New York Stories

Woody Allen is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century. He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early... 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian. By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup.
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Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors. He epitomized the group of filmmakers known as the New Hollywood, that includes Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert... Altman, Woody Allen, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, and Brian De Palma who emerged in the early 1970s with unconventional ideas that challenged contemporary film-making. He co-wrote the script for Patton , which won an Academy Award for Original Screenplay. His directorial fame escalated with the release of The Godfather , a film which revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre, earning praise from critics and public alike. It won three Academy Awards, including his second, for Best Adapted Screenplay, and was instrumental in cementing his position as a prominent American film director. Coppola followed it with a critically successful sequel, The Godfather Part II , which became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
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Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life... Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards. Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets , Taxi Driver , Raging Bull , and Goodfellas – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed , having been nominated a previous five times. Martin Scorsese grew up in New York City.
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