William Goldman was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist before turning to screenwriting. Among other accolades, Goldman won two Academy Awards in both writing categories: first for Best Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and then for Best Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men (1976).
Charles Robert Redford Jr. is an American actor and filmmaker. He has received numerous accolades such as an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1996, the Academy Honorary Award in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and the Honorary César in 2019. He was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014.
Robert Towne was an American screenwriter and director. He started writing films for Roger Corman, including The Tomb of Ligeia in 1964, and was later part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking.
Stephen Sommers is an American film director, screenwriter and producer, best known for big-budget action films, such as The Mummy (1999), its sequel, The Mummy Returns (2001), Van Helsing (2004), and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009). He also directed The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993), Disney's live action version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1994) and the action horror film Deep Rising (1998).
Barry Lee Levinson is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Levinson won the Academy Award for Best Director for Rain Man (1988). His other best-known works are Diner (1982), The Natural (1984), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Bugsy (1991), and Wag the Dog (1997). In 2021, he co-executive produced the Hulu miniseries Dopesick and directed the first two episodes.
Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Nick Adams was an American film and television actor and screenwriter. He was noted for his roles in several Hollywood films during the 1950s and 1960s, including Rebel Without a Cause and Giant along with his starring role in the ABC television series The Rebel (1959–1961). He also led the cast of several Japanese productions, including Frankenstein Conquers the World, Invasion of Astro-Monster, and The Killing Bottle.
John Gregory Dunne was an American writer. He began his career as a journalist for Time magazine before expanding into writing criticism, essays, novels, and screenplays. He often collaborated with his wife, Joan Didion.
Jeremiah Johnson is a 1972 American Western film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford as the title character and Will Geer as "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp. It is based partly on the life of the legendary mountain man John Jeremiah Johnson, recounted in Raymond Thorp and Robert Bunker's book Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson and Vardis Fisher's 1965 novel Mountain Man.
József Antal Eszterhás, credited as Joe Eszterhas, is a Hungarian-American writer. Born in Hungary, he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. After an early career as a journalist and editor, he entered the film industry. His first screenwriting credit was for the film F.I.S.T. (1978). He co-wrote the script for Flashdance, which became one of the highest-grossing films of 1983, and set off a lucrative and prolific run for his career. By the early 1990s, he was known as the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, and noted for his work in the erotic thriller genre. He was paid a then-record $3 million for his script Love Hurts, which was produced as Basic Instinct (1992), and following its success, news outlets reported he earned seven-figure salaries solely on the basis of two-to-four page outlines.
Daniel Thomas O'Bannon was an American film screenwriter, director and visual effects supervisor, most closely associated in the science fiction and horror genres.
Jane Loretta Anne Goldman is a British screenwriter and producer. She is mostly known for collaborating with director Matthew Vaughn on the screenplays of Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and its sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), as well as X-Men: First Class (2011), Kick-Ass (2010) and Stardust (2007). Goldman also worked on the story of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), the sequel to First Class, again in partnership with Vaughn. Both met high critical praise for their work.
Dominick John Dunne was an American writer, investigative journalist, and producer. He began his career in film and television as a producer of the pioneering gay film The Boys in the Band (1970) and as the producer of the award-winning drug film The Panic in Needle Park (1971). He turned to writing in the early 1970s. After the 1982 murder of his daughter Dominique, an actress, he began to write about the interaction of wealth and high society with the judicial system. Dunne was a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and, beginning in the 1980s, often appeared on television discussing crime.
Up Close & Personal is a 1996 American romantic drama film directed by Jon Avnet from a screenplay written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. It stars Robert Redford as a news director and Michelle Pfeiffer as his protégée, with Stockard Channing, Joe Mantegna, and Kate Nelligan in supporting roles.
Philip Ives Dunne was an American screenwriter, film director and producer, who worked prolifically from 1932 until 1965. He spent the majority of his career at 20th Century Fox. He crafted well regarded romantic and historical dramas, usually adapted from another medium. Dunne was a leading Screen Writers Guild organizer and was politically active during the "Hollywood Blacklist" episode of the 1940s–1950s. He is best known for the films How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Robe (1953) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965).
Gavin Lambert was a British-born screenwriter, novelist and biographer who lived for part of his life in Hollywood. His writing was mainly fiction and nonfiction about the film industry.
Austin Film Festival (AFF), founded in 1994, is an organization in Austin, Texas, that focuses on writers' creative contributions to film. Initially, AFF was called the Austin Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference and functioned to launch the careers of screenwriters, who historically have been underrepresented within the film industry.
A scriptment is a written work by a movie or television screenwriter that combines elements of a script and treatment, especially the dialogue elements, which are formatted the same as in a screenplay. It is a more elaborate document than a standard draft treatment. Some films have been shot using only a scriptment.
Michael H. Weber is an American screenwriter and producer. He and his writing partner, Scott Neustadter, are best known for writing the screenplay for the romantic comedy film 500 Days of Summer. The film is based on two real relationships Neustadter had. They also wrote the screenplays for the film adaptations of the novels The Spectacular Now, The Fault in Our Stars, and Paper Towns.
Joshua Cooley is an American filmmaker and storyboard artist. He is best known for directing the animated films Toy Story 4 (2019) and Transformers One (2024), with the former winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film Inside Out (2015), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
