Connectivity: Moviegoing and Film Exhibition in Flux

Jason Reitman is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker who most recently directed Saturday Night. Reitman made his feature film debut with the 2006 Sundance hit Thank You for Smoking. He earned Academy Award nominations for directing Juno and Up in the Air. Reitman has collaborated with screenwriter Diablo Cody on four critically acclaimed films, including Young Adult, Tully, and Jennifer’s Body. As a producer, Reitman oversaw four seasons of the Hulu comedy series Casual. He also produced the Academy Award-winning film Whiplash and Jean-Marc Vallee’s Demolition. In 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic, Reitman created and directed Home Movie: The Princess Bride, raising over a million dollars for World Central Kitchen. In 2021, Reitman directed and co-wrote Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and in 2023, produced and co-wrote its sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. In early 2024, Reitman assembled 35 prominent film directors in order to save the Westwood Village Theater.

Brad Silberling (BA English, UCSB) is a film and television director, producer, and writer. As a director, his first feature film credit, for producer Steven Spielberg, was the family classic Casper (1995). His other directing credits include the box-office hit City of Angels (1998) and the Academy Award-winning Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep. He also served as Director, Producer, and Writer for the critically acclaimed Moonlight Mile (2002), 10 Items or Less (2006), Land of the Lost (2009), and An Ordinary Man (2017).

His extensive television directing credits also include work on numerous Steven Bochco series including NYPD Blue and L.A. Law, among others. He has also served as the Director and Executive Producer of The CW’s Reign, Jane the Virgin, Dynasty, and Charmed, as well as NBC’s Heartbreaker. This year, Brad is also directing a new Amazon drama pilot, It’s Not Like That.

Ross Melnick is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara and Interim Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his book Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022). He is the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (CUP, 2012), co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-author of Cinema Treasures (MBI, 2004). His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, The Moving Image, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in numerous other journals and edited collections.