Alan Moore, who is the most dazzlingly gifted writer in this subculture, created the comics title "The Watchmen," an apocalyptic turn on superheroes that attracted directors like Terry Gilliam.
The spare, cinematic quality of phone booths -- three walls, one door, a secret world within a world -- also attracted directors like Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Fosse, who set a scene from "Sweet Charity" in one of them.
The studio has also attracted directors like Quentin Tarantino, who this month finished shooting a World War II film, "Inglourious Basterds," and Roman Polanski, who has just started filming a thriller called "The Ghost".
The mayor said there was surely something special about the quality of the Mediterranean light here, although he noted that the same light had attracted directors who used Matera as a substitute for Spain and northern Africa.
After all, his darkness was what attracted directors.
There was a perception that shareholder lawsuits and tougher requirements would make it harder to attract directors and would drive some existing directors to leave, said Evan Rosenberg, a Chubb Specialty Insurance executive who sells policies for directors.
The result is consistent with the hypothesis that board compensation policy is designed to: (1) attract directors whose marginal productivity interacts with the investment opportunities of the firm to produce the maximal gain, and (2) mitigate agency problems.
And an amazing little endeavor, the Kara Film Festival, annually showcases the best of Pakistani films from Silent Waters, Sabiha Sumar's brilliant meditation on history, to the zombie horror flick Zibakhana and attracts directors from, say, far flung New Zealand, as well as Bollywood luminaries from across the border.
Steven Knight's swift, tantalizing screenplay of "Dirty Pretty Things" immediately attracted the director Stephen Frears.
But that was not what he was talking about after a Tuesday night screening of "Finding Forrester," which opens on Dec. 20, that attracted the director JOHN WATERS, the writers NORA EPHRON and BUCK HENRY and the ABC News political analyst GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS.
