Akira Kurosawa
Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), and Ran (1985), set in feudal Japan of director Akira Kurosawa, greatly influenced American and European filmmaking.
This producer, screenwriter, and editor, regarded of the most important and influential in the history of cinema, directed thirty in a career, spanning 57 years.
Following a brief stint as a painter, Kurosawa entered the industry in 1936. After years of working as an assistant and scriptwriter, he made his debut in 1943 during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata, also known as Judo Saga. After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented the reputation of t
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Robert Rodríguez
Robert Anthony Rodriguez is an American director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician perhaps best known for making profitable, crowd-pleasing independent and studio films with fairly low budgets and fast schedules by Hollywood standards. He shoots and produces many of his films in Texas and Mexico.
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Sidney Lumet
Sidney Lumet was an Academy Award-winning American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982), all of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director. He won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, for his "brilliant services to screenwriters, performers, and the art of the motion picture".
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Walter Murch
Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. His work includes THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing).
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For his work on Apocalypse Now, Murch was the first person to receive a credit as "Sound Designer." Murch was also involved with the editing of Apocalypse Now Redux. In 1998, producer Rick Schmidlin chose Murch as his editor for the restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. Murch is the author of a popular book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and is the subject of Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversa -
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
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Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
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Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W -
Walter Murch
Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. His work includes THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing).
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For his work on Apocalypse Now, Murch was the first person to receive a credit as "Sound Designer." Murch was also involved with the editing of Apocalypse Now Redux. In 1998, producer Rick Schmidlin chose Murch as his editor for the restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. Murch is the author of a popular book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and is the subject of Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversa -
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
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Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre -
Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao Miyazaki (Japanese: 宮崎 駿) is a celebrated Japanese animator, filmmaker, screenwriter, and manga artist, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of animation. He is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, the animation studio responsible for producing many of Japan’s most beloved and internationally acclaimed animated films. Over the course of a career spanning decades, Miyazaki has developed a reputation for creating visually rich, emotionally resonant stories that often explore themes such as nature, pacifism, flight, childhood, and the human condition.
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Miyazaki was born in Tokyo and developed an early interest in drawing and animation. His father’s work in the aviation industry had a significant influence on hi -
Peter Biskind
Peter Biskind is an American cultural critic, film historian, and journalist, best known for his tenure as executive editor of Premiere magazine from 1986 to 1996. He attended Swarthmore College and authored several influential books on Hollywood, including Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, some of which became bestsellers. In 2010, he published a biography of Warren Beatty titled Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Biskind is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, with work appearing in major publications like Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He served as editor-in-chief of American Film from 1981 to 1986. His books have been translated into over thirty languages. Despite his acclaim, som
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David Mamet
David Alan 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.
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As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and anti -
William Goldman
Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956.His brother was the late James Goldman, author and playwright.
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William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used as the foundation for his screenplays.
In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he famously remarked that "Nobody knows anything"). He then returned to writing novels. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriti -
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. He received acclaim for his films, which are often distinguished by their surrealist, dreamlike qualities. In a career spanning more than fifty years, he was awarded numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and an Honorary Academy Award in 2019. Described as a "visionary", Lynch was considered one of the most important filmmakers of his era.
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Lynch studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film was the independent surrealist film Eraserhead (1977), which saw success as a midnight movie. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director fo -
Paul Schrader
Although his name is often linked to that of the 'movie brat' generation (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different. Schrader's strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was eighteen. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries - Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu Bresson Dreyer Da Capo Paperback) rather than Saturday morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackp
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Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Russian: Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский) was a Soviet film director, writer and opera director. Tarkovksy is listed among the 100 most critically acclaimed filmmakers. He attained critical acclaim for directing such films as Andrei Rublev, Solaris and Stalker.
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Tarkovsky also worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, film theorist, and theater director. He directed most of his films in the Soviet Union, with the exception of his last two films which were produced in Italy and Sweden. His films are characterized by Christian spirituality and metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, lack of conventional dramatic structure and plot, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. -
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetić) is a German film director, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.
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He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders and others. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, or people with unique talents in obscure fields. -
Robert Rodríguez
Robert Anthony Rodriguez is an American director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician perhaps best known for making profitable, crowd-pleasing independent and studio films with fairly low budgets and fast schedules by Hollywood standards. He shoots and produces many of his films in Texas and Mexico.
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François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an award-winning and influential filmmaker, critically acclaimed worldwide. He was also a talented and sought-after film critic in France (most notably, his work for Cahiers du Cinema), and one of the founders of the French New Wave and the auteur theory; he remains an icon of the French film industry. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he was also a screenwriter, producer or occasional actor in over twenty-five films.
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Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛsɔ̃]; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic and aesthetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film and influenced the rise of French New Wave cinema. He is often referred to as the most highly regarded French filmmaker since Jean Renoir. Bresson's influence on French cinema was once described by Jean-Luc Godard, quoting "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music.
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John Vaillant
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's and Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), was an international bestseller, and has been published in 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar's Children (Houghton Mifflin), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fic
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Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an Academy Award- and Palme d'Or-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and stylized violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).
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Sidney Lumet
Sidney Lumet was an Academy Award-winning American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982), all of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director. He won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, for his "brilliant services to screenwriters, performers, and the art of the motion picture".
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Nathanael West
Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in Rhode Island, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn't graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.
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After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The -
Syd Field
Sydney Alvin Field was an American screenwriting guru who wrote several books on the subject of screenwriting. He also conducted workshops and seminars on the subject of producing salable screenplays. Hollywood film producers have increasingly used his ideas on structure as a guideline to a proposed screenplay's potential.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books. He received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Wicklow. She completed her undergraduate studies at Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana and subsequently earned an MA at The University of Wales and an M.Phil at Trinity College, Dublin.
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Her first collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Her second, Walk the Blue Fields, was Richard Ford’s book of the year. Her works have won several awards including The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, The Martin Healy Prize, The Olive Cook Award, The Kilkenny Prize, The Tom Gallon Award and The William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate -
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust , published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scientific research in various fields, notably botany, and held several governmental positions.
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George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Works span the fields of literature, theology, and humanism.
People laud this magnum opus as one of the peaks of world literature. Other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther .
With this key figure of German literature, th -
Hermann Hesse
Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.
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Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game , which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society.
In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind , first great -
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский (Russian)
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Works, such as the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Russian writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevski combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight.
Very influential writings of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin included Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929),
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky composed short stories, essays, and journals. His literature explores humans in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century and engages with a variety of philosophies and themes. People most acclaimed his Demons(1872) .
Many literary critics rate him among the greatest authors of worl -
Mieko Kawakami
Mieko Kawakami (川上未映子, born in August 29, 1976) is a Japanese singer and writer from Osaka.
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She was awarded the 138th Akutagawa Prize for promising new writers of serious fiction (2007) for her novel Chichi to Ran (乳と卵) (Breasts and Eggs).
Kawakami has released three albums and three singles as a singer. -
James Monaco
James Monaco is a writer and publisher based in Sag Harbor, NY. For more information please see JamesMonaco.com.
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Don Coscarelli
DON COSCARELLI became the youngest filmmaker ever to have a feature film distributed by a major studio at age nineteen when Universal Pictures bought his first film, Jim The World’s Greatest. The independent, award-winning filmmaker is best known for Phantasm and its sequels, which spawned a dedicated cult of fans worldwide.
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His other indie genre hits include The Beastmaster and Bubba Ho-tep. For TV, he directed the premiere episode of Showtime’s acclaimed series Masters of Horror, and his film John Dies at the End premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Don’s well-received memoir, True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking is now available everywhere.
For more information on the world of Phantasm visit the official website at: Phantasm.com -
David Thomson
David Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.
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Frederic Raphael
Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Prizes was one of the major British and American television successes of the 1970s.
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Paul Schrader
Although his name is often linked to that of the 'movie brat' generation (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different. Schrader's strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was eighteen. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries - Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu Bresson Dreyer Da Capo Paperback) rather than Saturday morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackp
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David Mamet
David Alan 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.
Buy books on Amazon
As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and anti -
Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛsɔ̃]; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic and aesthetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film and influenced the rise of French New Wave cinema. He is often referred to as the most highly regarded French filmmaker since Jean Renoir. Bresson's influence on French cinema was once described by Jean-Luc Godard, quoting "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music.
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Donald Richie
Donald Richie is an American-born author who has written about the Japanese people and Japanese cinema. Although he considers himself only a writer, Richie has directed many experimental films, the first when he was 17. Although Richie speaks Japanese fluently, he can neither read nor write it.
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During World War II, he served aboard Liberty ships as a purser and medical officer. By then he had already published his first work, "Tumblebugs" (1942), a short story.
In 1947, Richie first visited Japan with the American occupation force, a job he saw as an opportunity to escape from Lima, Ohio. He first worked as a typist, and then as a civilian staff writer for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. While in Tokyo, he became fascinated with Japanese cultu