A Room with a View

James Francis Ivory is an American film director, best known for the results of his long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, which included both Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Their films won six Academy Awards. Ivory was born in... Berkeley, California, the son of Hallie Millicent and Edward Patrick Ivory, a sawmill operator. He is of Irish and French descent, and grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He was educated at the University of Oregon, majoring in Architecture and Fine Arts and then at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where he directed the short film Four in the Morning . Then he wrote, photographed, and produced Venice: Theme and Variations a half-hour documentary submitted as a thesis film for his degree in cinema at USC. The film was named by The New York Times in 1957 as one of the ten best non-theatrical films of the year. He graduated from USC in 1957.
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Ismail Merchant was an Indian-born film producer, best known for the results of his famously long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions which included director James Ivory as well as screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Their films won six Academy Awards. Merchant succeeded as an... independent producer in Hollywood for more than 40 years. His strength lay in funding his projects, particularly in his ability to produce films for several million dollars less than those of his contemporaries. Born Ismail Noormohamed Abdul Rehman in Bombay, he was the son of Hazra and Noormohamed Haji Abdul Rehman, a Mumbai Memon textile dealer. He grew up bilingual in Gujarati and Urdu, and learned Arabic and English at school. When he was 11, he and his family were caught up in the 1947 partitioning of India. His father was president of the Muslim League, and refused to move to Pakistan. Merchant later said that he carried memories of the "butchery and riots" into adulthood. He studied at St.
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