Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy is an American actress. She made her feature film debut in Bad Boys (1983) and came to prominence as a member of the Brat Pack with roles in Oxford Blues (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and Blue City (1986). She received three Saturn Award nominations for Best Actress for her performances in WarGames (1983), Fear (1990), and Man's Best Friend (1993). For playing a drug-addicted lesbian photographer in High Art (1998), Sheedy won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. She also starred in the films Twice in a Lifetime (1985), Short Circuit (1986), Betsy's Wedding (1990), Only the Lonely (1991), and Life During Wartime (2009), as well as the series Single Drunk Female (2022–2023).
Sanford Meisner was an American actor and acting teacher who developed an approach to acting instruction that is now known as the Meisner technique. While Meisner was exposed to method acting at the Group Theatre, his approach differed markedly in that he completely abandoned the use of affective memory, a distinct characteristic of method acting. Meisner maintained an emphasis on "the reality of doing", which was the foundation of his approach.
James Edward Franco is an American actor and filmmaker. He has starred in numerous films, including Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy (2002–2007), Milk (2008), Eat Pray Love (2010), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Spring Breakers (2012), and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). He is known for his collaborations with fellow actor Seth Rogen, having appeared in eight films and one television series with him, examples being Pineapple Express (2008), This Is the End (2013), Sausage Party (2016), and The Disaster Artist (2017), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. For his role in 127 Hours (2010), he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Rafe Esquith is an American teacher who taught at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School, in Los Angeles, California, from 1984 until his resignation in 2015. Many of his students, who were all from a community of poor and immigrant families, started class very early, left late, and typically achieved high scores in standardized tests. Esquith has authored books about teaching and his annual class Shakespeare productions were featured in the 2005 documentary The Hobart Shakespeareans.
Robyn Cohen is an American actress best known for her role as Anne Marie Sakowitz, the sunbathing script supervisor in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Julia Margaret Duffy is an American actress. She began her career in television, appearing in minor guest roles before being cast in the role of Penny Davis in the series The Doctors from 1973 until 1977. She starred in the acclaimed Broadway revival of Once in a Lifetime in 1978.
Hollywood accounting is the opaque or creative accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.
Regina Taylor is an American actress and playwright. She has won several awards throughout her career, including a Golden Globe Award and NAACP Image Award. In July 2017, Taylor was announced as the new Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theater at Fordham University.
Milton George Katselas was an American director and producer of stage and film, as well as a Hollywood acting instructor and coach who trained under Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg at the acclaimed Actors Studio in New York City. In 1978, he acquired the Beverly Hills Playhouse, where he taught a master class for many years.
Michael Jerrod Moore, known professionally as Michael Arden, is an American actor, singer, musician, and theatre director. Arden won a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 2023 for the revival of the musical Parade.
The Beverly Hills Playhouse is an acting school with theaters and training facilities in Beverly Hills, California, and also in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. It is one of the oldest acting schools and theatres in the Los Angeles area.
Howard Fine is an American acting teacher, celebrity acting coach, Broadway theater director, and author. He is the founder of the Howard Fine Acting Studio in Hollywood and in Melbourne, Australia.
Edi Mūe Gathegi is a Kenyan-American actor. He appeared as recurring character Dr. Jeffrey Cole in the television series House, as Cheese in the 2007 film Gone Baby Gone, Laurent in the films Twilight and its sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and as Darwin in X-Men: First Class. Edi also featured in the AMC series, Into the Badlands, as Baron Jacobee. He has also been a recurring character in NBC's television series, The Blacklist, as Matias Solomon, an operative for a covert organization. Gathegi reprised the role in the 2016–2017 season crime thriller, The Blacklist: Redemption. He has also played a leading role in Startup, a television drama series on Crackle. Since 2022, Edi has played engineer and entrepreneur Dev Ayesa in the Apple TV+ original science fiction space drama series For All Mankind.
William Hurley Traylor Jr. was an American film, stage, and television actor. He was also, along with his wife, Peggy Feury, an acting coach and founder of The Loft Studio, an acting school attended by such major stars as Sean Penn, Anjelica Huston and Nicolas Cage. He is the father of actresses Stephanie Feury and Susan Traylor.
Pack Beauregard Willimon is an American playwright and screenwriter. He helped develop the American version of the series House of Cards and served as showrunner for the first four seasons. In 2018, Willimon created the drama series The First for Hulu, about the first crewed mission to Mars.
George Ernest Salazar is an American actor, singer, and musician known for his work on and off-Broadway. He made his Broadway debut in the 2011 revival of Stephen Schwartz's Godspell. Salazar originated in the role of Michael Mell in the 2015 musical Be More Chill and performed in the musical's 2018 Off-Broadway and Broadway in 2019 at the Lyceum Theater in New York City, New York. He originated the role of Grover in The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical and starred in Pasadena Playhouse's production of Little Shop of Horrors as Seymour Krelborn.
Peggy Feury was an American actress on Broadway, in films, and on television. She became a highly regarded acting teacher in New York and then in Los Angeles. Throughout her career, she taught many notable students.
Rabbit Bandini Productions is a film and television production company founded in 2003 by actors/filmmakers James Franco and Vince Jolivette. The name comes from combining the titular hero from John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy with the hero of John Fante's Ask the Dust, Arturo Bandini.
Merton of the Movies is a 1922 satirical comedy play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. It was adapted from the novel of the same name.
The University of Southern California was founded in 1880, and is the oldest private research university in California.
