Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter, and playwright. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 18 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2023.
Elliott Gould is an American actor. In a career spanning over seven decades, he began acting in Hollywood films during the 1960s.
The Cannon Group, Inc. was an American group of companies, including Cannon Films, which produced films from 1967 to 1994. The extensive group also owned, amongst others, a large international cinema chain and a video film company that invested heavily in the video market, buying the international video rights to several classic film libraries. Some of their best known films include Joe (1970), Runaway Train (1985) and Street Smart (1987), all of which were Oscar-nominated.
The Heartbreak Kid is a 1972 American romantic black comedy film directed by Elaine May and written by Neil Simon, starring Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin, Audra Lindley, Eddie Albert, and Doris Roberts. It is based on the short story "A Change of Plan", written by Bruce Jay Friedman and first published in Esquire in 1966.
Joseph H. Lewis was an American B-movie film director whose stylish flourishes came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years following his retirement in 1966. In a 30-year directorial career, he directed numerous low-budget westerns, action pictures, musicals, adventures, and thrillers. Today he is remembered for mysteries and film noir stories: My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) and So Dark the Night (1946) as well as his most highly regarded features, 1950's Gun Crazy, which spotlighted a desperate young couple who embark on a deadly crime spree, and the 1955 film noir The Big Combo, with its stunning cinematography by John Alton.
Shiksa is an often disparaging, although not always, term for a gentile woman or girl. The word, which is of Yiddish origin, has moved into English usage and some Hebrew usage, mostly in North American Jewish culture.
Menahem Golan was an Israeli film producer, screenwriter, and director. He was best known for co-owning The Cannon Group with his cousin Yoram Globus. Cannon specialized in producing low-to-mid-budget American films, primarily genre films, during the 1980s after Golan and Globus had achieved significant filmmaking success in their native Israel during the 1970s.
Straight Out of Brooklyn is a 1991 independent film directed by Matty Rich in his directorial debut. The film is a story about Dennis, an African-American teen living in a housing project with his sister, mother and abusive, alcoholic father. Fed up with his family's seemingly hopeless future, he plans with his friends to rob a drug dealer.
The Silent Partner is a 1978 Canadian thriller film directed by Daryl Duke and starring Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, and Susannah York. The screenplay by Curtis Hanson is based on the novel Think of a Number by Danish writer Anders Bodelsen, and is the third filmed adaptation of the novel.
City of Industry is a 1997 American neo-noir crime thriller film starring Harvey Keitel, Stephen Dorff and Timothy Hutton. It is directed by John Irvin, produced by Evzen Kolar and Ken Solarz and written by Solarz.
Greedy is a 1994 American comedy film directed by Jonathan Lynn, written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, and starring Michael J. Fox, Kirk Douglas, Nancy Travis, Olivia d'Abo, Phil Hartman, Ed Begley Jr., and Colleen Camp. It tells the story of an aging wheelchair-using scrap metal tycoon whose younger relatives compete to get the inheritance when he dies.
Alex "Allie" Sherman was an American football player and coach who played 51 games in six seasons in the National Football League (NFL) as a quarterback and defensive back, and afterward served as head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League (CFL) and of the New York Giants of the NFL. He later worked as a cable television and sports marketing executive and media personality.
Lansky is a 1999 American made-for-television crime drama film written by David Mamet and directed by John McNaughton. It stars Richard Dreyfuss as the famous gangster Meyer Lansky, Eric Roberts as Bugsy Siegel, and Ryan Merriman as the young Lansky.
Getting Straight is a 1970 American comedy film motion picture directed by Richard Rush, released by Columbia Pictures.
Company Business is a 1991 action film, written and directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The film follows the exploits of Sam Boyd, a former operative for the CIA who is reactivated to escort Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko, a captured KGB mole, to a prisoner exchange in recently reunited Berlin.
Daniel Melnick was an American film producer and film studio executive who started working in Hollywood as a teenager in television and then became the producer of such films as All That Jazz, Altered States and Straw Dogs. Melnick's films won more than 20 Academy Awards out of some 80 nominations.
Switchmas is an American musical comedy film directed by Sue Corcoran. It tells the story of a Christmas-obsessed Jewish boy on his way to sunny Florida who figures out how to get the Christmas of his dreams by trading airline tickets and places with another boy on his way to snowy Christmastown, Washington. This film also features CGI scenes depicting the boy's Christmas dreams.
Roger M. Sherman is an American filmmaker – a cinematographer, director, producer, still photographer, and author best known for his work in documentary cinema. He is a founder of Florentine Films. His most widely recognized documentaries are Alexander Calder (1998), Richard Rogers: The Sweetest Sounds (2001), Don't Divorce the Children (1989), Medal of Honor (2008), The Restaurateur (2010), Zapruder and Stolley: Witness to an Assassination (2011), his upcoming two-hour PBS special, The Search for Israeli Cuisine, The Rhythm of My Soul (2006), and The American Brew (2007). His films have won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and two Academy Award nominations, among other honors.
Café Society is a 2016 American romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Woody Allen. It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Jeannie Berlin, Blake Lively, Parker Posey, Corey Stoll, and Ken Stott. The plot follows a young man who moves to Hollywood in the 1930s, where he falls in love with the assistant to his uncle, a powerful talent agent.
Inside Out is a 1986 American drama film about an agoraphobe that was directed by Robert Taicher and written by him and Kevin Bartelme and starred Elliott Gould, Howard Hesseman and Jennifer Tilly.
