Gary Winick

Alongside his directing career, Winick also made impressive advances on a business end, founding an all-digital production company in 1999, InDigEnt. With the digital format substantially driving the cost of filmmaking down, Winick was able to turn out offbeat, profitable indie films right and left with a who's who of stars -- such an extensive list of films, in fact, that his resumé over the following decade reads like a laundry list of important American independent features. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2001), Eric Bogosian: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2001), Pieces of April (2003), and Starting Out in the Evening (2007), to name only a few, all bore Winick's producing credit.

As a director, Winick made a much bigger splash in the indie film world in 2002 with his drama Tadpole, about a 15-year-old intellectual prep-school student (Aaron Stanford) who sets out to seduce his stepmother (Sigourney Weaver) but winds up attracting the attention of her best friend (Bebe Neuwirth). Winick won the directing award for the film that year at the Sundance Film Festival. For his next movie, he entered the mainstream Hollywood market with 13 Going on 30 (2004), starring Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo, about a 13-year-old who wakes up one day in a 30-year-old body after wishing she could just skip the trials of adolescence and move straight to adulthood. Winick next continued with Hollywood moviemaking, but switched to family films with the star-studded live-action adaptation Charlotte's Web (2006) for Paramount, Nickelodeon, and Walden Media.

He then tried his hand at television work, directing a 2007 episode of the popular comedy drama Ugly Betty and the 2008 pilot of Candace Bushnell's Lipstick Jungle, starring Brooke Shields. The next year witnessed Winick helming the romantic comedy Bride Wars. With a cast featuring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, and a script co-authored by SNL contributor Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael, the movie concerns best friends who enter crisis mode when they discover that they've both accidentally scheduled their weddings for the same day. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide