to go read Tolkien's books, in order to learn more about Tolkien's world and characters. He then got a series of other jobs which funded his early experiments in film-making. All shooting was done in the weekends as Jackson was working full-time. One of these early weekend films was to grow into his first feature film, Bad Taste, a movie about some aliens that come to earth with the desire of farming humans for food. He used several special effects, one of which consisted of some muesli hot cereal in a bowl mixed with green food colouring.

Low-budget splatter
Over four years (from 1983 to 1987) the horror comedy Bad Taste grew from the originally planned 10 minute short to a 90-minute feature film. Jackson and his crew took the end result to the Cannes Film Festival, received critical acclaim and sold the rights to twelve countries. This allowed him to start a professional career as a film director. During post-production on Bad Taste, Jackson also met Fran Walsh who would one day become his wife and mother of his son Billy and his daughter Katie.
The success of Bad Taste attracted funding for Jackson's subsequent films. His second production was Meet the Feebles (1989), a warped musical comedy starring Muppet-style puppets. This was Jackson's first collaboration with Richard Taylor, who would subsequently work on all Jackson's movies except Forgotten Silver. Although not a horror movie, Meet the Feebles is in keeping with the other movies from this period - like Jackson's other early work, Feebles features gross-out humour (including the use of vomit), adult themes and recognisably Wellington locations.
Jackson's next project was Braindead (1992) (released in North America as Dead Alive). Originally a Spanish co-production, this splatter comedy was a reversal of the usual horror plot - rather than keeping the zombies out of his place of refuge, the hero attempts to keep them inside, while maintaining a facade of normality.

'Arthouse'
Released in 1994, Heavenly Creatures was a major change for Jackson in terms of both style and tone. The film depicts the story of the Parker-Hulme murder in which two teenage girls in 1950s Christchurch murdered the mother of one of the girls. Based on his previous filmography, many New Zealanders were apprehensive about how Jackson would treat his subject matter. The early scene in which Parker and Hulme run screaming and covered in blood may be an allusion to these early films, but most commentators felt that Jackson and his co-writer Fran Walsh had dealt with the events sensitively and appropriately. It received considerable critical acclaim, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
The following year Jackson released a 'mockumentary', Forgotten Silver (1995). This claimed to tell the story of (fictional) New Zealand film pioneer Colin McKenzie who had supposedly invented colour film and 'talkies', and attempted to make an epic film of Salome before being killed in the Spanish Civil War and forgotten by the world. The film was screened on New Zealand television as if it were fact, and its spoof nature was only revealed the following day. Many people were outraged at being fooled, and the number of people who believed the increasingly improbable story is testimony to Jackson's skill at playing on the New Zealand national myth of a nation of innovators and forgotten trail-blazers.
In the meantime, Jackson and Walsh welcomed their children, Billy (1995) and Katie (1996) into the world.

Breaking into Hollywood
The acclaim received by Heavenly Creatures led to Jackson's directing the Robert Zemeckis production, The Frighteners (1996), starring Michael J. Fox. This was a commercial failure and most critics were disappointed that it displayed neither the anarchistic humor of Jackson's early movies nor the sensitivity of Heavenly Creatures. Work on a remake of King Kong was shelved by Universal Studios (partly because Mighty Joe Young, another giant gorilla movie, had already gone into production). When pre-production was set on halt, Jackson and Walsh focused on another of Jackson's dreams: to make a film of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings
Jackson earned the rights to a film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's novel in 1997 from Saul Zaentz. Originally working with Miramax towards a two-film production, he was soon put under pressure to render the story as a single film, and eventually made a new deal with New Line for a trilogy in 1998.
Principal photography went on from October 11, 1999 to December 22, 2000 with Jackson monitoring as many as seven units across New Zealand locations and sets. With the benefit of post-production on each film for their December releases, the films were huge successes and sent Jackson's popularity soaring.
Jackson's mother Joan died 3 days before the release of the first movie in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. There was a special showing of the film after her funeral.
Following The Return of the King, Jackson lost a large amount of weight (over 50 lb/22.5 kg) to the point of being unrecognizable to some fans. According to the British Daily Telegraph he attributes his weight loss to his diet. He said, "I just got tired of being overweight and unfit, so I changed my diet from hamburgers to yogurt and muesli and it seems to work."

King Kong
Universal Studios signed Peter Jackson for his first film following The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong - the film that inspired him to become a film director when he was 9 years old. He was reportedly being paid a fee of US$20 million upfront, the highest salary ever paid to a film director in advance of production, against a 20 percent take of the box-office rentals (the portion of the price of the ticket that goes to the film distributor, in this case Universal). The film was released on December 14, 2005, and grossed around US$550 million worldwide. Its release on home video and DVD was even bigger, as it set records for a Universal Pictures DVD in sales figures.

Current and future projects
Jackson recently directed a short film entitled "Crossing the Line" to test a new model of digital Cinema camera RED ONE. The film takes place during WWI, and was shot in two days. "Crossing the Line" was shown at NAB 2007 (National Association of Broadcasters) in 4K resolution. Clips of the film can be found at Reduser.net.
He will produce a version of Alice Sebold's bestseller, The Lovely Bones, which he will be writing and directing and which he has said will be a welcome relief from the larger-scale epics and bears some similarities to Heavenly Creatures.
He also has announced that he will produce and direct a Tintin movie along with Steven Spielberg using 3-D animation combined with motion capture to bring the project to the silver screen, to be released in 2009.
Jackson has begun producing. He was set to make a $128 million movie version of the sci-fi video game Halo, but it was scrapped when fiscal backers withdrew their support. Additionally, Jackson will produce a remake of The Dam Busters in 2008, along with Sir David Frost as Executive Producer. Jackson has also earned the rights to a film adaptation of the fantasy novel series Temeraire, a novel about dragons being used in combat in the Napoleonic Wars and the story of a dragon named Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence, during that time period, written by Naomi Novik. Dragons and lengthy battle scenes, which the book has plenty of, are some of Jackson's interests, though it remains to be seen if he will direct it. Also he will produce District 9, a sci-fi project which Neill Blomkamp will direct, after the adaptions for Halo is done going through difficulties due to creative differences with attached studios. The script is written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, Sony Pictures will distribute the film.
Jackson's involvement in the making of a film version of The Hobbit, along with another possible The Lord of the Rings prequel, has had a long and chequered history. In November 2006, a letter from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh mentioned that due to an ongoing legal dispute between Wingnut Films (Jackson's production company) and New Line Cinema, they would likely not be directing the film. However, in response, MGM spokesman Jeff Pryor has stated that "We still believe this matter of Peter Jackson directing The Hobbit is far from closed." As MGM owns the distribution rights to The Hobbit film, this may carry some weight. New Line Cinema's head, Robert Shaye, said that the studio won't work with Jackson on that film or any other. "He will never make any movie with New Line Cinema again while I'm still working for the company," Shaye said. In response to this statement, an online boycott of New Line Cinema was started in the hopes of compelling New Line Cinema to renegotiate with Peter Jackson. Shaye's comments marked the first time a New Line executive has commented publicly on the franchise since Jackson announced that he was pulled out of the project and also appeared to harden New Line's position against Jackson. In August 2007 though, after a string of flops, Shaye was trying to repair his working relationship with Jackson. When asked if it was true that company insiders had been in talks with Jackson's reps, Shaye replied, "Yes, that's a fair statement...I really respect and admire Peter and would love for him to be creatively involved in some way in The Hobbit." On December 18, 2007, it was announced that Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema had reached agreement to make two prequels, one based on The Hobbit which will be relesed in 2010 and 2011. Jackson will serve as executive producer. Guillermo del Toro is in final negotiations to direct.
Jackson will make three games with Microsoft Game Studios, a partnership announced on September 27, 2006, at X06. Specifically, Jackson and Microsoft are teaming together to form a new studio called Wingnut Interactive. In collaboration with Bungie Studios, Jackson will co-write, co-design and co-produce a new game taking place in the Halo universe - tentatively called Halo: Chronicles.

Charitable activity
He has given NZ$500,000 to stem cell research.
He purchased a church in Wellington for approximately $10 million, saving it from demolition.

Style
Jackson is well known for an attention to detail, a macabre sense of humour and a general playfulness to the point where The Lord of the Rings conceptual designer Alan Lee jokingly remarked "the film is almost incidental really".
Unlike some other New Zealand film directors, Jackson has remained in his native country to make films. This has been the genesis of several production and support companies. Most of Jackson's assets are on the Miramar Peninsula in his home town of Wellington and much of his filming occurs in and around the city. New Line Cinema honoured him by agreeing to hold the world premiere of The Return of the King in the city's iconic Embassy Theatre, which Jackson helped restore.
He was an early user of computer enhancement technology and provided digital special effects to a number of Hollywood films by use of telecommunications and satellite links to transmit raw images and the final results across the Pacific Ocean.
Jackson was noted perfectionist on the Lord of the Rings shoot where he demanded numerous takes of scenes, requesting additional takes by repeatedly saying, "one more for luck".. He was also known to insist that miniatures used in the films were made to exacting, detailed specifications, even on features that would never appear in the film.
Jackson is also renowned within the New Zealand film industry for his insistence on "coverage" - shooting a scene from as many angles as possible, thereby only creating his final vision in the editing process when he has as many options to choose from as possible. A trademark, perhaps, of his roots in do-it-yourself filmmaking, Jackson has been known to spend days shooting a single scene in order to get as much coverage as possible. This is evident in his work where even scenes featuring simple conversations often feature a wide array of multiple camera angles and shot-sizes as well as zooming closeups on characters' faces. One of his most common visual trademarks is shooting close-ups of actors with wide-angle lenses.

Awards
Jackson won three Academy Awards for The Return of the King, including the Academy Award for Best Director.

Jackson's cameo roles
Jackson usually makes cameo appearances in his own films:
Jackson appears as a bi-plane gunner attacking Kong in New York, reprising the cameo which original King Kong filmmaker Merian C. Cooper made in his 1933 film.
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy includes multiple cameos. In The Fellowship of the Ring Jackson plays Albert Dreary, a drunken, carrot-chomping citizen of Bree. In The Two Towers he plays a spear-throwing defender of Helm's Deep. His significant cameo in The Return of the King is limited to the extended version, where he is seen as the boatswain of a corsair ship in The Return of the King and is accidentally killed by Legolas's "warning shot." (The character is seen very briefly in the theatrical version.) Additionally, though not a cameo in the traditional sense, he also served as a stand-in for Sean Astin in the shot where Samwise Gamgee steps into frame, challenging the monster Shelob.
In The Frighteners, Jackson is a biker bumped into by Frank Bannister.
In Heavenly Creatures, he is a bum that gets kissed by Juliet Hulme.
In Braindead, he is the mortician's assistant.
In the puppet movie Meet the Feebles Jackson has no cameo, making this his only film to date in which he does not appear.
In Bad Taste Jackson has two roles, one of which is Derek.
He has also made cameos in several films not directed by him. In Hot Fuzz (2007), he played a demented Father Christmas, who stabs Nicholas Angel (played by Simon Pegg) in the hand.
Jackson's eldest son Billy (born 1995), has had cameo appearances in every one of his parents' films since his birth, namely The Frighteners (1996), The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and King Kong. His daughter Katie (born 1996) appeared in all the above films, except The Frighteners.
Jackson had a cameo on the HBO show Entourage in the August 5, 2007 episode, "Gary's Desk", in which he offers a business proposal to Eric Murphy, manager to the lead character, Vincent Chase.

Timothy "Tim" William Burton (born August 25, 1958) is an Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated American film director, writer and designer notable for the quirky and sometimes dark atmosphere of his films.

Early life
Burton was born in Burbank, California, the first of two sons to Bill Burton and Jean Erickson. His year of birth is sometimes mistakenly given as 1960, most notably in his own books, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and the picture book of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton described his childhood self as quirky, self-absorbed and highly imaginative. As a child growing up in Burbank, he staged an axe murder with his brother to scare the neighbors, prompting them to call the police. He repeated the prank again with similar results. He found home life and school difficult, often escaping the reality of everyday life by watching horror and low budget films, to which he would later pay tribute in his biography of Edward D. Wood, Jr.. Another film figure of importance in Burton's childhood is Vincent Price, whose films would deeply influence the upcoming director's career. He was inspired early on by Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion films.
After high school, he won a Disney scholarship to attend the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. He studied at the Character Animation program for three years. Burton's first job in animation was working as a cell painter on Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings. Burton was then hired by the Walt Disney Studios as an animator apprentice. Burton's job was to draw for The Fox and the Hound, but he was dissatisfied with the artistic direction of the movie. He later commented on the refusal of Disney to use his design for The Fox and the Hound because his designs made the characters, in opposition to Disney's desires, "look like roadkill." Burton was not happy during his Disney period, but it was then that he wrote and drew the poem and illustrations that would be the basis for his celebrated The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Early career
In 1982, Burton made his first short, Vincent, a six-minute stop-motion film about a young boy who fantasizes that he is his (and Burton's) screen idol Vincent Price, with Price himself providing narration. This was followed by the live-action short Frankenweenie, starring Barret Oliver, Daniel Stern and Shelley Duvall (an early supporter of Burton's work). Shot in black and white and inspired by James Whale's Frankenstein, Frankenweenie features a boy who reanimates his dog Sparky who was hit by a car. Although the film won praise at film festivals, Disney was concerned that the film was too scary for children and, not knowing what to do with it, shelved the film. (Frankenweenie later received a video release in 1992).
Although Burton's work had yet to see wide release, he began to attract the attention of the film industry. Actor/producer Griffin Dunne, approached Burton to direct After Hours (1985), a comedy about a bored word processor who survives a crazy night in SoHo that had already been passed over by Martin Scorsese. However, when financing for The Last Temptation of Christ fell through, Burton bowed out of the project out of respect for Scorsese.

The 1990s

Edward Scissorhands
In 1990, Burton co-wrote (with Caroline Thompson) and directed Edward Scissorhands, re-uniting with Winona Ryder from Beetlejuice. Johnny Depp, a teen idol at the end of the 1980s due primarily to his work on the hit TV series 21 Jump Street, was cast in the title role of Edward, who was the creation of an eccentric and old-fashioned inventor (played by Vincent Price, in his last appearance on screen before his death). Edward looked human, but was left with scissors in the place of hands due to the untimely death of his creator. Set in suburbia (the film was shot in Tampa, Florida), the film is largely seen as Burton's autobiography of his own childhood in the suburb of Burbank. Price at one point is said to have remarked, "Tim is Edward." Johnny Depp wrote a similar comment in the foreword to Mark Salisbury's book, Burton on Burton, regarding his first meeting with Burton over the casting of the film. Edward is considered Burton's best movie by many fans and critics. Following this collaboration with Burton, Depp went on to star in Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Batman Returns
Although Warner Brothers had declined to make the more personal Scissorhands even after the success of Batman, Burton finally agreed to direct the sequel for Warner Brothers on the condition that he would be granted total control. The result was Batman Returns which featured Michael Keaton returning as the Dark Knight, and a new triad of villains: Danny DeVito (as the Penguin), Michelle Pfeiffer (as Catwoman), and Christopher Walken (as evil corporate tycoon, Max Shreck). Darker and considerably more personal than its predecessor, concerns were raised that the film was too scary for children. Audiences were even more uncomfortable at the film's overt sexuality, personified by the sleek, fetish-inspired styling of Catwoman's costume. One critic remarked, "too many villains spoiled the Batman," highlighting Burton's decision to focus the storyline more on the villains instead of Batman. The film also polarized the fanbase, with some loving the darkness and quirkiness, while others felt it wasn't true to the core aspects of the source material. Tim Burton made many changes to the Penguin which would be applied to the Penguin in both comics and television. While in the comics, he was an ordinary man, Burton created a freak of nature resembling a penguin with webbed, flipper-like fingers, a hooked, beak-like nose, and a penguin-like body. Batman Returns was made for $80 million, equivalent to over $119.8 million in 2007, and grossed $282.8 million world-wide, equivalent to over $423.6 million in 2007.
Burton then went on to do preliminary work on the third installment in the franchise. Val Kilmer was cast as the title character (after Michael Keaton turned down the offer to reprise his previous role after Burton's departure from the project), Chris O'Donnell was cast as Robin, Jim Carrey was cast as the Riddler (after Robin Williams turned down the part), Tommy Lee Jones was cast as Two-Face, and Nicole Kidman was cast as love interest Dr. Chase Meridian. Warner Brothers ultimately threw out Burton after they realized the tone of the film was to be similar to Batman Returns. Burton left the Batman franchise (but returned as a producer for the Joel Schumacher-directed Batman Forever (1995), a movie which he said had a title "like a tattoo you get when you're on drugs").

The Nightmare Before Christmas
Next, Burton wrote and produced (but did not direct, due to schedule constraints on Batman Returns) The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), originally meant to be a children's book in rhyme. The film was directed by Henry Selick and written by Michael McDowell and Caroline Thompson, based on Burton's original story, world and characters. The film continues to have a wide cult following. Burton collaborated with Selick again for James and the Giant Peach (1996), which Burton co-produced. The movie helped to generate a renewed interest in stop-motion animation.
A deleted scene from The Nightmare Before Christmas features a group of vampires playing hockey on the frozen pond with the decapitated head of producer Tim Burton. The head was later replaced with a Jack-o'-lantern.

Ed Wood
His next film, Ed Wood (1994), was of a much smaller scale, depicting the life of Ed Wood Jr, a filmmaker sometimes called "the worst director of all time." Starring Johnny Depp in the title role, the film is a homage to the low-budget sci-fi and horror films of Burton's childhood, and handles its comical protagonist and his motley band of collaborators with surprising fondness and sensitivity. Due to creative squabbles during the making of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Danny Elfman declined to score Ed Wood, and the assignment went to Howard Shore. While a commercial failure at the time of its release, Ed Wood was well received by critics and has since gathered a considerable fanbase, as well as helped revive the public interest for the films of Ed Wood Jr. Martin Landau also received an Academy Award, in the Best Supporting Actor category, for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi.

Mars Attacks!
Elfman and Burton reunited for Mars Attacks! (1996). Based on a popular science fiction trading card series, the film was a hybrid of 1950s sci-fi flicks and 1970s all-star disaster flicks -- an anarchic cacophony of clever satire and goofy mayhem. Coincidence made it an inadvertent spoof of the blockbuster, Independence Day, made around the same time and released five months earlier. Although the film boasted an all-star cast, including Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Michael J. Fox, Sarah Jessica Parker, Natalie Portman, Lukas Haas, Glenn Close and Rod Steiger, among others, the film received mixed reviews by American critics and was mostly ignored by American audiences. It was however more successful abroad, and later managed to gather an American fan base from its television airings and DVD release.

Sleepy Hollow
Sleepy Hollow, released in the autumn of 1999, was a return to vintage Burton, with a supernatural setting, unique sets and another offbeat performance by Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, now a detective with an interest in forensic science rather than the schoolteacher of Washington Irving's original tale. With Hollow, Burton paid homage to the old horror movies from English company Hammer Film Productions. Hammer veteran Christopher Lee is given a cameo role. A host of Burton regulars appeared in supporting roles (Michael Gough, Jeffrey Jones, and Christopher Walken, among others) and Christina Ricci was cast as Katrina van Tassel. Mostly well-received by critics, and with a special mention to Elfman's Gothic score, the film won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction, as well as two BAFTAs for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design. A box office success, Sleepy Hollow was also a turning point for Burton. Along with change in his personal life (separation from Lisa Marie), Burton changed radically in style for his next project, leaving the haunted forests and colorful outcasts behind to go on to directing Planet of the Apes which, as Burton had repeatedly noted, was "not a remake" of the earlier film.

Tim Burton's Lost In Oz
Conceived as an original television series based on the immortal works of L. Frank Baum, "Tim Burton's Lost In Oz" was never aired. Though a pilot script was written by Trey Callaway with direct input from Burton as an executive producer and a number of key scenes were filmed by veteran television producer/director Michael Katleman, budgetary constraints ultimately prevented the project from being fully realized.

The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy: and Other Stories
His book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy: and Other Stories was published in 1996. The collection of verse is about misfit children such as Oyster Boy, Match Girl, Stainboy (which later became short animations), the Girl Who Turned into a Bed, and other such outcasts. The book was published by the publishing company Faber and Faber, which also published the original artwork of Sleepy Hollow in 1999.

The 2000s

Planet of the Apes
Planet of the Apes was a commercial success, grossing $68 million in its opening weekend. It was however panned by critics and widely considered inferior to the first adaptation of the book . The main criticism was that the movie went for a more watered down "popcorn" feel than the dark, cerebral and nihilistic tone of the 1968 film. The film was a significant departure from Burton's usual style, and there was much subsequent debate about whether the film was really Burton's, or if he was just a "hired gun" who did what he was asked. Burton reportedly clashed with the studio during the whole making of the film, once going as far as abruptly leaving the set for the day. There were also many reports about last minute changes in the movie. Despite the commercial success of the movie and an ending that clearly suggested the possibility of a sequel, apparently there are no intentions from the studio or Burton to make another Apes movie.

Recent Years
Burton went on to direct Big Fish (2003) which received four Golden Globe nominations, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Corpse Bride (2005), both featuring Johnny Depp in the lead roles, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature Film. Charlie and Bride were Burton's most critically-praised movies in years. Charlie was a huge box office success that made over $207 million domestically.
In 2006 Burton began early work on the film Believe It or Not. By June, Burton announced that he would be postponing his work on this film to instead concentrate on the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This would become yet another collaboration with Johnny Depp, who signed on to play the murderous barber. By June 19th, 2007 Burton announced that he was withdrawing completely from the Believe It or Not film.
On February 5, 2007, Burton started principal production on Sweeney Todd, from a screenplay by John Logan. The Dreamworks/Warner Bros. production was released on December 21, 2007. So far, Burton's work on Sweeney Todd has won the National Board of Review Award for Best Director and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director.

Future projects
In November 2007, Burton signed a deal with Disney to direct two 3-D films. The first will be a motion capture adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, which is currently in pre-production. It will start filming in May 2008. Afterwards, he will remake Frankenweenie as a stop-motion film. John August has announced that he will start writing a live action film and a stop-motion film for Burton as soon as the writers' strike is over.

Personal life
Burton currently lives with Helena Bonham Carter with whom he has a son, Billy Ray Burton born October 4, 2003, and a daughter, whose name is said to be Indiana Rose, born December 15, 2007. Burton and Bonham Carter live in adjoining houses connected by a hallway, in London. The couple have also have a residence in the town of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire.
Burton made close friend Johnny Depp one of the godfathers of Billy Ray Burton soon after his birth. In Burton On Burton, Depp wrote the intro, stating, "What more can I say about him? He is a brother, a friend, my godson's father. He is a unique and brave soul, someone that I would go to the ends of the earth for, and I know, full and well, he would do the same for me."

Trademarks
A black-and-white tiled floor appear in each movie.
Worked into the designs of many things seen on screen are elegant curls. The ends of lines often taper off into thin spirals at the ends. The most famous of these curls is the hill in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Frequently uses the name "Edward". Examples include Edward Scissorhands, Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney) in Big Fish, and Ed Wood in Ed Wood.
Distinctive skeleton motif seems to show influences from artist Edward Burra (http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/N/N05/N05005_9.jpg).
Frequently works with actor Johnny Depp. The two collaborated in the films Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, and Sweeney Todd. Burton wanted to cast Depp in his movie Mars Attacks! (in the role that eventually went to Michael J Fox).
Frequently works with actress and fiancee Helena Bonham Carter.
Frequently shows dead dogs, clowns, falling snow, black and white checkered floors, twisted trees, jack-o'-lanterns, scarecrows, striped snakes, butterflies, black and white stripes, and redheads in his films.
Several films, such as Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride and Edward Scissorhands are set at Christmas or during winter and feature the giving of presents.
When presenting the film House of Wax with Vincent Price, he said his favorite scene was watching the wax figures melt and their eyeballs fall out in such a manner. He got to express that excitement when he directed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also got to work with Vincent Price by casting him in Edward Scissorhands.
His films frequently have dinner table scenes. See Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride.
His films often have gothic subtexts. See Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride.
Personalizes the production logo in the beginning of his films.
Opening credits usually utilize a tracking shot. They also tend to go either on, through, or into something.
His long standing collaboration with Danny Elfman, who scored all his films since Pee-wee's Big Adventure, except Ed Wood, which featured the noted composer Howard Shore and Tim's new film Sweeney Todd, based on a musical with already existing music and lyrics by renowned Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim. See also List of noted film producer and composer collaborations.
His main characters tend to be outsiders, and are usually shy, with a pale complexion and unruly black hair, similar to his own.
Many of his characters are given a back story regarding their relationships with their fathers, often as a means of explaining erratic behavior. Batman, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Edward Scissorhands are some prominent examples.
Many of his stop-motion film main characters have long legs and small feet.

Other Appearances
A caricature of Burton appeared on the Plucky Duck Show episode "Return of Batduck". In the episode, the titular character hunts down Burton and attempts to score a role in Batman Returns. Burton did not provide his voice for the episode; Maurice LaMarche (who, incidentally, provided the voice-over for Vincent D'Onofrio's portrayal of Orson Welles in Ed Wood) took the role.

Samuel Marshall Raimi (born October 23, 1959) is an American film director, producer, actor and writer. He is best known for directing the classic cult-horror film The Evil Dead and the blockbuster Spider-Man films.

Biography

Early life
Raimi, the fourth of five children, was born in Royal Oak, Michigan, the son of Celia Barbara (n?e Abrams), who owned lingerie shops, and Leonard Ronald Raimi, who owned home furnishing stores. Raimi was raised in Conservative Judaism; his ancestors immigrated from Russia and Hungary. Raimi's eldest sibling, Sander, died in a swimming accident in 1968 at age fifteen. His elder brother, Ivan Raimi, is an emergency room doctor and screenwriter who sometimes collaborates with Sam. His brother, Ted Raimi, is an actor and played J. Jonah Jameson's assistant Hoffman in all three Spider-Man movies. His older sister, Andrea Raimi Rubin, is a court reporter and is not involved in the film industry. Raimi attended Wylie E. Groves High School, and Michigan State University and majored in English, leaving after three semesters to film The Evil Dead.

Film
Raimi became fascinated with making films when his father brought a movie camera home one day and he began to make Super 8 movies with childhood friend Bruce Campbell. In college, he teamed up with his brother's roommate Robert Tapert and Campbell to shoot Within the Woods (1978), a 32-minute horror film which raised $350,000, as well as the short comedic film It's Murder!. Through family, friends, and a network of investors Raimi was able to finance production of the highly successful horror film The Evil Dead (1981) which became a major hit and effectively launched Raimi's career to new levels. He began work on his second film Crimewave (1985), intended as a live-action comic book-the film was not successful, due in part to unwanted studio intervention. Raimi returned to the horror genre with the seminal Evil Dead II (which toned down the savageness of the original in favour of slapstick, showcasing his love of the Three Stooges). A long-time comic book buff, he attempted to adapt "The Shadow" into a movie, but was unable to secure the rights. So he created his own super-hero, Darkman (1990). The film was his first major studio picture, and was only moderately successful, but he was still able to secure funding for Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness, which turned away almost totally from horror in favour of fantasy and comedy elements.
In the 1990s Raimi moved into other genres, directing such films as the western The Quick and the Dead, the critically-acclaimed crime thriller A Simple Plan (1998) (starring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton), and the romantic drama For Love of the Game (1999) (starring Kevin Costner). Raimi achieved great commercial success with the blockbuster Spider-Man (2002), which was adapted from the comic book series of the same name. The movie has grossed over $800 million worldwide, spawning two sequels: Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3. After the completion of the third Spider-Man film, Raimi is slated to direct a film adaptation of The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Prior to directing the Spider-Man films, Raimi lobbied to direct Batman Forever when Tim Burton was ousted from the director's chair, but was rejected in favor of Joel Schumacher, whose reputation at the time outshone Raimi's.
Raimi frequently collaborates with Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning when Joel was one of the editors of Evil Dead. The Coens co-wrote Crimewave and The Hudsucker Proxy with Raimi in the mid-1980s (though Hudsucker was not filmed for almost a decade). Raimi made cameo appearances in both Miller's Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy. The Coen brothers gave Raimi advice on shooting in snow for A Simple Plan, based on their experiences with Fargo.
He has also worked in front of the camera with Miller's Crossing as a coldblooded gunman, The Stand as a dimwitted hitman, John Carpenter's Body Bags in an unusual role as a gas station attendant (all three roles saw Raimi dying in distinct ways), and Indian Summer in what is perhaps his biggest role as a bumbling assistant to Alan Arkin. He also produced The Grudge, The Grudge 2 and The Grudge 3.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Raimi has expressed an interest in directing a film version of The Hobbit, the prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Television
In addition to film, Raimi has worked in television, producing such series as Xena: Warrior Princess, featuring his younger brother Ted Raimi and long-time friend Bruce Campbell, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, American Gothic, Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of All Trades. In 2006, Raimi agreed to direct a TV version of Terry Goodkind's best-selling The Sword of Truth fantasy series.

Recurring trademarks, motifs, and partners
In his film and television projects, Raimi's brother Ted Raimi and his friend Bruce Campbell often appear in on-screen roles, though these appearances are often just short cameos. The trio have been working together since their college days. Both Ted and Bruce have appeared in all three Evil Dead and Spider-Man movies, as well as Xena: Warrior Princess, which Sam produced. In the Dead films, Campbell plays the recurring star role of Ash, while Ted played various small parts every time. In the Spider Man films, however, Ted plays Daily Bugle advertising manager Ted Hoffman, while Campbell has played different roles every time. In Xena, Ted and Bruce played the recurring roles of Joxer and Autolocus.
Raimi occasionally appears on-screen in his own movies, usually in similar fashion to the cameos made by his idol Alfred Hitchcock: A silhouette behind a projection screen (Spider-Man, in the wrestling scene), a passer-by with some kind of physical interaction with the film's protagonist (Spider-Man 2, as the student whose bookbag hits Peter Parker in the back of the head), a hitchhiker in The Evil Dead. Raimi also wears a suit with white shirt and tie on-set in another homage to Hitchcock.
Raimi often works with film editor Bob Murawski, a fellow Michigan State University alumnus; among Raimi's films edited by Murawski include the Spider-Man movies, The Gift, and Army of Darkness.
Sam Raimi has included a 1973 yellow Oldsmobile Delta 88 automobile (nicknamed "The Classic") in every film except The Quick and the Dead, although it was claimed by Bruce Campbell at Comic-con 2005 that it was but had been disguised as a covered wagon. A bottle of Maker's Mark also appears regularly in his movies.
Raimi also displays an American flag in his movies. All three Spider-man films includes scenes of the American flag.
Other Raimi screen-framing trademarks include:
A distinctive camera shot where the camera follows a moving object (such as an arrow or a projectile weapon) at high speeds creating a first-person point of view from the object itself;
A rapid dolly zoom to bring a far-off object suddenly into the center of the shot or to pull back from the main focal object to show what is happening around the perimeter (sometimes called "push-pull");
Montage sequences with overlapping close-up shots to establish a set of similar actions over elapsing time.
Manic and hyperkinetic, comic-book-like visuals and intense action sequences, generally characterized by brava visual imagination and ingeunity, and often complex camera techniques, frequently executed with a minimal budget.
In the Making The Amazing documentary on the Spider-Man 2 DVD, both Tobey Maguire and Bruce Campbell jokingly describe Raimi's penchant for "abusing" actors: In order to get realistic closeups of a character getting hit by debris, Raimi usually stands just off-camera throwing items, swinging tree branches, etc., at the actor who is at the center of the shot. Scenes from the documentary show that Raimi is the one throwing popcorn at Peter Parker during the walk to the wrestling ring in Spider-Man and tossing gold coins around during the bank robbery scene in Spider-Man 2.

Personal life
Raimi has been married since 1993 to Gillian Deale Greene, daughter of actor Lorne Greene. They have five children. Three of the Raimis' children (daughter Emma Rose and sons Lorne and Henry) appeared as extras in Spider-Man 3 during the movie's climactic final battle.
On occasion, Raimi collaborates with his elder brother Ivan, a doctor and occasional scriptwriter. Together, they co-wrote the screenplays for Darkman and Army of Darkness. Ivan also contributed to story and script development for the three Spider-Man films.

James Francis Cameron (born August 16, 1954) is an Academy Award-winning Canadian/American director, producer and screenwriter. He is noted for his action/science fiction films, which are often highly innovative and financially successful. Thematically, James Cameron's films generally explore the relationship between man and technology. Cameron directed the film Titanic, which went on to become the top-grossing film of all time, with a worldwide gross of over US$1.8 billion. He also created the Terminator franchise.

Background
Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada, the son of Shirley, an artist and nurse, and Phillip Cameron, an electrical engineer. He grew up in Chippawa, Ontario, and in 1971 his family moved to Brea, California. There he studied physics at Cal State-Fullerton, but his passion for filmmaking would draw him to the film archive of UCLA at every opportunity. After seeing the film Star Wars, Cameron quit his job as a truck driver to enter the film industry.

Early career
He started in the film industry as a screenwriter, then moved into art direction and effects for films such as Battle Beyond the Stars and Escape from New York. Working with producer Roger Corman, Cameron landed his first directorial job in 1981 for the film Piranha II: The Spawning, shot at Grand Cayman Island for the underwater diving sequences, and in Rome, Italy for most of the interior scenes. He was originally hired as the special effects director (and his hand in story-writing can be suspected under the H. A. Milton pseudonym on the original script), and took over the direction when the original director left.

Major films

The Terminator
During his stay in Rome, he fell ill and had a nightmare about a machine emerging from a fire to kill him. While recovering, Cameron materialized the idea for The Terminator. He finally completed a screenplay, and decided to sell it so that he could direct the movie. However, the production companies he contacted, while expressing interest in the project, were unwilling to let a first-time director make the movie. Finally, Cameron found a company called Hemdale Pictures, which was willing to let him direct. His soon-to-be-then-wife, Gale Anne Hurd, who had started her own production company, Pacific Western Productions, had previously worked with Cameron in Roger Corman's company and agreed to buy Cameron's screenplay for one dollar, on the condition that Cameron direct the film. Hurd was signed on as producer, and Cameron finally got his first break as director. Orion Pictures would distribute the film.
Initially, for the role of the Terminator, Cameron wanted someone who wasn't exceptionally muscular, and who could "blend into" a normal crowd. Lance Henriksen, who had starred in Piranha II: The Spawning, was considered for the titular role, but when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cameron first met over lunch to discuss Schwarzenegger playing the role of Kyle Reese, both came to the conclusion that the cyborg villain would be the more compelling role for the Austrian bodybuilder; Henriksen got the smaller part of LAPD detective Hal Vukovi