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Zac Efron

Biography

Zachary David Alexander Efron (born October 18, 1987) is an American actor. He began acting professionally in the early 2000s and rose to prominence in the late 2000s for his leading role as Troy Bolton in the High School Musical trilogy (2006–2008). During this time, he also starred in the musical film Hairspray (2007) and the comedy film 17 Again (2009). Efron subsequently rose to mainstream prominence with starring roles in the films New Year's Eve (2011), The Lucky One (2012), The Paperboy (2012), Neighbors (2014), Dirty Grandpa (2016), Baywatch (2017), and The Greatest Showman (2017). He played Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019). In 2021, he won a Daytime Emmy Award for the Netflix web documentary series Down to Earth with Zac Efron (2020–present).
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John Woo

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John Woo Yu-Sen SBS is a Hong Kong film director and producer. Recognized for his stylised films of highly choreographed action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and use of slow-motion, Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Hard Boiled and Red Cliff. His Hollywood films include Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2. He also created the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics. Woo was described by Dave Kehr in The Observer in 2002 as "arguably the most influential director making movies today". Woo cites his three favorite films as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï.
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Jane Wodening

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Jane Wodening (born Mary Jane Collom, and formerly known as Jane Brakhage) is an American writer and the first wife of filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The birth of their first child is the subject of the 1959 experimental short film Window Water Baby Moving. Wodening married Stan Brakhage in 1957 and is credited with creating scrapbooks for the Brakhage family during what is recognized as the filmmaker's most significant period of creation from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s. The couple separated in 1987. Description above from the Wikipedia article Jane Wodening, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.​
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Sean Connery

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Sir Thomas Sean Connery (August 25, 1930 – October 31, 2020) was a Scottish actor and producer who won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award), and three Golden Globes, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award. Connery was the first actor to portray the character James Bond in film, starring in seven Bond films (every film from Dr. No to You Only Live Twice, plus Diamonds Are Forever and Never Say Never Again), between 1962 and 1983. In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His films also include Marnie (1964), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Highlander (1986), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Dragonheart (1996), The Rock (1996), and Finding Forrester (2000). Connery was polled in a 2004 The Sunday Herald as "The Greatest Living Scot" and in a 2011 EuroMillions survey as "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". He was voted by People magazine as both the “Sexiest Man Alive" in 1989 and the "Sexiest Man of the Century” in 1999. He received a lifetime achievement award in the United States with a Kennedy Center Honor in 1999. Connery was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to film drama. On 31 October 2020, it was announced that Connery had died at the age of 90. Description above from the Wikipedia article Sean Connery, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
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Jerome Hill

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Jerome Hill (March 2, 1905 – November 21, 1972) was an American filmmaker and artist. He was educated at Yale, where he drew covers, caricatures and cartoons for campus humor magazine The Yale Record. His 1950 documentary Grandma Moses, written and narrated by Archibald MacLeish, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Two-reel. He won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his film Albert Schweitzer. In addition to making films, he was a painter and composer. His last film, the autobiographical Film Portrait (1973), was added to the National Film Registry in 2003. Description above from the Wikipedia article Jerome Hill, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.​
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Ivor Novello

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Ivor Novello (born David Ivor Davies; 15 January 1893 – 6 March 1951) was a Welsh composer and actor who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century, on both screen and stage. He was born into a musical Cardiff family and his mother, Clara Novello Davies, was an internationally known singing teacher and choral conductor. As a child, Novello was a successful singer in various eisteddfodau throughout the country. He was educated privately in Cardiff and then in Gloucester and later won a scholarship to Magdalen College School in Oxford. The family moved to London in 1913 and here Novello's career flourished. In 1914, at the start of World War II, he wrote the words to his most popular song, "Keep the Home Fires Burning". Novello lived in a flat above the Strand Theatre, where he remained until his death in 1951. Since 1955 the internationally prestigious The Ivor Novello Awards ("The Ivors") for songwriting and composing are annually awarded by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA).
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Peter Kubelka

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Peter Kubelka (born 23 March 1934 in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian experimental filmmaker, architect, musician, curator and lecturer. His films are primarily short experiments in linking seemingly disparate sound and images. He is best known for his 1966 avant-garde classic Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa). Kubelka made 16mm films, mostly shorts, and is known for his 1960 film Arnulf Rainer, a "flicker film" which alternates black and clear film that is projected to create a "flicker" effect. Kubelka also designed the Anthology Film Archives custom film screening space in the 1970s in New York. The theater had highly raked (tiered) seating with a cowel over each seat and visual barriers between each seat so that the audience member was totally isolated visually from other patrons. The theater was painted black and the seating was covered in black velvet. The only light in the room between film showings came from a spotlight aimed at the screen, thus ensuring that the only light in the room came from the screen. The design is illustrative of the purist aesthetic of the Avant Garde film movement of that era. Description above from the Wikipedia article Peter Kubelka, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.​
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Standish Lawder

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Born in Connecticut in 1936, Lawder attended Williams College and the National Autonomous University of Mexico as an undergraduate, and studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. While at the University of Munich, he became a test subject for a neurologist researching phosphenes at around 1960. During these experiments, he was injected with measured amounts of LSD, mescaline and psilocybin, and "spent a whole day in the clinic". In this, he became an early subject of psychedelics. Afterwards, he received his Doctor of Philosophy as an art historian at Yale University. His thesis, which was later published as The Cubist Cinema, examines the correlation between the history of film and its impact on modern art, described as a holistic overview by Anthony Reveaux inFilm Quarterly. His body of work is purported to span over 25 films and his literary works encapsulates several essays on experimental film. His first endeavors with experimental films started in his basement during a sabbatical of his in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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Adolfas Mekas

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Adolfas Mekas (born on September 30th 1924 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania and died on May 31st 2011 in Poughkeepsie, New York) was a Lithuanian filmmaker, writer, director, editor, actor, educator and mentor. Adolfas Mekas collaborated with his brother Jonas Mekas to establish the seminal magazine Film Culture, and the Film-Maker’s Cooperative. He was associated with George Maciunas as well as the Fluxus art movement. His short films incorporate a comic and anarchic spirit, highlighted in his feature ‘Hallelujah the Hills’ (1963), which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival and is now classified as an American classic. Adolfas Mekas played a key role in the experimental film society, the ‘New American Cinema’ in the 1960s.
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Gregory J. Markopoulos

Biography

Gregory J. Markopoulos (March 12, 1928 - November 12, 1992) was an American experimental filmmaker. Born in Toledo, Ohio to Greek immigrant parents, Markopoulos began making 8 mm films at an early age. He attended USC Film School in the late 1940s, and went on to become a co-founder — with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage and others — of the New American Cinema movement. He was as well a contributor to Film Culture magazine, and an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1967, he and his partner Robert Beavers left the United States for permanent residence in Europe. Once ensconced in self-imposed exile, Markopoulos withdrew his films from circulation, refused any interviews, and insisted that a chapter about him be removed from the second edition of Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney's seminal study of American avant-garde cinema. While he continued to make films, his work went largely unseen for almost 30 years.
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