Curated playlist
Golden Globe Award–winning producers
- Simon KinbergSimon Kinberg has a small cameo in one of his own scripts. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, he plays the banker who chats with John Smith at a dinner party. He had started the screenplay years earlier, as his thesis project in film school. That scene…
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his…
- Wes AndersonWes Anderson grew up in Houston, Texas, making silent films on his father's Super 8 camera, casting his brothers and friends as the talent. His first ambition, he has said, was not to direct movies at all but to become a writer. That early…
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest of the outreach. This is a filmmaker whose movies have earned over $6 billion…
- Kirk DouglasKirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on the 9th of December 1916, the only son among seven children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Amsterdam, New York. His father had been a horse trader in Russia and became a ragman in…
- Elia KazanElia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish word for "pot maker". His family arrived in the United States on the 8th of July,…
- Jack L. WarnerJack Leonard Warner ran Warner Bros. Studios for more than half a century, longer than any other pioneering Hollywood mogul. His career began with a pawned horse and a borrowed chair, and it ended with an estate valued at $15 million and a…
- James CameronOn the 26th of March 2012, James Cameron sat alone inside the Deepsea Challenger and dropped to the deepest point on Earth. He reached the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, spending more than three hours on the ocean floor. No one had…
- Michael DouglasMichael Kirk Douglas was born on the 25th of September, 1944, into a household already saturated with Hollywood ambition. His father, Kirk Douglas, had risen from poverty to become one of the defining stars of American cinema. His mother,…
- Sacha Baron CohenSacha Baron Cohen walked onto the red carpet of the 84th Academy Awards carrying an urn he claimed contained the ashes of Kim Jong-il. He was in character as Admiral General Aladeen. The "ashes" were flour, which he then accidentally…
- Ridley ScottRidley Scott was born on the 30th of November 1937 in South Shields, a port town on the northeast coast of England, to a father who would serve as a Colonel in the Royal Engineers and a mother who was a miner's daughter. His great-uncle…
- George Miller (filmmaker)George Miller was born on the 3rd of March 1945 in Chinchilla, Queensland, the son of Greek immigrant parents. By the time he turned thirty, he had trained as a physician, completed a hospital residency, and was quietly teaching himself to…
- Robin WilliamsRobin McLaurin Williams was voted "Most Likely Not to Succeed" by his high school classmates in 1969. Within a decade, he was on the cover of Time magazine, and within two, he had won an Academy Award. What made Williams so difficult to…
- Saul ZaentzSaul Zaentz won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, a feat almost no one else in Hollywood has matched. Born on the 28th of February 1921, in Passaic, New Jersey, he was the youngest of five children of Polish Jewish immigrants. He…