Special Guests – Joe Dante and Belinda Balaski

Joe Dante is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art.  After a stint as a film reviewer, he began his filmmaking apprenticeship in 1974 as trailer editor for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. He made his directorial debut in 1976 with Hollywood Boulevard (co-directed with Allan Arkush), a thinly disguised spoof of New World’s low budget exploitation pictures, shot in ten days for $60,000.

In 1977 Dante made his solo debut as a director with Piranha, which went on to become one of the company’s biggest hits and was distributed throughout the rest of the world by United Artists. During his tenure at New World, Dante edited Ron Howard’s directorial debut Grand Theft Auto and co-wrote the original story for Rock n Roll High School.

For Avco-Embassy Dante next directed the seminal werewolf thriller The Howling (1981), followed by the It’s a Good Life segment of the episodic Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).

Having worked with Steven Spielberg on the latter, Dante was chosen to helm the first Amblin Production for Warner Bros. Gremlins (1984) became a runaway hit and grossed more than $200 million worldwide.

Dante followed up with Explorers for Paramount, a sci-fi fantasy about three kids who build their own spaceship, and then Innerspace (1987) for Guber/Peters, Amblin and Warner Bros., an action comedy in which miniaturized test pilot Dennis Quaid is injected into the body of supermarket clerk Martin Short.

Tom Hanks starred in Dante’s next film for Imagine/Universal, The ‘Burbs (1989), which was followed by Gremlins 2:  The New Batch for Warner Bros. in 1990.  Matinee, featuring John Goodman as a huckster showman premiering his new horror film during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was a production of Dante and partner Mike Finnell’s Renfield Productions for Universal in 1993.

Dreamworks/Universal’s Small Soldiers was released in 1998, followed in 2003 by Warner Bros. Looney Tunes: Back in Action featuring one of Dante’s favorite actors, Bugs Bunny.

Along the way Dante contributed several comedy segments to the multi-part Amazon  Women on the Moon (1987) spoof produced by John Landis, and directed various episodes of the tv series Amazing Stories, Twilight Zone, Police Squad!, Night Visions and Picture Windows. He also directed the network pilots for Caleb Carr’s The Osiris Chronicles (1995) and the NBC series Eerie, Indiana, on which he was creative consultant throughout its run.

Dante’s Homecoming, an episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, debuted in December 2005 to rave reviews from critics and audiences alike and was named to numerous “Top 10” critics’ lists.  The Sitges and Brussels International Film Festivals both honored Homecoming with Special Jury Recognition Awards, and the New Yorker called it the best political film of 2005.  Additional television work includes another Masters of Horror episode, The Screwfly Solution, as well as episodes of CSI: New York, Salem, Witches of East End and Hawaii 5-0.