Robert Zemeckis

Robert Lee Zemeckis is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter, who pioneered ImageMovers Digital Studios for the Walt Disney Company and directed the films Who Framed Roger Rabbit and A Christmas Carol. He was also the producer of Mars Needs Moms and the director of the 2022 live-action remake of Pinocchio.

Zemeckis was born in 1951 in Chicago, Illinois, and attended a Catholic grade school as well as Fenger Academy High School. He also attended Northern Illinois University at some later time, where he gained early experience in film as a film cutter and editor for NBC News in Chicago during a summer break, and edited commercials in his home state. Later, he transferred to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, California, where he met writer Bob Gale, and the two co-wrote various screenplays, one of which would later become Back to the Future.

Since the late 1970s, Zemeckis has either directed, written, or produced a number of films that went on to achieve box office success, such as 1941, Romancing the Stone, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, Contact, House on Haunted Hill (1999), What Lies Beneath, Cast Away, The Polar Express, Beowulf, Welcome to Marwen, Gothika, House of Wax (2005), Last Holiday, and Monster House.