George Walton Lucas Jr. is an American filmmaker. Lucas is best known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic and THX. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012. Lucas is one of history's most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards. His films are among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation. Lucas is considered to be one of the most significant figures of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement, and a pioneer of the modern blockbuster.
Steven Allan Spielberg is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, he is the most commercially successful director in history. He is the recipient of many accolades, including three Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and four Directors Guild of America Awards, as well as the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1995, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2006, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Seven of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC is an American film and television production company, founded by filmmaker George Lucas in 1971 in San Rafael, California; most of the company's operations were moved to San Francisco in 2005. It is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company. The studio is best known for creating and producing the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, as well as its leadership in developing special effects, sound, and computer animation for films.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 American science fiction drama film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. It is the story of Roy Neary, an everyday blue-collar worker in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with a UFO.
John Towner Williams KBE is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career that has spanned seven decades, he has composed some of the most popular, recognizable and critically acclaimed film scores in cinematic history. Williams has won 25 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With 53 Academy Award nominations, he is the second most-nominated individual, after Walt Disney. His compositions are considered the epitome of film music, and he is considered among the greatest composers in the history of cinema-as well as all time.
A blockbuster is a work of entertainment—typically used to describe a feature film produced by a major film studio, but also other media—that is highly popular and financially successful. The term has also come to refer to any large-budget production intended for "blockbuster" status, aimed at mass markets with associated merchandising, sometimes on a scale that meant the financial fortunes of a film studio or a distributor could depend on it.
Amazing Stories is an American anthology television series created by Steven Spielberg, that originally ran on NBC in the United States from September 29, 1985 to April 10, 1987.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a 2008 American action adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by David Koepp, from a story by Jeff Nathanson and franchise creator George Lucas. The fourth installment in the Indiana Jones series, it was released and takes place 19 years after the previous film. Set in 1957, it pits Indiana Jones against Soviet KGB agents led by Irina Spalko searching for a telepathic crystal skull. Jones is aided by his former lover, Marion Ravenwood, and their son, Mutt Williams. Ray Winstone, John Hurt, and Jim Broadbent are also part of the supporting cast.
Klaus Badelt is a German composer, producer, and arranger of film scores. He is known for his collaborations with Hans Zimmer, helping to write scores for dozens of critically acclaimed films including The Thin Red Line, The Prince of Egypt, and Gladiator. Independently, he is known for his work on Hollywood blockbuster films such as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Equilibrium, K-19: The Widowmaker, Basic, and TMNT, and for his work in French and Chinese cinema as well as a number of films by Werner Herzog.
Steven Spielberg is an American director, writer, and producer. He is considered one of the founding pioneers of the New Hollywood era, as well as one of the most popular directors and producers in film history. He is also one of the co-founders of Amblin Entertainment, DreamWorks Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood is a book by Peter Biskind, published by Simon & Schuster in 1998. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is about the 1960s and 1970s Hollywood, a period of American film known for the production of such films such as The Godfather,The Godfather Part II,The French Connection,Chinatown,Taxi Driver,Jaws,Star Wars,The Exorcist, and The Last Picture Show. The title is taken from films which bookend the era: Easy Rider (1969) and Raging Bull (1980). The book follows Hollywood on the brink of the Vietnam War, when a group of young Hollywood film directors known as the "movie brats" are making their names. It begins in the 1960s and ends in the 1980s.
Indiana Jones is an American media franchise based on the adventures of Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., a fictional professor of archaeology, that began in 1981 with the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1984, a prequel, The Temple of Doom, was released, and in 1989, a sequel, The Last Crusade. A fourth film followed in 2008, titled The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. A fifth and final film, titled The Dial of Destiny, is in production and is scheduled to be released in 2023. The series was created by George Lucas and stars Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. The first four films were directed by Steven Spielberg, who worked closely with Lucas during their production.
Jaws is an American natural horror film series that started with a 1975 film that expanded into three sequels, a theme park ride, and other tie-in merchandise, based on a 1974 novel. The main subject of the saga is a great white shark and its attacks on people in specific areas of the United States and The Bahamas. The Brody family is featured in all of the films as the primary antithesis to the shark. The original film was based on a novel written by Peter Benchley, which itself was inspired by the Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916. Benchley adapted his novel, along with help from Carl Gottlieb and Howard Sackler, into the 1975 film Jaws, which was directed by Steven Spielberg. Although Gottlieb went on to pen two of the three sequels, neither Benchley nor Spielberg returned to the film series in any capacity.
Laura Anne Karpman is an American composer, whose work has included music for film, television, video games, theater, and the concert hall. She has won five Emmy Awards for her work. Karpman was trained at The Juilliard School, where she played jazz, and honed her skills scatting in bars.
John Paesano is an American composer working primarily in film, television and video games. He is known for collaborating with director Wes Ball on the Maze Runner film series, as well as composing for the Marvel Television series Daredevil and The Defenders. As a video game composer, he has contributed music to the acclaimed titles, Detroit Become Human, Marvel's Spider-Man and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. For his work on Miles Morales, Paesano won the BAFTA for Best music in a video game.
Ready Player One is a 2018 American science fiction film based on Ernest Cline's novel of the same name. Directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Zak Penn and Cline, it stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, and Mark Rylance. The film is set in 2045, where much of humanity uses the OASIS, a virtual reality simulation, to escape the real world. A teenage orphan finds clues to a contest that promises ownership of the OASIS to the winner, and he and his allies try to complete it before an evil corporation can do so.
Score: A Film Music Documentary is a 2016 American documentary film directed by Matt Schrader about film scores, featuring Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, John Williams, Quincy Jones, Rachel Portman, Trent Reznor, and others. The film was released theatrically by Gravitas Ventures on June 16, 2017, and on Blu-ray and download September 5, 2017.
Matt Schrader is an American filmmaker. He is best known for writing and directing Score: A Film Music Documentary (2016) and creating the biopic podcast series Blockbuster. He's credited with Emmy Award-winning investigative journalism for CBS News and NBC News. He has been nominated for various awards, including three Emmy Awards.
Amazing Stories is an American anthology series based on the 1985 television series of the same name created by Steven Spielberg. The series is produced for Apple TV+ and its executive producers for the series include Spielberg, Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, Darryl Frank, and Justin Falvey. It premiered on March 6, 2020.
Masters of the Air is an upcoming American war drama miniseries based on the actions of the Eighth Air Force of the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. It is being produced by Apple Studios in cooperation with Playtone and Amblin Television. The series will be released on Apple TV+.
