John Landis

Born: August 3 1950
Where: Chicago, Illinois, USA

Landis must be counted among the more important mainstream Hollywood filmmakers to come to prominence in the late 1970s and early 80s.

He is part of the same post-countercultural movement as the screenwriting team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, the creative staff of the original Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon.

Landis translated this liberating sensibility to the big screen with features including The Kentucky Fried Movie, National Lampoon's Animal House and The Blues Brothers.

Flavored with rock'n'roll, rhythm and blues and nonstop movie references, Landis' films reveal him to be as much of a film buff as his contemporary Steven Spielberg.

Natural allies, the two traded off cameos in each other's films - Landis in 1941; Spielberg in The Blues Brothers - before collaborating as producers and segment directors on the ill-fated production of Twilight Zone - The Movie.

Starting out as a mailboy at 20th Century-Fox, the 18-year-old Landis made his way to Yugoslavia to work as a production assistant on the Clint Eastwood WWII comedy vehicle Kelly's Heroes.

Remaining in Europe, Landis found work as an actor, extra and stunt man in what he has described as "hundreds" of German action movies and Spanish-filmed spaghetti Westerns.

Returning to the US, he made his feature debut as a writer-director at age 21 with Schlock, an affectionate tribute to monster movies.

The Kentucky Fried Movie first presented the rapid-fire, hit-or-miss comic technique that Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker would further develop in their own Airplane and Naked Gun movies.

Animal House offered a gleefully vulgar update of the campus comedy with wildly successful results.

In a slight stretch, Landis scored commercially with his accessible approach to social satire in the popular Eddie Murphy vehicles Trading Places and Coming to America.

However, he stumbled with his leaden attempt to recreate the character-driven farce of 30s screwball comedy in Oscar.

More typically, he guided familiar TV faces to big screen success: John Belushi in Animal House; Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers and Aykroyd and Chevy Chase in Spies Like Us.

In an effort to bolster Eddie Murphy's then sagging box-office fortunes, Landis directed the underperforming action-oriented sequel, Beverly Hills Cop III.

He gave new life to a stock horror film monster in the impressive horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London.

Eccentric pop superstar Michael Jackson was particularly well-served by Landis in the video for Thriller, which revealed their shared love of special FX, monsters and horror iconography.

However, his professional and personal reputation may always be marred by his involvement in the tragedy that occurred in 1983 during filming of Twilight Zone - The Movie.

Along with fellow crew members, Landis was charged with involuntary manslaughter over the deaths of Vic Morrow and two child actors.

The performers were killed when struck by a helicopter which had been hit by debris from an FX explosion during a Vietnam War sequence.

All plead not guilty and were acquitted after a highly publicized year-long trial.

Landis has not enjoyed comparable feature success in the 90s.

His The Stupids awaited distribution for over a year and was met with mostly negative critical reaction.

Instead, Landis has been devoting more of his time to TV as a producer and director.