Rod Lurie
Graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1984, he served in the U.S. Army as an air defense artillery officer, then became an entertainment reporter and film critic, including stints at News12 in Norwalk, Connecticut, the New York Daily News, Premiere, Movieline, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles, and talk radio shows at KMPC and KABC, where his tactical on-air bets with Martin Landau, Mel Gibson and James Cameron that they would win the Oscar resulted in them having to pay up at the Academy Awards ceremony by publicly thanking him in their acceptance speeches.[3] His next directing effort, The Last Castle (2001)[2] with Robert Redford and James Gandolfini, was a commercial failure; as was Line of Fire, his 2003–04 TV series about the FBI's office in Richmond, Virginia, which starred David Paymer as a mob boss.Lurie then wrote and directed Nothing But the Truth, which is based on the stories of Valerie Plame and Judith Miller, which stars Kate Beckinsale, Matt Dillon, Angela Bassett, Alan Alda and David Schwimmer.Lurie worked on Resurrecting the Champ, a boxing drama, and served as creator and executive producer of the short-lived television series Commander in Chief, which starred Geena Davis as the United States' first female President, Mackenzie Allen.The characters of President Jackson Evans (The Contender), prison inmate Lt. Gen. Eugene Irwin (The Last Castle), FBI agent Paige Van Doren (Line of Fire), and vice presidential nominee Gen.