DIRECTOR RON HOWARD
Ron Howard is an Academy Award®-winning filmmaker and one of this generation's most popular directors.  From the critically acclaimed dramas A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13 to the hit comedies Parenthood and Splash, he has created some of Hollywood's most memorable films. Most recently, he directed and produced Cinderella Man starring Russell Crowe, which received three Oscar® nominations. He previously collaborated with Crowe on A Beautiful Mind, for which Howard earned an Oscar® for Best Director and which also won awards for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress. The film garnered four Golden Globes as well, including the award for Best Motion Picture Drama.  Additionally, Howard won Best Director of the Year from the Directors Guild of America. Howard and producer Brian Grazer received the first annual Awareness Award from the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign for their work on the film.
Howard's skill as a director has long been recognized.  In 1995, he received his first Best Director of the Year award from the DGA for Apollo 13. The true-life drama also garnered nine Academy Award® nominations, winning Oscars® for Best Film Editing and Best Sound. It also received Best Ensemble Cast and Best Supporting Actor awards from the Screen Actors Guild.  Many of Howard's past films have received nods from the Academy, including the popular hits Backdraft, Parenthood and Cocoon, the last of which took home two Oscars®. Howard was recently honored by the Museum of Moving Images and was the recipient of 2006 ACE "Golden Eddie" award.   
Howard's portfolio includes some of the most popular films of the past 20 years. In 1991, Howard created the acclaimed drama Backdraft starring Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell and William Baldwin.  He followed it with the historical epic Far and Away starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Howard directed Mel Gibson, Rene Russo, Gary Sinise and Delroy Lindo in the 1996 suspense thriller Ransom.  Howard worked with Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise and Kathleen Quinlan on Apollo 13, which was re-released recently in the IMAX format.  Howard's other films include the blockbuster Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas starring Jim Carrey, Parenthood starring Steve Martin, the fantasy epic Willow, Night Shift starring Henry Winkler, Michael Keaton and Shelley Long and the suspenseful western The Missing staring Oscar® winners Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones. 
Howard has also served as an executive producer on a number of award-winning films and television shows, such as the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" and Fox's Emmy award winner for Best Comedy, "Arrested Development," for which he also narrates.
Howard and long-time producing partner Brian Grazer first collaborated on the hit comedies Night Shift and Splash.  The pair co-founded Imagine Entertainment in 1986 to create independently produced feature films.  The company has since produced a variety of popular feature films, including such hits as The Nutty Professor, The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Bowfinger, The Paper, Fun With Dick and Jane, Inventing the Abbotts and Liar, Liar.  Howard made his directorial debut in 1978 with the comedy Grand Theft Auto.
He began his career in film as an actor.  He first appeared in The Journey and The Music Man, then as Opie on the long-running television series "The Andy Griffith Show." Howard later starred in the popular series "Happy Days" and drew favorable reviews for his performances in American Graffiti and The Shootist.

SCREENWRITER AKIVA GOLDSMAN
Akiva Goldsman previously collaborated with Ron Howard on Cinderella Man and A Beautiful Mind for which he earned the 2001 Academy Award®, Golden Globe Award and Writers Guild Award.
Goldsman's other writing credits include The Client, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Practical Magic and I, Robot.   
Goldsman's Weed Road Pictures has produced such films as Deep Blue Sea, Lost in Space, Starsky & Hutch, Constantine, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the upcoming Tonight, He Comes (starring Will Smith). 
Born in Brooklyn Heights, New York, Goldsman graduated from Wesleyan University and attended the graduate program in creative writing at New York University.  He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Rebecca.

NOVELIST DAN BROWN
Dan Brown, who is also the Executive Producer on The Da Vinci Code,  is the author of numerous best-selling novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, one of the best selling novels of all time, which has sold 50 million copies worldwide.
In early 2004, all four of Brown's novels held spots on the New York Times bestseller list during the same week.
Recently named one of the World's 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine, Brown has made appearances on CNN, The Today Show, National Public Radio, Voice of America, as well as in the pages of Newsweek, Forbes, People, GQ, The New Yorker and others. His novels have been translated and published in 44 languages around the world.
Brown is a graduate of Amherst College and Phillips Exeter Academy, where he spent time as an English teacher before turning his efforts fully to writing. In 1996, his interest in code-breaking and covert government agencies led him to write his first novel, Digital Fortress, which quickly became a #1 national best-selling eBook. Set within the clandestine National Security Agency, the novel explores the fine line between civilian privacy and national security. Brown's follow-up techno-thriller, Deception Point, centered on similar issues of morality in politics, national security and classified technology.
The son of a Presidential Award-winning math professor and of a professional sacred musician, Brown grew up surrounded by the paradoxical philosophies of science and religion. These complementary perspectives served as inspiration for his acclaimed novel Angels & Demons -- a science vs. religion thriller set within a Swiss physics lab and Vatican City. Recently, he has begun work on a series of symbology thrillers featuring his popular protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of iconography and religious art. The upcoming series will include books set in Paris, London and Washington, D.C.
Brown's wife Blythe -- an art historian and painter -- collaborates on his research and accompanies him on his frequent research trips, their latest to Paris, where they spent time in the Louvre for his thriller The Da Vinci Code.

PRODUCER BRIAN GRAZER
Brian Grazer is an Academy Award®-winning producer who has been making movies and television programs for more than two decades. As both a writer and producer, he has been nominated for three Academy Awards®, and in 2002 he won the Best Picture Oscar® for A Beautiful Mind.  In addition to winning three other Academy Awards®, A Beautiful Mind also won four Golden Globe Awards (including Best Motion Picture Drama) and earned Grazer the first annual Awareness Award from the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign.
Over the years, Grazer's films and TV shows have been nominated for a total of 42 Oscars¨ and 64 Emmys.  At the same time, his movies have generated more than $11.2 billion in worldwide theatrical, music and video grosses. Reflecting this combination of commercial and artistic achievement, the Producers Guild of America honored Grazer with the David O. Selznick Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. His accomplishments have also been recognized by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which in 1998 added Grazer to the short list of producers with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On March 6th, 2003, ShoWest celebrated Grazer's success by honoring him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. On November 14th, 2005, in Los Angeles, Grazer was honored by the Fulfillment Fund.
In addition to A Beautiful Mind, Grazer's films include Apollo 13, for which Grazer won the Producers Guild's Daryl F. Zanuck Motion Picture Producer of the Year Award as well as an Oscar¨ nomination for Best Picture in 1995, and Splash, which he co-wrote as well as produced, and for which he received an Oscar¨ nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 1984. 
Grazer most recently produced Inside Man directed by Spike Lee and starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster, the critically acclaimed drama Cinderella Man, which earned three Oscar¨ nominations, the hit thriller Flightplan starring Jodie Foster, which grossed more than $200 million worldwide and Jim Carrey's hit comedy Fun With Dick and Jane. Other feature film credits include, Inside Deep Throat, Friday Night Lights, 8 Mile, Blue Crush, The Missing, Intolerable Cruelty, Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar, Ransom, My Girl, Backdraft, Kindergarten Cop, Parenthood, Clean and Sober and Spies Like Us.
Grazer's television productions include Fox's Golden Globe-winning and Emmy nominated drama series Ò24Ó and the Emmy award-winning Best Comedy series ÒArrested Development.Ó His additional television credits include NBC's ÒMiss Match," the WB's ÒFelicity,Ó ABC's ÒSports Night,Ó as well as HBO's ÒFrom the Earth to the Moon,Ó for which he won the Emmy for Outstanding Mini-Series. 
Grazer began his career as a producer developing television projects. It was while he was executive producing TV pilots for Paramount Pictures in the early 1980s that Grazer first met his long-time friend and business partner Ron Howard.  Their collaboration began in 1985 with the hit comedies Night Shift and Splash, and in 1986, the two founded Imagine Entertainment, which they continue to run together as co-chairmen.

COMPOSER HANS ZIMMER
Hans Zimmer is one of the film industry's most respected composers, with more than 100 film scores to his credit.
In 1995, he won both an Academy Award® and a Golden Globe for his score to the animated blockbuster The Lion King, which also spawned one of the most successful soundtrack albums ever. Zimmer's music for The Lion King continues to draw applause in the award-winning stage production of the musical, which earned the 1998 Tony Award for Best Musical, as well as a Grammy for Best Original Cast Album.
Zimmer has garnered six additional Academy Award® nominations, most recently for his Gladiator score, for which he also won a Golden Globe and earned a Grammy nomination. He has also been Oscar® nominated for The Prince of Egypt, The Thin Red Line, As Good As It Gets, The Preacher's Wife and Rain Man.  In 2005, he earned his seventh Golden Globe nomination for his score for James L. Brooks' comedy Spanglish. He had previously earned Golden Globe nominations for his work on The Last Samurai, Pearl Harbor, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and The Prince of Egypt.
The Da Vinci Code is Zimmer's second collaboration with Ron Howard. They previously worked together on Backdraft.
Long recognized as one of Hollywood's most innovative musical talents, the German-born artist first achieved success in the pop music world as a member of The Buggles. The group's 1982 worldwide hit single, "Video Killed the Radio Star," helped usher in a new era of global entertainment as the first music video aired on MTV. That same year, Zimmer entered the realm of film music through a collaboration with famed composer Stanley Myers (The Deer Hunter) on the acclaimed drama Moonlighting. He continued his association with Myers on such projects as Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Launderette and Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance, learning the power of combining modern synthesized percussion beats with the melodies of classical music. After 15 collaborations with Meyers, Zimmer began his solo-composing career with 1988's A World Apart.
Zimmer has worked with some of the industry's most respected filmmakers, including Ridley Scott (Thelma & Louise, Black Hawk Down), James L. Brooks (As Good as It Gets), Gore Verbinski (The Ring, The Weather Man), Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line), Tony Scott (Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide, True Romance), Peter Weir (Green Card), Mike Nichols (Regarding Henry), John Boorman (Beyond Rangoon) and Mimi Leder (The Peacemaker). He also has frequently collaborated with directors Penny Marshall (A League of Their Own, Riding in Cars With Boys) and Tony Scott (Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide, True Romance).
Zimmer continues to break ground in the world of film music. A pioneer in the use of digital synthesizers, electronic keyboards and the latest computer technology, he is considered the father of integrating electronic sound with traditional orchestral arrangements.