Director P. J. Hogan made his motion picture directorial debut
with the delightfully original Muriel's Wedding, which he also wrote. Of
the international offers that resulted, he selected TriStar Pictures' My
Best Friend's Wedding to be his follow-up motion picture.
Hogan has worked in the Australian television and movie industry as a writer
and director of note for more than a decade.
He received attention in 1984 for Getting Wet, which he wrote, directed
and edited. It won two Australian Film Institute awards, including Best
Short Fiction.
In 1986, he directed and co-wrote The Humpty Dumpty Man, a film for television.
In 1991, he was second unit director and script editor on the acclaimed
feature film, Proof, directed by his wife, Jocelyn Moorhouse. Ms. Moorhouse
later directed How to Make an American Quilt. While Hogan was in Chicago
making My Best Friend's Wedding, she was nearby in rural Illinois filming
A Thousand Acres with Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jennifer Jason
Leigh. The couple is part of a new vanguard of Australian filmmakers whose
confident work helped revitalize that country's film community.
In 1993, Hogan directed the "Sloth" episode of Seven Deadly Sins
for Australian Broadcasting Corporation Television.
When Muriel's Wedding premiered at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors'
Fortnight in 1994, it received a 15-minute standing ovation. Similar receptions
greeted the film at festivals around the world.
Muriel's Wedding was received with equal enthusiasm at the box-office and
dominated the Australian Film Institute Awards with 11 nominations, including
Best Achievement In Direction. It won AFI awards for Best Film, Best Actress
and Best Achievement In Sound. A fourth win came for Best Supporting Actress,
given to Rachel Griffiths, who also co-stars in My Best Friend's Wedding.
It was the first Australian film to be chosen for a British Royal Premiere
in more than 20 years.
Producer Jerry Zucker is a versatile filmmaker who has scored success
as a producer, director and writer.
He directed the enormously popular Ghost in 1990, a gigantic box-office
hit that has earned substantially over half-a-billion dollars. He directed
and was a producer on First Knight, starring Sean Connery and Richard Gere.
He was a producer on My Life, with Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman, and,
more recently, produced (along with Gil Netter and David Zucker) A Walk
In The Clouds with Keanu Reeves and Anthony Quinn.
He was part of the highly original and trend-setting ZAZ (David Zucker/Jim
Abrahams/Jerry Zucker) team that collaborated on the hit Airplane!; co-wrote
and produced The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad!; and directed
Ruthless People. Also with ZAZ, Zucker created the Police Squad television
series and co-wrote the innovative Kentucky Fried Movie.
Producer and screenwriter Ronald Bass was honored with the Academy
Award® for co-writing, with Barry Morrow, the 1988 film Rain Man. He
more recently co-wrote and co-executive produced Waiting To Exhale.
His additional writing credits include The Joy Luck Club, co-written with
Amy Tan, as well as Sleeping With the Enemy, Black Widow, Gardens of Stone
and Dangerous Minds. He also co-wrote and executive produced When A Man
Loves A Woman.
Bass's television work includes writing and producing two new dramas, Dangerous
Minds and Moloney.
Bass studied at Stanford and Yale, and graduated from Harvard Law School.
He pursued a career in entertainment law before switching to writing. His
novels, including The Perfect Thief, Lime's Crisis and The Emerald Illusion
led to his successful screenwriting.
Executive producer Gil Netter has been president of the very successful
Zucker Brothers Productions for the past ten years.
He was an executive producer on First Knight, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final
Insult, Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear and My Life.
He was a producer on A Walk In the Clouds and the recent comedy High School
High.
Netter's career began as a talent/literary agent. He served as vice president
of Chuck Fries Productions and then Imagine Entertainment before joins forces
with Jerry Zucker and David Zucker.
Executive producer Patricia Whitcher co-produced the comedy High
School High before commencing work on My Best Friend's Wedding. She previously
co-produced How To Make An American Quilt for director Jocelyn Moorhouse
and Amblin Entertainment's A Dangerous Woman.
Her extensive film background includes serving as either unit production
manager or associate producer on a number of pictures, among them True Lies,
Meteor Man, An Inner City Fairy Tale, The Lawnmower Man, Freddy's Dead:
The Final Nightmare (sixth in the A Nightmare On Elm Street saga), Iron
Maze, Book Of Love, Darkman, Boris and Natasha, Lost Angels, Honey, I Shrunk
The Kids, The In Crowd and Odd Jobs.
With My Best Friend's Wedding, director of photography Laszlo Kovacs,
ASC, continues a long line of major films.
His American work began with such seminal motion pictures as Easy Rider,
Five Easy Pieces, That Cold Day In the Park and The Last Movie.
He was the cinematographer on What's Up, Doc?, The King of Marvin Gardens,
Paper Moon, For Pete's Sake, Shampoo, Nickelodeon, New York, New York, Butch
and Sundance: The Early Days, Frances, The Toy, Ghostbusters, Mask, Legal
Eagles and Radio Flyer.
Recent among his nearly 40 feature films are Free Willy 2: The Adventure
Home, Copycat and Multiplicity.
Kovacs escaped from his native Hungary during the 1956 Soviet invasion,
smuggling out the first film of occupation seen in the Western world.
Production designer Richard Sylbert is a six-time Academy Award®
nominee who has been honored with two of the coveted Oscars®. His first
win was for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his second was for Dick
Tracy, for which he also received the British Academy Award.
His other four Oscar® nominations were for production design on Chinatown,
Shampoo, Reds and The Cotton Club.
He has been involved in the production design of over 30 feature films,
including Baby Doll, A Face In The Crowd, Splendor In The Grass, The Manchurian
Candidate, Grand Prix, The Pawnbroker, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The
Graduate, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, The Fortune and Fat City.
Among his other films are Rosemary's Baby, The Bonfire of the Vanities,
Carlito's Way, Tequila Sunrise, Frances and The Heartbreak Kid.
Before beginning work on My Best Friend's Wedding, Sylbert was production
designer on Blood and Wine, starring Jack Nicholson, Jennifer Lopez and
Michael Caine.
His stage work includes the Broadway productions of "The Prisoner of
Second Avenue" and "The Egghead."
He served for two years as a vice president of production at Paramount Pictures.
Costume designer Jeffrey Kurland has devoted much of his career to
designing for the stylish films of Woody Allen.
Prior to joining the creative team on My Best Friend's Wedding, he was involved
in Allen's comedy Everyone Says I Love You. Other pictures with Allen include
Mighty Aphrodite, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Husbands and Wives, Shadows
and Fog, Alice, Crimes and Misdemeanors, New York Stories, Another Woman,
September, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Broadway
Danny Rose. Allen's Bullets Over Broadway brought Kurland an Academy Award®
nomination and Radio Days earned him England's highest film honor, the BAFTA.
His other films include This Is My Life, Quick Change, Revenge Of The Nerds
II: Nerds In Paradise, Streets of Gold and the 1981 film The Fan.
Early in his career, film editor Garth Craven worked on five powerful
pictures directed by Sam Peckinpah: Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett & Billy
The Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Killer Elite and Convoy.
He also edited five films for director Roger Spottiswoode: The Best Of Times,
Shoot To Kill and Turner & Hooch, plus Third Degree Burn and And The
Band Played On for HBO.
Among Craven's other movies are I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, Avalanche
Express, I, The Jury, Educating Rita, Little Treasure, Gaby - A True Story,
Soapdish, Passed Away, Daybreak and When A Man Loves A Woman.
His film work prior to My Best Friend's Wedding includes Restoration and
One Fine Day.
Additionally, he was second unit director on Leap of Faith, Air America,
Turner & Hooch, Convoy and Carney.
Lisa Fruchtman (Editor) began her professional career in film as
an editor at the National Film Board of Canada. After a move to San Francisco
in 1974, she was hired by Francis Ford Coppola as an assistant editor on
The Godfather, Part II. Over the next several years, among the films she
went on to edit were Apocalypse Now, Heaven's Gate, The Right Stuff, Children
of a Lesser God, The Godfather, Part III and The Doctor. For television,
she has edited Shimmer for American Playhouse and Truman for HBO.
Apocalypse Now received both an Oscar® nomination and a British Academy
Award nomination for Best Editing. In 1984, Fruchtman won an Oscar®
for Best Editing on The Right Stuff. Children of a Lesser God, on which
she was sole editor, was nominated for Best Picture. The Godfather, Part
III was nominated for Best Editing as well. Truman won both the Emmy and
Cable Ace awards for Best Picture and Fruchtman won the Cable Ace for Best
Editing.
Fruchtman is now pursuing a directing career. She has directed a 20 minute
dramatic short as part of the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop
for Women, and two television spots. She was admitted as a director to the
Sundance Institute Filmmakers Lab with Catford Street, a feature film she
is developing.
A four-time Oscar® nominee, James Newton Howard (Composer) has
written diverse and impressive scores for such films as Father's Day, One
Fine Day, The Prince of Tides, Flatliners, The Fugitive, Junior, Primal
Fear, An Eye for an Eye, Restoration, Outbreak, Dave, Grand Canyon, Wyatt
Earp, Glengarry Glen Ross and Pretty Woman, among others. Howard also created
the memorable theme for television's top-rated series ER, earning him an
Emmy nomination.
Initially trained as a classical pianist, Howard became a session musician
for pop and rock artists ranging from Elton John to Carly Simon in the 1970s.
He went on to become a sought-after arranger, orchestrator and record producer,
working with such artists as Bob Seger, Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones and
Rod Stewart.
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