During his teenage years, Lustig avidly watched a huge volume of lowdown trashy exploitation fare at numerous 42nd Street grindhouse theaters in Manhattan and also worked as a movie theater usher in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After graduating from high school, he took a few film classes at New York University.

In 1980, Lustig found himself at the center of a storm of controversy when he made the grim, gory and disturbing slasher sleaze splatter landmark "Maniac," which boasts an incredibly intense performance by the legendary character actor Joe Spinell as a vicious depraved psychopath and plenty of hideously graphic and gruesome make-up effects by genre icon Tom Savini. In 1982, Lustig followed up "Maniac" with the tough, gritty and exciting New York urban revenge opus "Vigilante." In 1988, he delivered another winner with the terrific "Maniac Cop," a violent horror action flick about an undead New York police officer on a killing spree which was the first of several cinematic collaborations with fellow maverick independent filmmaker Larry Cohen.

Lustig followed up with the 1989 stirring action item "Hit List" and the suspenseful serial killer thriller "Relentless," starring Judd Nelson and Robert Loggia. In 1990, Lustig made the favorite of his films, “Maniac Cop 2,” which many consider superior to the popular original. Lustig's last film as a director to date was the nifty and enjoyable 1996 fright flick "Uncle Sam." Recently Lustig produced the well-received remake of “Maniac” starring Elijah Wood, and is now producing the reboot of “Maniac Cop.”

Since 1997, William Lustig went on to initially produce DVDs for Anchor Bay and now currently runs the outstanding home entertainment label Blue Underground, which restores and re-releases popular and little seen cult movies and other grindhouse horror, thriller, action, and western films.

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The team sits down for a discussion with Mark Mills, as part of the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival.

Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science where he co-directs the Institute on Manufacturing Science and Innovation. He is also a strategic partner with Montrose Lane, an energy-tech fund focused on software.

His new book, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s, has risen to #1 in Amazon’s business planning and forecasting rankings. In the book, Mills presents a convincing vision of a coming era of economic prosperity fueled by today’s radical advances in technology, data, and the Cloud. He explains how digital acceleration is changing the value of the physical economy and lays out a common-sense argument for optimism in our ability to grow and innovate, drawing comparisons with the tech revolution that drove the economic expansion of the 20th century and the widespread adoption of telephony, cars, power plants, and plastics.

Mills’ previous books include Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era, and Work In The Age Of Robots, as well as The Bottomless, co-authored with Peter Huber, about which Bill Gates said: “This is the only book I’ve ever seen that really explains energy.”

Mills cofounded Digital Power Capital, which invested in emerging technologies. He has been a technology advisor for Bank of America Securities, and was a director for a preeminent engineering firm that designed power systems for global datacenters. He has testified numerous times before Congress on energy and technology matters.

Early in his career, Mills worked in the White House Science Office under President Reagan and provided science and technology policy counsel to numerous private-sector firms, the Department of Energy, and U.S. research laboratories. Prior to that, Mills was an experimental physicist and development engineer in microprocessors and fiber optics, earning several patents for his work.

Mills holds a degree in physics from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

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The team sits down with the one and only, Roger Love!

Roger Love is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on voice. No other vocal coach in history has been more commercially successful in both the speaking and singing fields. Roger has vocally produced more than 150-million-unit sales worldwide and written three top-selling books. Roger coaches singers such as John Mayer and Selena Gomez, as well as speakers like Anthony Robbins, and actors including Brad Pitt, Reese Witherspoon, Zoe Saldana, Keira Knightly, and Bradley Cooper.

If you would like to take advantage of Roger's generous $50 gift for his coaching services, please go to rogerlove.com/winner

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