Ronald William Howard is an American director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Howard started his career as a child actor before transitioning to directing films. Over his six decade career, Howard has received two Academy Awards, four Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Grammy Award. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2003 and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 2013. Howard has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions in film and television.
The idiom "jumping the shark" or "jump the shark" is a term that is used to argue that a creative work or entity has reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with, or an extreme exaggeration of, its original purpose. The phrase was coined in 1985 by radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom Happy Days, in which the character of Fonzie jumps over a live shark while on water-skis.
Henry Franklin Winkler is an American actor, comedian, author, producer, and director. Widely known as Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli on the American television series Happy Days, Winkler has distinguished himself as a character actor for roles on stage and screen. His many accolades include three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Critics Choice Awards.
The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses seven academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television; Interactive Media & Games; Media Arts + Practice; Peter Stark Producing Program.
Garry Kent Marshall was an American screenwriter, film director, producer and actor. Marshall began his career in the 1960s as a writer for The Lucy Show and Dick Van Dyke Show until he developed the television adaptation of Neil Simon's play The Odd Couple. He rose to fame in the 1970s for creating four ABC sitcoms including Happy Days (1974–1984), Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983), Blansky's Beauties (1977), and Mork & Mindy (1978–1982).
Forest Steven Whitaker is an American actor, producer and director. He is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Lawrence Trilling is an American television director, producer, showrunner, and writer. He has directed nearly 150 hours of television to date, and served as Producer/Executive Producer on such series as Felicity, Alias, Parenthood, Pushing Daisies, Goliath, and Outer Range. He has directed episodes of many popular series, including Scrubs, Monk, Masters of Sex, Damages, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Snowfall.
Jack Bender is an American television and film director, television producer and actor best known for his work as a director on Lost, The Sopranos and Game of Thrones.
The Hank Zipzer: The World's Greatest Underachiever series of American children's books (2003-2010) by actor Henry Winkler and writer Lin Oliver, tells the story of a dyslexic child, Hank Zipzer. The series is based on Winkler's difficulties with school as a child, and are set in his childhood home. After finishing the main series, Winkler and Oliver created a prequel called, Here's Hank. This series explores Hank's life as a second grader. In addition, Winkler and Oliver created a television series called Hank Zipzer that ran from January 2014 to December 2016 on the CBBC channel. HBO Max began streaming all three seasons of Hank Zipzer in May 2022 and Hank Zipzer's Christmas Catastrophe in December 2022.
Chris Terrio is an American screenwriter and film director. He is best known for writing the screenplay for the 2012 film Argo, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Terrio also won the Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay of 2012 and was nominated for Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, a BAFTA, and the 2013 Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for this work.
Cop and a Half is a 1993 American family buddy cop-comedy film directed by Henry Winkler, and stars Burt Reynolds, Norman D. Golden II, and Ray Sharkey in his final role. Reynolds plays a veteran cop who reluctantly takes an eight-year-old boy (Golden) as his partner to solve a murder investigation.
Barnet Kellman is an American theatre, television and film director, television producer and film actor, and educator, best known for the premiere productions of new American plays, and for the pilots of long-running television series such as Murphy Brown and Mad About You. He is the recipient of two Emmy Awards and a Directors Guild of America Award. He is the co-founder and director of USC Comedy at the School of Cinematic Arts, and holds the school's Robin Williams Endowed Chair in Comedy.
David Alan Isaacs is an American screenwriter and producer. He has written episodes of M*A*S*H, Cheers, its spin-off Frasier, and The Simpsons with Ken Levine.
Daniel Bilson is an American writer, director, and producer of movies, television, video games, and comic books. Together with his frequent collaborator, Paul De Meo, he is best known as the writer for the film The Rocketeer (1991) and creator, writer, producer and director for the television series Viper, The Sentinel (1996) and The Flash (1990). He has written multiple issues of the comic book The Flash, as well as scripts for multiple video games, including James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (2003). Da 5 Bloods (2020), based on a screenplay written by Bilson & De Meo, was released following De Meo's death.
Peter Gould is an American television writer, director and producer. He worked on all five seasons of the AMC drama Breaking Bad. He was nominated for four Writers Guild of America (WGA) Awards for his work on the series. After Breaking Bad ended, he went on to become the co-creator and co-showrunner, with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, of the show's spinoff, Better Call Saul. He became the series' sole showrunner after Gilligan left the writers room.
Todd Robinson is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Lin Oliver is an American writer, producer, and the co-founder of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. During the 1990s and early 2000s, she wrote and produced a number of works for television and film, notably the 1990s television show, Harry and the Hendersons. As an author of books for children, Oliver began collaborating on the Hank Zipzer series with actor Henry Winkler in 2003. They next created the prequel series Here's Hank, the Ghost Buddy series, and the Alien Superstar series.
Polly Cohen Johnsen is an American film executive and producer. She went to college at the University of California at San Diego, where she majored in Chinese, and is also a graduate of the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California.
Susan Vaill, ACE, is an American film and television editor, director and producer. She is best known for her work on the television series Hacks, This Is Us, and Grey's Anatomy.
