Legendary all-stars of cinema bring to life the evolution of science-fiction and special effects films from the wild and funny days of B-movies to blockbusters that have captured the world's imagination. This is the story of the Sci-Fi Boys, who started out as kids making amateur movies inspired by Forrest J Ackerman's FAMOUS MONSTERS magazine and grew up to take Hollywood by storm, inventing the art and technology for filming anything the mind can dream.
04-27-2006
1h 20m
THIS
HELLA
Doesn't have an image right now... sorry!has no image... sorry!
Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Paul Davids
Writer:
Paul Davids
Key Crew
Animation:
Evan York
Producer:
Paul Davids
Cinematography:
Michael Stuart
Locations and Languages
Country:
US
Languages:
en
Main Cast
Peter Jackson
Sir Peter Robert Jackson, (born 31 October 1961) is a New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter, known for his Lord of the Rings film trilogy, adapted from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien. He is also known for his 2005 remake of King Kong and as the producer of District 9. He won international attention early in his career with his "splatstick" horror comedies, before coming to mainstream prominence with Heavenly Creatures, for which he shared an Academy Award Best Screenplay nomination with his wife, Fran Walsh. Jackson has been awarded three Academy Awards in his career, including the award for Best Director in 2003.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Peter Jackson, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Raymond "Ray" Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American visual effects creator, writer, and producer who lived in London, England, from 1960 until his death in 2013.
He created a brand of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation." His most important works include the animation on Mighty Joe Young, with pioneer Willis O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects (1949); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, his first color film; and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.
Leonard Michael Maltin (born December 18, 1950) is an American film critic and film historian, as well as an author of several mainstream books on cinema, focusing on nostalgic, celebratory narratives. He is best known for his eponymous annual book of movie capsule reviews, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, which was published annually from 1969 to 2014.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Leonard Maltin, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Forrest J Ackerman (born Forrest James Ackerman; November 24, 1916 – December 4, 2008) was an American magazine editor, science fiction writer and literary agent, a founder of science fiction fandom, a leading expert on science fiction and fantasy films, and acknowledged as the world's most avid collector of genre books and movie memorabilia. He was based in Los Angeles, California.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Forrest J Ackerman", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
John Landis (born August 3, 1950) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer. He is known for his comedies, his horror films, and his music videos with singer Michael Jackson.
Dennis Muren, A.S.C. (born November 1, 1946) is an American film visual effects artist and supervisor. He has worked on the films of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron, among others, and has won nine Oscars in total: eight for Best Visual Effects and a Technical Achievement Academy Award. The Visual Effects Society has called him "a perpetual student, teacher, innovator, and mentor."
He has been identified as "a pioneer in bringing a new wave of visual effects films to the public, opening the doors for screenwriters and directors to tell stories never before possible with a new realism through the use of his skills in cinematic arts and advanced technologies."
According to Spielberg, Muren "set the example at Industrial Light & Magic for visual effects excellence with effects that add strong, appropriate emotion to a shot and fit seamlessly into a movie."
Description above from the Wikipedia article Dennis Muren, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Born and raised in Minnesota, Stephen Sommers went on to attend St. John’s University before transferring to the University of Seville in Spain. After graduating, he spent the next several years managing rock bands throughout Europe. Relocating to Los Angeles, Sommers enrolled in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and spent the next three years earning a Masters Degree in Film Production. Upon writing and directing an award-winning student film, Perfect Alibi, he was granted the opportunity to write and direct his first feature-length motion picture – a story set in the world of high school drag racing entitled Catch Me If You Can. From there, Sommers went on to create such well-known and beloved adaptations as The Adventures of Huck Finn and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, both for Walt Disney Pictures. He also wrote and executive produced Disney’s adventure film Tom and Huck before returning to the director’s chair for the suspense-thriller Deep Rising. The next year, Sommers wrote, directed and produced the first installment of The Mummy franchise for Universal Studios. That film and its sequel, The Mummy Returns, have grossed over eight-hundred and forty million dollars worldwide. His next monster blockbuster was the action-adventure epic Van Helsing, released in 2004, which did over three-hundred million dollars at the box office. Following his producing duties on The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor – which made the trilogy a billion dollar franchise - Sommers wrote, directed and produced G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra for Paramount Studios. Stephen currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife and their two daughters. Bio from official homepage.
Richard A. Baker (born December 8, 1950) is a retired American special make-up effects creator and actor, mostly known for his creature effects and designs. Baker won the Academy Award for Best Makeup a record seven times from a record eleven nominations, beginning when he won the inaugural award for the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London.
As a teen, Baker began creating artificial body parts in his own kitchen. He also appeared briefly in the fan production The Night Turkey, a one-hour, black-and-white video parody of The Night Stalker directed by William Malone. Baker's first professional job was as an assistant to prosthetic makeup effects veteran Dick Smith on the 1973 film The Exorcist. While working on The Exorcist, Baker was hired by director Larry Cohen to design and create a mutant infant for Cohen's 1974 film It's Alive.
Baker received the inaugural Academy Award for Best Makeup for his work on An American Werewolf in London. He also created the werewolf creature Michael Jackson transforms into in the music video Thriller. Subsequently, Baker has been nominated for the Best Makeup Oscar ten more times, winning on seven occasions, both records in his field.
Baker claims that his work on Harry and the Hendersons is one of his proudest achievements.[8] On October 3, 2009, he received the Jack Pierce – Lifetime Achievement Award title of the Chiller-Eyegore Awards.[9]
He was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Academy of Art University San Francisco in 2008. He also contributes commentaries to the web series Trailers from Hell for trailers about horror and science fiction films.
Baker received the 2485th star of the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 30, 2012. The star is located in front of the Guinness World Records Museum.
Baker announced his retirement on May 28, 2015: "First of all, the CG stuff definitely took away the animatronics part of what I do. It's also starting to take away the makeup part. The time is right, I am 64 years old, and the business is crazy right now. I like to do things right, and they wanted cheap and fast. That is not what I want to do, so I just decided it is basically time to get out. I would consider designing and consulting on something, but I don't think I will have a huge working studio anymore."
Roger William Corman (born April 5, 1926) is an American film director, producer, and actor. He has been called "The Pope of Pop Cinema" and is known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film. Many of Corman's films are based on works that have an already-established critical reputation, such as his cycle of low-budget cult films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
In 1964, Corman—admired by members of the French New Wave and Cahiers du Cinéma—became the youngest filmmaker to have a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, as well as in the British Film Institute and the Museum of Modern Art. He was the co-founder of New World Pictures, the founder of New Concorde and is a longtime member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2009, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award "for his rich engendering of films and filmmakers".
Corman mentored and gave a start to many young film directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, John Sayles, and James Cameron, and was highly influential in the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He also helped to launch the careers of actors like Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, Sylvester Stallone, Diane Ladd, and William Shatner. Corman has occasionally taken minor acting roles in the films of directors who started with him, including The Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather Part II, Apollo 13, The Manchurian Candidate, and Philadelphia.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Roger Corman, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th and 21st century American writers of speculative fiction. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into television shows or films.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Ray Bradbury, licensed under CC-BY-SA,full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
George Walton Lucas Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American filmmaker and entrepreneur. Lucas is known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.
After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1967, Lucas co-founded American Zoetrope with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas wrote and directed THX 1138 (1971), based on his earlier student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which was a critical success but a financial failure. His next work as a writer-director was the film American Graffiti (1973), inspired by his youth in early 1960s Modesto, California, and produced through the newly founded Lucasfilm. The film was critically and commercially successful, and received five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.
Lucas's next film, the epic space opera Star Wars (1977), had a troubled production but was a surprise hit, becoming the highest-grossing film at the time, winning six Academy Awards and sparking a cultural phenomenon. Lucas produced and co-wrote the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). With director Steven Spielberg, he created, produced and co-wrote the Indiana Jones films Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Temple of Doom (1984), The Last Crusade (1989) and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). He also produced and wrote a variety of films and television series through Lucasfilm between the 1970s and the 2010s.
In 1997, Lucas rereleased the Star Wars trilogy as part of a special edition featuring several alterations; home media versions with further changes were released in 2004 and 2011. He returned to directing with a Star Wars prequel trilogy comprising The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005). He last collaborated on the CGI-animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020), the war film Red Tails (2012), and the CGI film Strange Magic (2015).
Lucas is one of history's most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards. His films are among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation. Lucas is considered a significant figure of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement.
Description above from the Wikipedia article George Lucas, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, writer and producer. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, he is the most commercially successful director of all time. Spielberg is the recipient of various accolades, including three Academy Awards, a Kennedy Center honor, four Directors Guild of America Awards, two BAFTA Awards, a Cecil B. DeMille Award and an AFI Life Achievement Award. Seven of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to California and studied film in college. After directing several episodes for television including Night Gallery and Columbo, he directed the television film Duel (1971) which gained acclaim from critics and audiences. He made his directorial film debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), and became a household name with the 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws. He then directed huge box office successes Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the Indiana Jones original trilogy (1981-89). Spielberg subsequently explored drama in the acclaimed The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987).
After a brief hiatus, Spielberg directed the science fiction thriller Jurassic Park (1993), the highest-grossing film ever at the time, and the Holocaust drama Schindler's List (1993), which has often been listed as one of the greatest films ever made. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the latter and for the 1998 World War II epic Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg continued in the 2000s with science fiction films A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005). He also directed the adventure films The Adventures of Tintin (2011) and Ready Player One (2018); the historical dramas Amistad (1997), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017); the musical West Side Story (2021); and the semi-autobiographical drama The Fabelmans (2022). He has been a producer on several successful films, including Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) as well as the miniseries Band of Brothers (2001).
Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks, and has served as a producer for many successful films and television series. He is also known for his long collaboration with the composer John Williams, with whom he has worked for all but five of his feature films. Several of Spielberg's works are among the highest-grossing and greatest films all time. Premiere ranked him first place in the list of 100 Most Powerful People in Movies in 2003. In 2013, Time listed him as one of the 100 most influential people.
Phil Tippett is an American filmmaker and multi-award-winning visual effects supervisor and producer, specializing in creature design, stop-motion, and computerized character animation. Over his career, he has assisted ILM, DreamWorks, and his own company Tippet Studios, with his work appearing in movies such as the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, and RoboCop.
