About the Editors

ROB EDELMAN has, for the past decade and a half, taught film history courses at the University at Albany (SUNY). He offers film commentary on WAMC (Northeast) Public Radio, and his work appears on the WAMC Web site. His books include Great Baseball Films and Baseball on the Web (which Amazon.com cited as a Top 10 Internet book), and he often contributes to Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, edited by John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball. With his wife, Audrey Kupferberg, he has coauthored Meet the Mertzes, a double biography of Vivian Vance and William Frawley; Matthau: A Life; and Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen. He is a contributing editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin’s Family Film Guide, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia; has edited Issues on Trial: Freedom of the Press and written several children’s books (on such subjects as Watergate and the Vietnam War); and has presented lectures in the New York State Council for the Humanities’ Speakers in the Humanities program. His byline has appeared in many reference books (including A Political Companion to American Film, Total Baseball, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, The Total Baseball Catalog, Women Filmmakers and Their Films, Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond, St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, and histories of the 1918 Boston Red Sox, 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, 1947 New York Yankees, and 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates) and dozens of periodicals (including, most recently, NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture). He was Director of Programming for Home Film Festival; is the author of a baseball film essay for the Kino International DVD Reel Baseball: Baseball Films from the Silent Era, 1899–1926; is an interviewee on several documentaries on the director’s cut DVD of The Natural; and has been a juror at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual film festival.

Major funding for SPENCER GREEN’s bio has been provided by the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. Mr. Green has written for In Living Color, AAAHH!!! Real Monsters, Duckman, Mad TV, The Fairly Oddparents, Denis Leary’s Merry F#%$in’ Christmas, and Americana for BBC Radio. He was a contributing editor for more than two decades to Leonard Maltin’s annual Movie Guide, as well as coeditor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia, and edited We’ll Never Be Young Again: Remembering the Last Days of John F. Kennedy. Mr. Green performs at the Los Angeles comedic writers’ salon Sit ’n Spin and is coauthor/colyricist of BUKOWSICAL, which won Outstanding Musical at the 2007 New York International Fringe Festival and recently played at St. Louis’ New Line Theatre. He writes regularly for The Huffington Post and created the parody Web site The Parallel Universe Film Guide; his plays have been produced by St. Louis’ Theatre Lab, Seattle’s Slingshot New Works Series, and Los Angeles’ Sci-Fest LA. We hope you have enjoyed this bio. Now, please exit on the right-hand side.

MICHAEL SCHEINFELD is a writer and editor at HBO. As a Senior Writer for TV Guide, he wrote film reviews and the popular “Classic Movies” column, as well as a DVD review column. He served as contributing editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and Leonard Maltin’s Family Film Guide. He also contributed essays for the “City Secrets” book Movies: The Ultimate Insider’s Guide, and has written for several other books and magazines, including The Motion Picture Guide, The Virgin Film Guide, Films in Review, The 500 Best British and Foreign Films, and others. He has also worked for AMC and MTV Films, and has produced and programmed film series for cable channels in New York City and Philadelphia.

CASEY ST. CHARNEZ saw his first motion picture at age two (it was The Tales of Hoffmann, in case you wondered). In elementary school, he began a lifelong avocation of writing film reviews for newspapers, moving somewhat later into radio and TV, as well as both print (American Film, The Hollywood Reporter) and online periodicals (www.SantaFe.com). In junior high he went to the National Spelling Bee twice in a row, and in high school he often sneaked into spicy, forbidden foreign films. He earned a B.A. (English lit) and an M.A. (comparative mythology) at Texas Tech, then another M.A. (Cinema Studies) and a Ph.D. (film and dance history) at New York University, specializing in the movie musical. It was at NYU where he met one Leonard Maltin, his boss at the Washington Square Journal. Subsequently a publicity associate with Paramount (A Separate Peace, The Little Prince) and Fox (Lucky Lady), he is also the author of The Complete Films of Steve McQueen and wrote about Greer Garson in 100 Years: A Celebration of Filmmaking in New Mexico. He has been an editor on the various iterations of the Maltin Movie Guides since 1986. Working on the Classic Guide is always rewarding for him, as he knows that all the best movies were made before 1965. Except, of course, for Star Wars. He continues to waltz in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his strawberry blonde bride, Lisa Suzonne Harris.

TOM WEAVER of Sleepy Hollow, New York, has been a fan of old movies, especially monster movies, since he was in short pants. This has led him to conduct interviews with hundreds of cast and crew members from many of his favorite fright films. Most of his thirty books, including the newish The Creature Chronicles (the history of the three Creature from the Black Lagoon movies), were published by McFarland & Co.; Weaver frequently calls himself McFarland’s favorite author, although he admits that he does so without sanction, and in fact with no proof of that statement’s accuracy. With equal frequency, he also points out that The New York Times once called him “one of the leading scholars in the horror field.” Weaver has enjoyed doing dozens of DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and riding a Florida roller coaster with Anne Francis. His major life achievement: While being lectured for five minutes by Christopher Lee (“No, no, no, you are not from Sleepy Hollow, there is no such town”), and not allowed to interrupt, he successfully suppressed the urge to shout the It’s a Wonderful Life line “Idiot! Don’t you think I know where I live??” He’s now fifty-seven and, sad to say, still wears short pants, just in a vastly larger size.