Richard Schickel, one of the nation’s foremost film critics,  has been reviewing movies for Time magazine since 1972.  He has written many acclaimed books, including Clint Eastwood: A Biography; Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America; D.W. Griffith: An American Life; and The Disney Version.  He has also written, produced, and directed over 30 documentary films about industry icons – Elia Kazan among them.  He lives in Los Angeles, California. 

Leo Braudy is University Professor and Bing Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he teaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature, film history and criticism, and American culture. He has previously taught at Yale, Columbia, and the Johns Hopkins University.  In addition to numerous articles and reviews published in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals, he is the author of five books--Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon (Princeton, 1970); Jean Renoir: The World of his Films (Doubleday, 1972); The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Doubleday, 1976); The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (Oxford, 1986); and Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction and Popular Culture (Oxford, 1992); and From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Alfred Knopf, 2003. )

He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post Book World, International Herald Tribune, London Sunday Express, Travel Holiday, Times Literary Supplement, Film Quarterly, Harper's, among other publications.
He frequently appears as a commentator on popular culture, cultural history, and films on a variety of television shows, including Crossfire, World of Wonder, The Maria Shriver Show, and the South Bank Show. A transcript of his interview with Bill Moyers on Moyers's PBS show appeared in The World of Ideas (Doubleday, 1990).

Steven J. Ross is co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and a professor of history and chair of the History Department at USC, where he teaches courses in popular culture and American social and film history. He holds degrees from Columbia, Oxford, and Princeton University. He is the author of Working-Class Hollywood:Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America; Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnatti, 1788-1890; and numerous articles on film and social history. His current project is Hollywood Left and Right: How Movies Stars Shaped American Politics. Ross is a recent recipient of a Film Scholars Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.