John Landis began his career in the mailroom of 20th Century Fox. A high-school drop out, 18-year-old Landis made his way to Yugoslavia to work as a production assistant on Kelly's Heroes. Remaining in Europe, Landis found work as an actor, extra and stunt man in many of the Spanish/Italian "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. Clad in a Rick Baker-designed gorilla suit, Landis starred as "Schlockthropus", the missing link. After working as a writer, actor, and production assistant, Landis made his second film The Kentucky Fried Movie, in collaboration with the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams. Landis rose to international recognition as director of the wildly successful Animal House. With international blockbusters such as The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Spies Like Us, ¡Three Amigos!, and Coming to America, Landis has directed some of the most popular film comedies of all time. Other feature credits include _Into the Night (1985)_ , Innocent Blood and the comedy/horror genre classic An American Werewolf in London, which he also wrote. In 1986, John Landis, and four others, were acquitted and found Not Guilty for a tragic accident that occurred on Landis' segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The Twilight Zone also included segments by Joe Dante, George Miller and Steven Spielberg. In 1983, Landis wrote and directed the groundbreaking music video Michael Jackson's Thriller, created originally to play as a theatrical short. Thriller forever changed MTV and the concept of music videos, garnering multiple accolades including the MTV Video Music Awards for Best Overall Video, Viewer's Choice, and the Video Vanguard Award - The Greatest Video in the History of the World. In 1991, Thriller was inducted into the MVPA's Hall of Fame. In 1991, Landis collaborated again with Michael Jackson on Black or White, which premiered simultaneously in 27 countries with an estimated audience of 500 million people. Although it was not the first motion picture or music video to do so, Black or White popularized the use of "digital morphing" where one object appears to seamlessly metamorphose into another, raising the standard for state of the art special effects in music videos. Landis has also been active in television as the executive producer (and often director) of the Ace and Emmy Award-winning HBO series Dream On. Other TV shows produced by his company St. Clare Entertainment (St. Clare is the patron saint of television) include Weird Science, _Sliders (1995) (TV)_ , Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show, Campus Cops, and The Lost World. In 2004, the Independent Film Channel broadcast his feature length documentary about a used car salesman, Slasher. Deer Woman, an original one-hour episode written by Landis and his son Max Landis, inaugurated the Masters of Horror series in Fall 2005 on Showtime. Masters of Horror also features one-hour episodes by John Carpenter, Roger Corman, Tobe Hooper, Don Coscarelli, Mick Garris, Dario Argento, and Larry Cohen.

A sought-after commercial director, Landis has worked for a variety of companies including Direct TV, Taco Bell, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kellogg's, and Disney. John Landis was made a Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1985, awarded the Federico Fellini Prize by Rimini Cinema Festival in Italy, and was named a George Eastman Scholar by The Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Both the Edinburgh Film Festival and the Torino Film Festival have held career retrospectives of his films. In 2004, Landis received the Time Machine Career Achievement Award at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain. Sent as a filmmaker/scholar by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, Landis has lectured at many film schools and universities including Yale, Harvard, NYU, UCLA, UCSB, USC, Texas A&M, The North Carolina School of the Arts, University of Miami and Indiana University. He has also acted as a teacher and advisor to aspiring filmmakers at the Sundance Institute in Utah. Additionally, John Landis edited Best American Movie Writing 2001 (Thunder's Mouth Press, NY, 2001). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Landis moved to Los Angeles soon after his birth. He is married to Deborah Nadoolman, an Oscar-nominated costume designer, and President of the Costume Designers Guild, with whom he has two children.


The trademark trivia often mentioned in Landis-directed films, the inclusion in some form of the phrase "See you next Wednesday", is a reference to a line in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where astronaut Frank Poole watches a video sent to him by his wife and father on the occasion of his birthday. At the end of the video his wife says, "See you next Wednesday!", an obvious reference to their next available time to transmit a message to the distant spacecraft bound for Jupiter, though since Frank is killed within the next day or two by HAL, it is perhaps meant as an ironic trademark since it seems to occur in Landis films when characters are in great danger. It appears during the werewolf rampage as the title on the marquee of a porno theater in An American Werewolf in London (1981). It is spoken in German when Vic Morrow is being shot at on the building in the sequence he directed for Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). In The Blues Brothers (1980) it's on a billboard where the the cops are lying in wait. Then again, it mostly appears as the name on movie posters, so that it probably became merely something to watch for like Alfred Hitchcock's cameos. It first appeared in his first film Schlock (1973) as the name of a movie and as a movie poster in a theater lobby. It appeared again in his second film. The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), as the title of the "Feel-O-Rama" movie. It surfaces in an apartment in Trading Places (1983) on a movie poster. In Coming to America (1988) it appears in a subway station (the movie claims to star Jamie Lee Curtis, who appeared in "Trading Places"). Another poster is visible in Ophelia's apartment. In Spies Like Us (1985) it appears on the recruitment poster behind the desk of the commander of the army training post. In Into the Night (1985/I) it appears on two posters in the office where Ed and Diana make the phone call. In Innocent Blood (1992) it is once again advertised on a movie marquee across the street from the Melody Lounge exotic dance bar near where a car crash takes place. It also appears in the Michael Jackson video Thriller (1983) (TV), which was directed by Landis. One of the men chasing the werewolf finds a note and reads this out while the shot shows MJ in the theater eating popcorn. He directed the music videos Thriller (1983) (TV) and Black or White (1991) (V), both by Michael Jackson. He has a small cameo as the director in "Black Or White". After he dropped out of school at age 17 he worked as mailman at the Fox studios. Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 555-559. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988. Once worked as an attendant in a parking lot. Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1989.