Anthony Balducci
Dennis Bartok
Steve Bingen
Stephen Bowie
Dwayne Epstein
Glenn Erickson
Stuart Galbraith IV
Michael Jeck
Doug Krentzlin
Scott T. Rivers
Dusty Somers
Gary Teetzel
Sylvia Townsend
Peter Winkler
Anthony Balducci has written three books on silent film comedy. He is presently at work on a book called I Won’t Grow Up!: What Comedy Films Have to Teach Us About Maturity, Responsibility and Masculinity. He has been a devoted blogger since 2000. You can visit his current blog at http://anthonybalducci.blogspot.com/.
Dennis Bartok. The son of noted avant-garde filmmaker and conceptual artist LeAnn Bartok, Dennis graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Film program. At NYU he directed the 10-minute short “Quarter ‘Til” starring Sean Young and John Heard for HBO’s Cinema Showcase series. After graduation he worked for one year for Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Productions in New York. From 1992 – 2005 he served as Head of Programming for the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, a non-profit film organization that screens foreign, classic and rare films. While he was there the Cinematheque restored and re-opened the historic 1922 Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the classic 1940s era Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. During that time he sold several spec screenplays to 20th Century Fox and New Line. In 2005/2006 he produced & wrote the anthology horror film “Trapped Ashes” which screened as a work in progress at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and world premiered at the Toronto Film Festival that year in the Midnight Madness program. He has also appeared as a TV commentator on film history for AMC’s “Behind The Screen” program, and is featured interviewing directors on a number of DVD releases including the “Alien” boxed set with Ridley Scott, “Black Hawk Down” with director Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer and “Amelie” with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. He is the brother of actor/writer Jayce Bartok, and his wife Susan is a TV and film producer. He has one son, Sandor Ace.
Steven Bingen is a historian, screenwriter and former archivist at Warner Bros. Originally a native of Seattle, Washington, Bingen has written or contributed to dozens of books, articles and documentaries on Hollywood history, Including MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, which he coauthored, and which was the first significant book ever published about a movie studio lot. A follow-up is due in September; 2014. He lives in the world’s largest backlot, also known as Los Angeles, California.
Stephen Bowie is a contributor to The A.V. Club and the founder of The Classic TV History Blog.
Dwayne Epstein is the author of a number of young adult biographies, covering such celebrity personalities as Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Hilary Swank, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Denzel Washington for Lucent Books’ “People in the News” series. Epstein also contributed to Bill Krohn’s bestselling books Hitchcock at Work and Joe Dante and the Gremlins of Hollywood. Prior to writing biographies, Epstein contributed to film chronicles on a regular basis. He wrote for Filmfax Magazine on subjects such as Bobby Darin, the Rat Pack, television pioneer Steve Allen, film director Sam Fuller, comic book artist Neal Adams, Invasion of the Body Snatchers‘ Kevin McCarthy, John Belushi and comedy legend Sid Caesar. Epstein later contributed to Cahiers Du Cinema‘s “Serious Pleasures” which had a high profile in Europe. He wrote on American films chosen for rediscovery by directors Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood. Early in his career, Epstein earned his first professional writing credit reviewing films for Hearst Community Newspapers. Epstein was born in New York’s Coney Island and moved West with his family at age 8, spending the rest of his childhood in Cerritos, Calif. He moved back east, attended Mercer Community College in New Jersey, and also served as an assistant editor for the five area newspapers of Cranbury Publications.
Glenn Erickson has been reviewing film and video releases since 1997, for MGM, Turner Classic Movies and his own website DVD Savant. A member since 2001 of the Online Film Critics’ Society, Glenn has a background in special effects and film and video editorial, but is still at heart a starry-eyed UCLA Film Student. He’s done a number of audio commentaries for Warner, Fox and Criterion discs, and his latest book is Sci-Fi Savant: Classic Sci-fi Review
Stuart Galbraith IV (publisher-editor) is a Kyoto-based film historian and writer. He is the author of seven books, including The Emperor and the Wolf (Faber & Faber, 2002), the joint-biography of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune hailed by Martin Scorsese as “a must read.” Peter Biskind, in The New York Times Book Review, called it “a rare feast for lovers of Japanese cinema [and] a monumental job of research . . . infused throughout with an affection for its subjects that is contagious. Best of all, it does what all good film books should do: returns us, with an enriched appreciation, to the movies themselves.” “One of the best industrial histories of Japanese cinema available in English,” adds Catherine Russell of Cineaste. And Bill Kelley, in The Sarasota Herald Tribune, had this to say: “Not many film books deserve to have the adjective ‘extraordinary’ applied to them, but Stuart Galbraith’s The Emperor and the Wolf is nothing less than that. In fact, it’s more . . . this 823-page achievement wants to be all things to all admirers of its twin subjects, and, incredibly, it succeeds. Reference work, scrupulously thorough filmography, exhaustive biography – all are here . . . A graceful, economical writer, [Galbraith] is also a first-rate critic and film historian. [The Emperor and the Wolf] is a wonder of clarity and organization, and an enormous pleasure to read . . . [a] magnificent book.” The book is also available in a Spanish edition while a Japanese-language version is due out in 2014. Galbraith’s other books include Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo: The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films (Feral House, 1998), The Japanese Filmography (McFarland & Co., 1996), Motor City Marquees (McFarland, 1994), Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films (McFarland, 1994), The Toho Studios Story (Scarecrow, 2004), and Japanese Cinema (Taschen, 2009). From 2004-2009, Galbraith wrote a monthly column for Japan’s Daily Yomiuri on Region 2/Japanese DVDs. Within the home video field, Galbraith has written essays for Criterion’s three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and Blu-ray, Optimum’s Rashomon, and BCI Eclipse’s The Quiet Duel. He provided audio commentaries for AnimEigo’s Musashi Miyamoto – The Ultimate Samurai and Tora-san, editing the accompanying booklet for the latter. He was an associate producer for the DVDs of the classic poolroom drama The Hustler and Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. He provided audio commentary (with director Richard Fleischer) for the Special Edition DVD of Tora! Tora! Tora! (all for 20th Century-Fox), and interviewed Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond for his audio commentary track for The Sadist. Galbraith also contributed commentary tracks to The Horror of Hammer and Tales of Frankenstein, all for All Day Entertainment. Galbraith’s audio commentary for Classic Media’s Invasion of Astro-Monster was released in 2007 and nomiated for a Rondo Hatton Award. Holding a Master’s Degree from the University of Southern California’s prestigious School of Cinema-Television, Galbraith worked as an archivist and researcher at both Warner Bros. and M-G-M. At Warner Bros., Galbraith implemented preservation projects and procedures at both its USC-Warner Bros. Archives and the Warner Bros. Corporate Image Archives. At M-G-M, Galbraith worked as a “film detective,” tracking down the original camera negatives to more than three dozen “lost” films. Born in 1965 in Detroit, Michigan, Galbraith was a film critic for the Ann Arbor News, a daily newspaper. In addition to writing film reviews and feature stories, Galbraith also wrote a weekly column, “Video View,” which ran from 1990-1993. Between books, Galbraith wrote for such film magazines as Filmfax, Outre, and the French film magazine HK Orient Extreme Cinema. He’s written nearly 2,000 DVD and Blu-ray reviews for DVD Talk and, since 2003 he has lived in Kyoto, Japan with his wife, Yukiyo, and their daughter, Sadie.
Michael Jeck is adjunct professor of film history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and writer of the text for the quarterly programs of Film Forum 2, New York since 1988. And he has been: an independent film distributor; programmer of the American Film Institute Theater; on-air host of international movies at Mhz-TV; and audio commentator on the DVDs and Blu-rays of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood.
Doug Krentzlin is a professional freelance writer and actor living in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his cat, Buffy. He has also writes about classic television and has had articles published in the New York Post and Movie Maker Magazine and at Current.org.
Scott T. Rivers is a film historian, writer, editor and researcher. He received his BA and MFA in Film Studies from the University of Utah. For the past 30 years, he has written on film history and popular culture for Filmfax, Classic Images, The Salt Lake Tribune, City Weekly and Las Vegas Life. He also served as Film Researcher on the BBC/Flashback Television documentary Superhomes: Los Angeles (2005).
Dusty Somers is a Seattle-based writer and editor who splits his critical ambitions between writing Blu-ray and DVD reviews and theater criticism. He a member of the Online Film Critics Society and Seattle Theater Writers.
Gary Teetzel lives in Los Angeles, where he has worked in motion picture publicity, film & video servicing and film remastering/restoration. He has reviewed DVDs for the Turner Classic Movies website and been a guest writer at DVD Savant and Sci-Fi Japan..
Sylvia Townsend is a Los Angeles native who served an internship at The Hollywood Reporter while earning a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California. For years she was a reporter for the Daily News of Los Angeles and other newspapers, and then a freelance journalist and editor. Later, she completed the unfinished, posthumous memoir of the production designer, and briefly production head at Paramount, Richard Sylbert. Praeger published the book, Designing Movies: Portrait of a Hollywood Artist, in 2006.
Peter Winkler has written about movies for CineFan, Crime Magazine, Filmfax, The Jimston Journal, Playboy, PopMatters, and spiked; and reviewed movies for Video Theater, where he served as associate editor. Mr. Winkler has also written for The Huffington Post, PC Laptop Computers Magazine,PICO-Laptops and Portables, and Smart TV & Sound. He was the subject of a feature story in the Los Angeles Times and has been a guest on talk-radio shows in the U.S. and Europe. Mr. Winkler graduated with academic honors from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978.