Drawing Directors

Randal Kleiser has been an internationally known film director since the release of his first feature, Grease. Other credits include The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, The Blue Lagoon, Summer Lovers, Flight of the Navigator, White Fang, North Shore, and It's My Party.In 2007, his USC thesis film Peege was selected to be added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. With George Lucas and in association with USC School of Cinematic Arts, he produced the documentary, The Nina Foch Course for Filmmakers and Actors.While in high school he attended classes at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art and the Bryn Mawr Art Center, where he discovered his love for sketching. Kleiser has served as chair of the Directors Guild's annual Digital Day for over two decades and was invited to join the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.His first book, Grease: The Director's Notebook, was published by HarperCollins in 2019.

For many decades, film director Randal Kleiser (Grease, The Blue Lagoon, White Fang) has been drawing sketches of other fellow directors using a technique called blind contour drawing, where you trace the lines of the subject with your eye and simultaneously draw with a pen on the paper without looking down. The difficulty was that the subjects moved or changed positions in mid-sketch and many of the attempts were thrown away. This is a collection of the ones that worked.With a foreword by Roger Corman, Drawing Directors pays tribute to Kleiser's favorite directors, including Steven Spielberg, John Singleton, Ron Howard, Guillermo del Toro, Robert Wise, and Billy Wilder. The author recounts their professional career and reveals anecdotes about them and his personal opinion about their work.