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Gene Hackman is a two-time Academy Award-winning American actor that came to fame during the 1970s after his role as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and continued to appear in Hollywood films playing major roles. He was born in San Bernardino, California and his family moved from one place to another until finally settling in Danville, Illinois.

Hackman’s parents divorced in 1943 and he left home at 16 to join the United States Marine Corps where he served three years as a field radio operator. After finishing his service, he moved to New York, working in several minor jobs before moving to study television production and journalism at the University of Illinois. Hackman decided to become an actor at 26 and joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California where he forged a friendship with another aspiring actor, Dustin Hoffman. Hackman moved to New York City in the 1960s and began performing in several off-Broadway plays.

In 1971, he won the Best Actor Academy Award for his memorable performance as New York City police officer Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. By the end of the 1980s, he was well-respected actor and alternated between leading and supporting roles, earning a Best Actor nomination for Mississippi Burning. In 1992, he played a sadistic sheriff in the western Unforgiven directed by Clint Eastwood and earned an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

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Diane Lane was born in New York City to Colleen Farrington, a nightclub singer and Playboy centerfold, and Burton Lane, a Manhattan drama coach who ran an acting workshop with John Cassavetes. She began acting professionally at the age of six, appearing in an acclaimed production of Medea, and at age 12, she had a role in Joseph Papp’s production of The Cherry Orchard with Meryl Streep.

Lane made her feature film debut at 13 opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance. A year later, she was featured on the cover of Time magazine declaring her one of Hollywood’s “Whiz Kids.” She was one of the few child actors to make a successful transition into adult roles with Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club. Both films were commercial and critical failures and she took three years off.

During the 1990s, Lane alternated between conventional studio films (Judge Dredd) and independent films (My New Gun). Her strongest film to come out of this decade was 1999’s A Walk on the Moon, opposite Viggo Mortensen. Lane delivered the best performance of her career as a housewife who has an adulterous affair with a mysterious book dealer in Unfaithful. She earned widespread praise for her performance, including Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.

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David Lynch is an American director, screenwriter, producer, painter, and composer. Over a lengthy career, he has employed a distinctive and unorthodox approach to narrative filmmaking, which has become instantly recognizable to many audiences and critics worldwide. His films are known for surreal, nightmarish and dreamlike images and meticulously crafted sound design.

Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana and raised throughout the Pacific Northwest and Durham, North Carolina. Intending to become an artist, Lynch attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and made several short films there. After getting a grant from the American Film Institute, he moved to Los Angeles and made his first feature-length film Eraserhead over the next five years with family and friends working in front of and behind the camera. This film brought him to the attention of Mel Brooks who hired him to direct The Elephant Man.

After the commercial and critical failure of science fiction epic Dune, Lynch made Blue Velvet, which was controversial and introduced him into the mainstream, diving critics and audiences alike. He went on to collaborate with television producer Mark Frost on the show Twin Peaks for ABC and it became a popular culture phenomenon. Lynch adapted Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. After the show was canceled in 1991, he followed it up with a prequel entitled, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which flopped at the box office. Lynch received widespread critical and commercial acclaim for Mulholland Drive.

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His Girl Friday is a 1940 screwball comedy and a remake of the 1931 film The Front Page, itself an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of their play of the same name. The “twist” to His Girl Friday is that one of the leading roles was converted from a man to a woman.

The film stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell and features Ralph Bellamy. It was directed by Howard Hawks and is noted for the rapid-fire pace of its dialogue. He had a very difficult time casting the lead female role. His first choice was Carol Lombard but Columbia Pictures could not afford her. Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Margaret Sullivan, Ginger Rogers, and Irene Dunne were offered the role, but turned it down.

His Girl Friday premiered in New York City on January 11, 1940 and went into general release on January 18. The film is noted for the rapid-fire pace of the repartee, using overlapping dialogue to make conversations sound more realistic. The film was ranked #19 on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years, 100 Laughs,” and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

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Sergio Leone was born in Rome, Italy to cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone and actress Edvige Valcarenghi. He started working in the film industry at the age of 18. Leone is well-known for his spaghetti western films and his style of juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots and original music soundtracks.

Leone began writing screenplays in the 1950s, primarily for the so-called “sword and sandal” historical epics, which were popular at the time. He also worked as an assistant director on several large-scale and high-profile productions, notably Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur. His film, A Fistful of Dollars, was an early trend-setter in a genre that came to be known as the “spaghetti western.” The film is also notable for its establishment of Clint Eastwood as a star, who until that time had been an American television actor with few roles to his name.

Leone’s next two films – For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – completed what has become known as The Man with No Name trilogy (aka the Dollars trilogy), with each film being more financially successful and technically proficient than its predecessor. Based on the success of the Dollars trilogy, Leone was invited to the United States in 1967 to direct what he hoped would be his masterwork, Once Upon a Time in the West. He turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather, in favor of working on another gangster story, Once Upon a Time in America.

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The Thin Red Line is a 1998 war film which tells a fictional story of United States forces during the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II with the focus on the men of C Company, most notably Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) and his conflicted feelings about fighting in the war; Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) and his desire to win the battle at any cost in order to get a promotion; and Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) and the dissolution of his marriage back home while he fights in the war.

The Thin Red Line marked director Terrence Malick’s return to filmmaking after a 20 year absence. He adapted the screenplay from the novel of the same name by James Jones. The film features a large ensemble cast with many big name movie stars expressing interest in appearing in the film, including Robert De Niro, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, and Brad Pitt.

The Thin Red Line was not successful at the North American box office; however, critical response was generally strong. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the top prize at the 1999 Berlin International Film Festival. Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader, ranked Malick’s film as his second favorite of 1999 while filmmaker Martin Scorsese ranked it as his second favorite film of the 1990s.

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Titanic is a 1997 disaster film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. It features Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, two members of different social classes who fall in love about the ill-fated 1912 maiden voyage of the ship.

The main characters and the central love story are fictional, but some supporting characters (such as members of the ship’s crew) are based on real historical figures. Production of the film began in 1995, when Cameron shot footage of the real wreck of the RMS Titanic. He envisioned the love story as a means to engage the audience with the real-life tragedy. A reconstruction of the ship was built in Baja, California. Titanic became, at the time, the most expensive film ever made, costing approximately $200 million with funding from Paramount Pictures and 20^th Century Fox.

Originally slated to be released on July 2, 1997, post-production delays pushed back Titanic’s release date to December 19, 1997. As a result, the press believed that the film would fail and cause the downfall of both studios. Despite low expectations, the film was both a major critical and commercial success, winning 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and becoming the highest-grossing film of all time with a worldwide gross of approximately $1.8 billion.

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Wall Street is a 1987 American film directed by Oliver Stone and features Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, a young stockbroker desperate to succeed, and a wealthy but unscrupulous corporate raider named Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) whom he idolizes. After the success of Platoon, Stone wanted film school friend and Los Angeles screenwriter Stanley Weiser to research and write a screenplay about quiz show scandals in the 1950s. During a story conference, Stone suggested making a film about Wall Street instead.

Reportedly, the character of Bud Fox is said to be a composite of Owen Morrisey, who was involved in a $20 million insider trading scandal in 1985, Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, and others. Gordon Gekko was a composite of Boesky, corporate raider Carl Icahn, art collector Asher Edelman, agent Michael Ovitz, and Stone himself. Stone cast Daryl Hannah as Fox’s materialistic girlfriend, but she had problems relating to her character and struggled with the role. Stone also had difficulties with Sean Young, who made her opinions known that Hannah should be fired and that she should play that role instead.

The film was well-received critically and commercially. In addition, Douglas won an Academy Award for Best Actor. Over the years, Weiser has been approached by numerous people who told him that the film changed their life and wanted to be like Gekko.

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Richard Pryor was an American comedian, actor and writer. He was known for unflinching examinations of racism and customs in modern life, as well for his frequent use of colorful, vulgar and profane language, and racial epithets. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations. Pryor’s body of work included concert movies, recordings, and numerous films as an actor, usually in comedies.

Pryor was born in Peoria, Illinois and grew up in his grandmother’s brothel where his mother practiced prostitution and his father was her pimp. Pryor was expelled from school at age 14 and from 1958 to 1960, he served in the United States Army, but spent virtually his entire stint in an army prison. When he was 19, he worked at a Mafia-owned nightclub as the MC. In 1963, he moved to New York City and began performing regularly in clubs alongside performers such as Bob Dylan and Woody Allen.

Soon, Pryor began regularly on television variety shows like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. In 1969, he moved to Berkeley, California and recorded several comedy albums. Pryor wrote for T.V. and appeared in several popular films in 1970s and early 1980s, including The Mack, Silver Streak, and Bustin’ Loose. In 1983, he signed a five-year, $40 million contract and resulted in softer, more formulaic films like Superman III and The Toy. In 1991, he announced that he had been suffering from multiple sclerosis and died of cardiac arrest on December 10, 2005.

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David Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue, and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.

Mamet was born in Chicago, the son of a teacher and an attorney. He is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company and gained early acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway plays in 1976: The Duck Variation, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross, which received its first Broadway revival in 2005. Mamet’s first produced screenplay was the 1981 production of The Postman Always Rings Twice. He received an Academy Award nomination for The Verdict a year later.

In 1987, Mamet made his film directing debut with House of Games, starring his then-wife, Lindsay Crouse, and a host of longtime stage associates. He has remained a prolific writer and director, assembling an informal repertory company for his films, including William H. Macy, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Ricky Jay. Like independent filmmaker John Sayles, Mamet funds his own films with the pay he gets from credited and uncredited rewrites of typically big-budget Hollywood films like Wag the Dog and Ronin.

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