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Robert Zemeckis

Born:	May 14, 1952 (age 54) Chicago, Illinois, USA
Occupation:	Director, Producer and Writer
Spouse:	Leslie Harter Zemeckis

Robert Zemeckis (born May 14, 1952) is an Academy Award-winning American movie director, producer and writer. Zemeckis first came to public attention in the eighties as the director of "intricate cinematic jungle gyms"^[1] like Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, though he has since diversified into more dramatic fare, including Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar.

His films are characterized by an interest in state-of-the-art technology, including the early use of match moving in Back to the Future Part II and the pioneering performance capture techniques seen in The Polar Express. Though Zemeckis has often been pidgeonholed as a director only interested in effects,^[2] film critic David Thomson has written that "[n]o other contemporary director has used special effects to more dramatic and narrative purpose....As writer and director, he has rarely allowed the show to lose sight of....human realities."^[3]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early Life 1.2 Education at USC 1.3 Career 1.4 Interest in Effects and Digital Filmmaking 1.5 Personal Life 2 Selected Filmography 3 References 4 External links

He was born Robert Lee Zemeckis in Chicago, Illinois to a Lithuanian father and Yugoslavian mother and was raised in a working-class Catholic family. Zemeckis has said that "the truth was that in my family there was no art. I mean, there was no music, there were no books, there was no theater....The only thing I had that was inspirational, was television--and it actually was."^[4] As a child, Zemeckis loved television and was fascinated by his parents' 8 mm film home movie camera. Starting off by filming family events like birthdays and holidays, Zemeckis gradually began producing narrative films with his friends. "I started to do a lot of stop motion animation, puppet animation type things, and blowing things up with fire crackers and elaborate special effects," he recalled. "So they were very entertained by that."^[4]

Along with enjoying movies, Zemeckis remained an avid TV watcher. "You hear so much about the problems with television," he said, "but I think that it saved my life."^[4] Television gave Zemeckis his first glimpse of a world outside of his blue-collar upbringing; specifically, he learned of the existence of film schools on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. After seeing Bonnie and Clyde with his father and being heavily influenced by it,^[2] Zemeckis decided that he wanted to go to film school.

His parents disapproved of the idea, Zemeckis later said, "But only in the sense that they were concerned....for my family and my friends and the world that I grew up in, this was the kind of dream that really was impossible. My parents would sit there and say, 'Don't you see where you come from? You can't be a movie director.' I guess maybe some of it I felt I had to do in spite of them, too."^[4]

Zemeckis applied only to University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, and got into the Film School on the strength of an essay and a music video based on a Beatles song. Not having heard from the University itself, Zemeckis called and was told he had been rejected, because of his average grades. The director gave an "impassioned plea" to the official on the other line, promising to go to summer school and improve his studies, and eventually convinced the school to accept him.^[4]

Arriving at USC that Fall, Zemeckis encountered a program that was, in his words, made up of "a bunch of hippies [and] considered an embarrassment by the university."^[4] The classes were difficult, with professors constantly stressing how hard the movie business was. Zemeckis remembered not being much fazed by this, citing the "healthy cynicism" that had been bred into him from his Chicago upbringing.^[4]

While at USC, Zemeckis developed a close friendship with the writer Bob Gale, who was also a student there. Gale later recalled, "The graduate students at USC had this veneer of intellectualism....So Bob and I gravitated toward one another because we wanted to make Hollywood movies. We weren't interested in the French New Wave. We were interested in Clint Eastwood and James Bond and Walt Disney, because that's how we grew up."^[5]

As a result of winning a Student Academy Award at USC for his film, A Field of Honor, Zemeckis came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg said, "He barged right past my secretary, and sat me down and showed me this student film....and I thought it was spectacular, with police cars and a riot, all dubbed to Elmer Bernstein's score for The Great Escape."^[5] Spielberg became Zemeckis' mentor and executive produced his first two films, both of which Zemeckis co-wrote with Bob Gale.

1978's I Wanna Hold Your Hand and 1980's Used Cars (starring Kurt Russell) were well-received critically, with Pauline Kael going into particular rhapsody over the latter film, but both were commercially inert. After a third failure, the Spielberg-directed 1941 (for which Zemeckis and Gale had written the screenplay), the pair gained a reputation for writing "scripts that everyone thought were great [but] somehow didn't translate into movies people wanted to see."^[5]

As a result of this, Zemeckis had trouble finding work in the early eighties, though he and Gale kept busy. They wrote scripts for other directors, including Car Pool for Brian De Palma and Growing Up for Spielberg; neither ended up getting made. Another Zemeckis-Gale project, about a teenager who accidentally travels back in time to the fifties, was turned down by every major studio.^[6] The director was jobless until Michael Douglas hired him in 1984 to film Romancing the Stone. A romantic adventure starring Douglas and Kathleen Turner, Romancing was expected to flop (to the point that, after viewing a rough cut of the film, the producers of the then-in-the-works Cocoon fired Zemeckis as director),^[6] but the film became a sleeper hit. While working on Romancing the Stone, Zemeckis met composer Alan Silvestri, who has scored all of his subsequent pictures.

After Romancing, the director suddenly had the clout to direct his time-traveling screenplay, which was titled Back to the Future. Starring Michael J. Fox, the 1985 movie was wildly successful upon its release, and was followed by two sequels. The Back to the Future sequels sandwiched another Zemeckis project, the madcap 1940s toon-mystery Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In 1990, Zemeckis commented, when asked if he would want to make non-comedies, "I would like to be able to do everything. Just now, though, I’m too restless to do anything that’s not really zany."^[6] After the last Back to the Future sequel, Zemeckis did decide to direct more serious fare, starting with what has been his biggest commercial and critical success to date, 1994's Forrest Gump. The film won Zemeckis an Academy Award for Best Director.

Zemeckis is known for his innovative use of special effects, especially in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which combined live action seamlessly with traditional animation, and Forrest Gump, in which he placed Tom Hanks in scenes with well-known historical figures such as John F. Kennedy. Since his first film, which used archival footage of The Beatles, one of Zemeckis' trademarks has been the inclusion of actual celebrities as characters in his movies. Another of his trademarks is a long, complicated opening shot, accomplished either optically or digitally. Memorable opening shots in his films include those in Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, and Contact.

In 1999, Zemeckis donated $5 million towards the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at USC, a 35,000 square-foot center that houses production stages, an immense 60-system digital editing lab, and a 50-seat screening room. When the Center opened in March 2001, Zemeckis spoke in a panel about the future of film, alongside friends Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Of those (including Spielberg) who clung to celluloid and disparaged the idea of shooting digitally, Zemeckis said, "These guys are the same ones who have been saying that LPs sound better than CDs. You can argue that until you're blue in the face, but I don't know anyone who's still buying vinyl. Film, as we have traditionally thought of it, is going to be different. But the continuum is man's desire to tell stories around the campfire. The only thing that keeps changing is the campfire."^[7] (Today, the Robert Zemeckis Center hosts many film school classes, much of the Interactive Media Division, and Trojan Vision, USC's student television station, which has been voted the number one college television station in the country.)

2004's The Polar Express (based on the children's book by Chris Van Allsburg and reteaming Zemeckis with Tom Hanks) utilized the computer animation technique known as performance capture, whereby the movements of the actors are captured digitally and used as the basis for the animated characters. Express was the first time the technology had been used in a feature film, causing The New York Times to write that, "Whatever critics and audiences make of this movie, from a technical perspective it could mark a turning point in the gradual transition from an analog to a digital cinema."^[8] Zemeckis will use the technology again in his latest film, Beowulf, scheduled to be released on November 16, 2007.

In February 2007 Zemeckis and Disney chairman Dick Cook announced plans to set up a new performance-capture film company devoted to CG-created, 3-D movies.^[9] The company will create films using the performance capture technology, with Zemeckis expected to direct a number of the projects. Disney will distribute and market the motion pictures worldwide.

Zemeckis has said that, for a long time, he sacrificed his personal life in favor of a career. "I won an Academy Award when I was 44 years old," he explained, "but I paid for it with my 20s. That decade of my life from film school till 30 was nothing but work, nothing but absolute, driving work. I had no money. I had no life."^[4] In the early eighties, Zemeckis married actress Mary Ellen Trainor, with whom he had a son, Alexander. He described the relationship as difficult to balance with his filmmaking, saying in 1996, "Nothing's been harder on my marriage than this career. I mean, it's really, really hard."^[4] His relationship with Trainor eventually ended in divorce. In 2001, he married actress Leslie Harter Zemeckis.

Further information: Category:Films directed by Robert Zemeckis

• I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) (director, co-writer)
• 1941 (1979) (co-writer)
• Used Cars (1980) (director, co-writer)
• Romancing the Stone (1984) (director)
• Back to the Future (1985) (director, co-writer)
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) (director)
• Back to the Future Part II (1989) (director, co-writer)
• Back to the Future Part III (1990) (director, co-writer)
• Death Becomes Her (1992) (director)
• Forrest Gump (1994) (director)
• The Frighteners (1996) (executive producer)
• Contact (1997) (director)
• What Lies Beneath (2000) (director)
• Cast Away (2000) (director)
• Matchstick Men (2003) (executive producer)
• The Polar Express (2004) (director, co-writer)
• Monster House (2006) (executive producer)
• Beowulf (2007) (director)
• The Corrections (currently in pre-production) (director)

Preceded by Steven Spielberg for Schindler's List

Academy Award for Best Director 1994 for Forrest Gump

Succeeded by Mel Gibson for Braveheart

• Robert Zemeckis at the Internet Movie Database
• Robert Zemeckis at the Notable Names Database