Legendary filmmaker, John Landis, is the director of such influential films as Animal House , Trading Places and The Blues Brothers, and one of the most successful comedy directors of all time .

Born in Chicago, Landis moved to Los Angeles soon after his birth and 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 Clint Eastwood's 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 comedies of all time. Other feature credits include The Twilight Zone , Into the Night , Innocent Blood , and the comedy/horror genre classic An American Werewolf in London , which he also wrote.

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 Landis include Weird Science , Sliders , 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 and Roger Corman.

Landis is also no stranger to the commercial genre having previously helmed campaigns for Pepsi, Taco Bell, Burger King, Kellogs and DirecTV.

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 and Indiana University. He has also acted as a teacher and advisor to aspiring filmmakers at the Sundance Institute in Utah.