JEANNE JOHNSON
After happily raising her three children, Jeanne gained degrees from English Universities in both education and counseling. She is a qualified personal and relationship counselor and has practiced in doctors' offices, a men's prison and the private sector. Her 25 years as an educator range from teaching kindergarten to college-based workshops for parents of young children.

Taking up writing in her late fifties, after moving to California from her native England, Jeanne has had short stories and poetry published in the Porter Gulch Review, contributed a series of health and personal development articles to selfgrowth.com and was a feature writer for the West Point News, a popular Sierra foothills newspaper. Jeanne's first book, Starlings in the Park, was recently published by Blue Lupin Press and she is currently working on a novel.

DAN BESSIE
Dumping an $85 a week truck driving job to apprentice (for $36.45 a week) on Tom & Jerry in MGM's cartoon factory under Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera in 1956, Dan soon branched into the world of TV commercials (Culligan Man, Western Airlines, Jell-O, etc) and Saturday morning children's programs such as Spiderman and Linus the Lionhearted. Later, when, in the middle of a consumer awareness film he was producing, the director announced he had to leave for a dental appointment, Dan fell headlong into directing live action educational shorts.

Entering the realm of features, Dan allowed himself to be mercilessly exploited as line producer of Executive Action (1973, starring Burt Lancaster). Eventually mastering his many skills, he created more than 100 of his own films, including Peter and the Wolf (1981, with Ray Bolger - CBS, HBO, The Disney Channel), Hard Traveling (1986, New World Pictures), and Turnabout: The Story of the Yale Puppeteers (1992, PBS).

An award-winning film maker, a highly regarded screenplay coach and free-lance writer, Dan, in addition to authoring Reeling Through Hollywood, has illustrated half a dozen other titles, and written the critically acclaimed Rare Birds, An American Family (University Press of Kentucky, 2000). He currently lives and works far from Tinseltown's frenetic pace, among the deer and woodpeckers in California's Sierra foothills.