Curated playlist
Inkpot Award winners
- 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…
- George LucasGeorge Lucas was nearly killed before he ever made a film. On the 12th of June 1962, a few days before his high school graduation in Modesto, California, another driver broadsided his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina, flipping the car…
- Kevin SmithKevin Smith walked out of a cinema on his 21st birthday with a decision made. The film was Richard Linklater's Slacker, shot in Austin, Texas without a studio or a name cast. Smith had grown up in Highlands, New Jersey, the son of a postal…
- Hayao MiyazakiHayao Miyazaki was born on the 5th of January 1941 in Akebono-cho, Hongō, Tokyo City, the second of four sons in a family that manufactured rudders for fighter planes during World War II. His earliest memories are of bombed-out cities. At…
- Dr. SeussTheodor Seuss Geisel was born on the 2nd of March, 1904, on Fairfield Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, within walking distance of a road called Mulberry Street. He would spend decades becoming one of the best-selling children's…
- Jim HensonJim Henson made his first Kermit the Frog from a halved table tennis ball and fabric cut from an old coat that belonged to his mother. A scrap of denim from a pair of jeans formed the sleeve for the puppeteer's arm. From those humble parts…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge spent decades asking one question that made both scientists and storytellers uncomfortable: what happens when machines become smarter than the people who built them? Born on the 2nd of October 1944, Vinge was a…
- Neil GaimanNeil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman was born on the 10th of November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire, into a family whose name had been changed from Chaiman to Gaiman by his grandfather after settling in Portsmouth. By the time Gaiman was seven…
- Kevin FeigeKevin Feige was born on the 2nd of June, 1973, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a family with a quiet thread connecting him to Hollywood before he ever set foot there. His maternal grandfather, Robert E. Short, produced television in the…
- Ralph BakshiRalph Bakshi was born on the 29th of October 1938 in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, into a Krymchak Jewish family, and by the time he was a teenager in Brooklyn he was digging through trash cans for comic books. That detail matters. It tells…
- Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola illegally hired a grave robber to supply real human corpses as props, and oversaw the ritualistic killing of a water buffalo. This was the production of Apocalypse Now, a film so plagued by delays it earned the mocking…
- Poul AndersonPoul William Anderson was born on the 25th of November 1926 in Bristol, Pennsylvania, to Danish parents who would soon uproot the family and carry it across half a continent. By the time he died on the 31st of July 2001, he had won seven…
- Stan LeeStan Lee signed off his monthly column with a single word: "Excelsior!" It is also the New York state motto, which suited a man born Stanley Martin Lieber on the 28th of December 1922, in Manhattan. He started his working life filling…
- Edgar Rice BurroughsEdgar Rice Burroughs was born on the 1st of September, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, the fourth son of Major George Tyler Burroughs, a Civil War veteran and businessman. By the time he died on the 19th of March, 1950, he had written almost…
- John LasseterJohn Lasseter was fired from the Walt Disney Company for believing too hard in the future. The year was 1984, the project was a test film blending traditional hand-drawn animation with computer-generated backgrounds, and the men who fired…
- Larry LieberLawrence D. Lieber arrived in Manhattan on the 26th of October 1931 to parents Celia and Jack Lieber, Romanian-Jewish immigrants who had built a life in New York City. The family moved to The Bronx when Larry was six months old, settling…
- Jack KirbyJack Kirby drew at least 20,318 pages of published art and another 1,385 covers across his career. In 1962 alone he published 1,158 pages. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at a drawing table in his home, turning out four to five…
- Steve DitkoSteve Ditko drew the first costume for Spider-Man because he worried the character's face looked too young. Covering it entirely, he reasoned, would add mystery. That single decision gave one of the most recognizable figures in popular…
- Arnold SchwarzeneggerArnold Alois Schwarzenegger arrived in the United States in October 1968 at age 21, speaking little English and carrying little money. He had already won the Mr. Universe title once, and he would go on to win it three more times. What…
- Howard KazanjianHoward Kazanjian is nowhere in the credits of The Empire Strikes Back. He took over that production partway through, after original producer Gary Kurtz departed, yet received no screen credit for it. Kazanjian was born on the 26th of July…
- Clive BarkerClive Barker was three years old when he saw a man fall out of the sky. At an air show in Liverpool, the French skydiver Leo Valentin plummeted to the ground during a public performance, and a toddler in the crowd watched it happen. That…
- George R. R. MartinGeorge Raymond Richard Martin was born on the 20th of September, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman. Every day walking to school, he passed the dock and house that had once belonged to his family before the Great…
- Joe ShusterJoe Shuster was born in Toronto in 1914, too poor to afford drawing paper, so he wandered from store to store collecting whatever scraps merchants threw out. One day he found a cache of unused wallpaper rolls, their blank backs an…
- Osamu TezukaOsamu Tezuka spent his final hours in a Tokyo hospital bed, drawing. When a nurse tried to take his equipment away, his last words were: "I'm begging you, let me work!" He died of stomach cancer on the 9th of February 1989, and Japan…
- Roger ZelaznyRoger Zelazny spent his evenings writing science fiction while working a day job at the U.S. Social Security Administration. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, he clocked in at government offices in Cleveland and Baltimore, then came home…
- David BrinGlen David Brin was born on the 6th of October 1950 in Glendale, California. His parents were Selma and Herb Brin, who raised him as a Jewish child. He pursued rigorous academic training at the California Institute of Technology. There he…
- Mark HamillMark Richard Hamill was born on the 25th of September 1951, in Oakland, California, the son of a U.S. Navy captain who dismissed his son's passion for movies and comic books as something a boy should outgrow. That boy would go on to play…
- Brian Michael BendisBrian Michael Bendis was thirteen years old when he decided he wanted to work in comics. Not read them. Make them. He was already revising his own Punisher versus Captain America story, drafting and redrafting it the way a novelist might…
- Yoshitaka AmanoYoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, in 1952, the youngest of four children. His father, Yoshio Amano, was a lacquer artist who specialized in traditional Suruga lacquerware and died in 1962 when Yoshitaka was…
- Donald F. GlutDonald Frank Glut began making films in 1953 at the age of nine. He continued this hobby until 1969, creating a total of 41 amateur movies during that span. His subjects ranged from dinosaurs to unauthorized adaptations of characters like…
- Jim ShooterJim Shooter was born on the 27th of September 1951, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He grew up with parents Ken and Eleanor Shooter who were of Polish descent. His father worked as a steelworker and earned very little money. Jim read comics…
- Byron PreissByron Preiss was buried with a secret that nine people are still trying to find. In 1982, he published a puzzle book called The Secret, hiding twelve plexiglass boxes across parks in North America. Each box held a ceramic container, and…
- Moto HagioMoto Hagio was born on the 12th of May 1949 in Ōmuta, Fukuoka, the second of four siblings, to a father who worked the docks and a mother who kept the home. Her parents moved the family repeatedly between Ōmuta and Suita in Osaka…