Mary Frances Reynolds was born on April Fool's Day, 1932 in El Paso, TX. A highly energetic child, she moved with her family to Burbank, CA when she was 7. Mary Frances won a local beauty pageant when she was 16. Two of the judges at that pageant were Hollywood talent scouts. The talent scout from Warner Brothers took the young girl for a screen test which led to a contract. Jack Warner himself changed her name to Debbie. Debbie's first big role was in the MGM musical Three Little Words, starring Fred Astaire and Red Skelton. Her performance in the Busby Berkley musical Two Weeks with Love prompted L.B. Mayer to give her the leading role, along with Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, in one of the greatest screen musicals of all time, Singing in the Rain. Debbie wasn't even a dancer when she was cast opposite the great Gene Kelly, but she was a quick study and her enthusiasm and joy shine throughout her performance. Over the next ten years, Debbie Reynolds made over 25 films including How the West Was Won and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Debbie Reynolds has had a successful acting career in film, television, and the theater and has sold out shows worldwide as a concert performer. She is also an avid volunteer for charitable causes and is the mother of actress and writer Carrie Fisher and Todd Fisher.

She cast such a sunny, positive glow in 1950s and 1960s films that you wonder how her promising career might have turned out had it not taken a sudden family detour. Lovely Milwaukee-born Nancy (Ann) Olson was the daughter of Henry, a physician, and Evelyn Olson, and educated at the University of Wisconsin. Discovered on stage after transferring to California's UCLA, the pretty, peaches-and-cream blonde was quickly signed by Paramount Studios in 1948 and almost immediately handed co-starring parts after an unbilled bit part in Portrait of Jennie (1948).

Earning a prime role in the picture Canadian Pacific (1949), the relatively inexperienced starlet was given the role of a lifetime as script girl Betty Schaefer, who attracts ne'er-do-well writer William Holden and irks reclusive diva Gloria Swanson in the towering classic Sunset Blvd. (1950). A bright and animated presence who held her own in a film rich with scene-stealers, Nancy won a deserved Oscar nomination for "best supporting actress" as one of the more sane characters in the film. Her pairing with Holden, in fact, went over so well they were teamed in a succession of standard features: Union Station (1950), Force of Arms (1951), and Submarine Command (1951), none holding a candle to their "Sunset" pairing. Other male co-stars during this active period included John Wayne as Big Jim McLain (1952), Sterling Hayden in So Big (1953) (one of her finer post "Sunset" roles), and Will Rogers Jr. in The Boy from Oklahoma (1954). - IMDB

An actor and stage director, Peter Bogdanovich began working in movies in 1966 as Roger Corman's assistant on the hit, The Wild Angels. Corman financed Bogdanovich's first film as director-writer-producer-actor with the cult classic, Targets, starring Boris Karloff. In 1971, Bogdanovich commanded the approving attention of both critics and the public with The Last Picture Show, starring then-unknowns Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn and Cloris Leachman. A brilliant look at small-town Texan-American life in the early 1950s, the film won the New York Film Critics' Circle Award for Best Screenplay, the British Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and received a total of eight Academy Award nominations, including three for Bogdanovich. Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won for Best Supporting Actor and Actress. The Library of Congress designated the film as a National Treasure.

Mr. Bogdanovich followed this triumph with the film What's Up, Doc?, a madcap romantic farce starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, and Paper Moon, a Depression Era tale about a pair of unlikely con artists. Paper Moon received four Academy Award nominations and nabbed a Supporting Actress Oscar for nine-year-old Tatum O'Neal.

Mr. Bogdanovich has directed a number of critically acclaimed films including the film version of Henry James' classic Daisy Miller, Audrey Hepburn's last starring role in They All Laughed, and Mask.

Having published over twelve books on various aspects of film and filmmaking, Bogdanovich currently has four of his works in print: the bestselling Who the Devil Made It, which includes interviews with sixteen legendary directors; Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week; This is Orson Welles, and his classic John Ford which has been continuously in print since its first edition in 1967. His latest book, Who the Hell's in It features 25 stars he knew or worked with including Cary Grant, James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, James Cagney, Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando.

Mr. Clooney has been a journalist since he was a teenager. But it was his appearance in 1994 as host of the cable channel American Movie Classics that brought his likeable visage and immense movie knowledge to the attention of the nation.

He was already well-known in the Cincinnati area, where he appeared in many forms: working as a radio host and a TV news anchor and hosting an early TV talk show, The Nick Clooney Show. He also hosted the syndicated game show The Money Maze from 1974-75 and wrote a column for the Cincinnati Post from 1989 until the paper closed in 2007.

Mr. Clooney is the father of actor, director, writer and producer George Clooney, and the brother of singer Rosemary Clooney. He published the book The Movies That Changed Us in 2002.

Nick Clooney was inducted into the Cincinnati Journalism Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2001. A Democrat, Clooney ran for Congress in Kentucky's 4th district in 2004, but was defeated by Republican Geoff Davis.

In the past few years, Mr. Clooney has been a Distinguished Journalist in Residence at American University's School Communication and The Newseum in Washington, D.C. Since 2006, he and his son George, have been raising awareness of the suffering in Sudan through lectures, public appearances and a recent film: A Journey to Darfur.

The Alloy Orchestra is a three man musical ensemble, writing and performing live accompaniment to classic silent films. Working with an outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects, they thrash and grind soulful music from unlikely sources.

Performing at prestigious film festivals and cultural centers in the US and abroad (The Telluride Film Festival, The Louvre, Lincoln Center, The Academy of Motion Pictures, the National Gallery of Art and others), Alloy has helped revive some of the great masterpieces of the silent era.

An unusual combination of found percussion and state-of-the-art electronics gives the Orchestra the ability to create any sound imaginable. Utilizing their famous "rack of junk" and electronic synthesizers, the group generates beautiful music in a spectacular variety of styles. They can conjure up a French symphony or a simple German bar band of the 20's. The group can make the audience think it is being attacked by tigers, contacted by radio signals from Mars or swept up in the Russian Revolution.

Alloy collaborates with some of the worlds best archives and collectors (such as the George Eastman House, The British Film Institute, Paramount pictures, Film Preservation Associates and The Douris Corporation) to present audiences with the very best available prints of some of history's greatest film.

Walter Strony is one of America's premier concert organists. He made his public debut in 1974 at the age of 18 and has since established himself as one of few organists equally at home playing both theatre and classical organ.

Mr. Strony has performed hundreds of concerts from coast to coast in the United States as well as in Japan, Australia, England, and Canada. In addition, he has performed at many conventions of the American Theatre Organ Society and the American Guild of Organists.

In July 2007 he performed the first solo organ recital to be presented in many years at New York's Radio City Music Hall for the American Theatre Organ Society's 2007 Convention.

He is the only living organist to have been twice voted "Organist of the Year" by the American Theatre Organ Society - in 1991 and 1993. He has performed with the Calgary Symphony (1999); Allentown Symphony (2003); and most recently, with the El Paso Symphony (2007).

Gerald Peary is an American film critic, who has been a columnist for the Boston Phoenix since 1996. He is likely best known in the Boston University community for his role as curator of BU Cinematheque, a weekly program that brings independent and celebrated filmmakers to campus to screen and discuss their work.

His cinema articles have appeared in many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and The Real Paper.

Peary has also contributed to numerous magazines, including Film Comment, Cineaste, Sight & Sound, the Boston Review, Toronto Magazine and Maclean's.

Peary is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the National Society of Film Critics and FIPRESCI (the International Film Critics Association), and he has served on critics' juries at film festivals including Berlin, Locarno, Stockholm and Thessaloniki.

Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ryan Piers Williams originally attended UT Austin's Film program but transferred to and graduated from USC's Film Production Program in 2005.

The Dry Land, Filmed partly in El Paso, Texas just last year, the film follows a U.S. soldier returning home from war as he struggles to reconcile his experiences abroad with the life and family he left in Texas. It is the first feature written and directed by native Texan Ryan Piers Williams. The film is the story of a soldier (Ryan O'Nan) returning to his wife (America Ferrera) and their home in El Paso, Texas. After a traumatic tour of duty, he is dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and having a hard time coping. A fellow Veteran, (Wilmer Valderrama) becomes an important part of the healing process and helps him through it, as they cope in very different ways.

The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and has screened at the Marfa Film Festival, Dallas Internatioinal Film Festival and Seattle Internatioinal Film Festival.

Born in Los Angeles to parents who immigrated from Honduras, America Ferrera was just out of high school when she made her auspicious film debut in the delightful 2002 indie comedy Real Women Have Curves. In addition to winning the Sundance Film Festival's jury award for best actress, she became a hero to women everywhere for embracing her sexiness despite her insecurities. While working on her degree in international relations at USC, Ferrera gave an award-winning performance in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Her small screen breakthrough came as the eponymous star of the series Ugly Betty, the hit American adaptation of a wildly popular Spanish telenovela. That role earned her an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a SAG award.

Ferrera has returned to the big screen with three recent outings: the comedy Our Family Wedding, voice work in the 3-D animated movie How to Train Your Dragon, and the war drama shown here at the Plaza Classic - The Dry Land. Nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, the same festival that helped launched Ferrera's career, The Dry Land was written and directed by Ferrera's fiancé Ryan Piers Williams.

Mr. Weiss is an award-winning independent film and video producer, director, editor and educator and consultant, who has lived in Dallas since 1981. He has been an associate producer at Vatican II Productions, as well as teaching film and video courses at Texas A&M's Visualization Lab, Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Austin and Arlington, and West Virginia State College.

Mr. Weiss is a Co-President of the Board of Directors of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF), past Vice President of the Texas Association of Film and Tape Professionals (TAFTP), founder and past President of the West Virginia Filmmakers' Guild, and co-founder of the Dallas Video Festival and the Video Association of Dallas. He is currently the producer for "Frame of Mind" a monthly show of independent film and video for KERA /KDTN Public Television in North Texas.

He has been a video columnist for The Dallas Morning News, Dallas Times Herald, United Features Syndicate, and KERA Radio (Dallas).

Mr. Weiss received an MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University in 1978 and a B.A. from Temple University in 1975.