A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
Ventura, California, USA
Born:
August 8, 1975
Matt Shakman is an American film, television, and theatre director and former child actor. He produced and directed WandaVision and has directed episodes of The Great, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Fargo, and Game of Thrones. He is the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, California. Shakman was born and raised in Ventura, California. His Jewish father and Catholic mother maintained a "relatively secular household", their interfaith marriage being a source of conflict with Shakman's Jewish paternal grandmother. After acting as a child, starting with commercials and landing a series regular role on Just the Ten of Us, he stepped away to attend The Thacher School in Ojai. Shakman went on to attend Yale University, where he graduated with an art history and theatre double major. It was at Yale that Shakman became interested in theatre, going on to direct a number of stage productions. After university, Shakman lived in New York City for several years before permanently moving to Los Angeles. As a child actor, Shakman played Graham "J.R." Lubbock, Jr., in the Growing Pains spin-off series Just the Ten of Us (1988–1990). His other television acting credits include The Facts of Life, Highway to Heaven, Diff'rent Strokes, Night Court, Good Morning, Miss Bliss, and Webster. He also appeared in the films A Night at the Magic Castle (1988) and Meet the Hollowheads (1989). Shakman is the founder and artistic director of the Black Dahlia Theatre (BDT) in Los Angeles, which was named one of "a dozen young American companies you need to know" by American Theatre Magazine. Since 2002, Shakman has mostly been directing for television. Among his credits are Succession, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, The Boys, The Great, House M.D., Fargo, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (also executive producer). Shakman directed the episodes "The Spoils of War" and "Eastwatch" for the seventh season of the HBO series Game of Thrones in 2017. In August of the same year, Shakman was appointed as the new artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. In 2017, TriStar Pictures announced that Shakman would direct its upcoming "live-action/hybrid" film adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth [until in 2018, Carlos Saldanha replaced Shakman due to scheduling conflicts]. In 2021, Shakman directed and executive produced the Marvel Studios miniseries WandaVision for Disney+. Later that year, it was revealed that Shakman would direct a film in the Star Trek franchise. In late August 2022, Shakman was in early talks to direct the Marvel Studios film The Fantastic Four, set to release in 2025, replacing Jon Watts, who exited the project to take a break from superhero films. On August 26, 2022, Shakman exited the Star Trek film, citing "scheduling issues", before being confirmed as the Fantastic Four director just weeks later. When asked why he chose to do Fantastic Four over Star Trek, Shakman said: "[M]ovies have different journeys and momentums, and schedules are a little bit mercurial, and so when the Fantastic Four opportunity came up, it was just too hard to pass up and to go back home to Marvel, a place that I worked on WandaVision at, with those people who are wonderful collaborators." Description above from the Wikipedia article Matt Shakman, licenced under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Director:
2009 The Nightman Cometh: Live
2014 Cut Bank
2025 The Fantastic Four
???? Untitled Cambridge Antalytica Project
Supervising Producer:
2009 A Very Sunny Christmas
2009 The Nightman Cometh: Live
2014 Cut Bank
2025 The Fantastic Four
???? Untitled Cambridge Antalytica Project
Director:
1999 Judging Amy
1999 Once and Again
2001 Six Feet Under
2002 Everwood
2003 Oliver Beene
2003 One Tree Hill
2004 Boston Legal
2004 House
2004 Huff
2004 Summerland
2005 Everybody Hates Chris
2005 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
2005 Kitchen Confidential
2005 Weeds
2006 Brothers and Sisters
2006 Men in Trees
2006 Psych
2006 Ugly Betty
2006 What About Brian
2006 Windfall
2007 Chuck
2007 Mad Men
2007 The Riches
2008 Childrens Hospital
2009 Hung
2009 The Good Wife
2010 Outsourced
2010 Raising Hope
2010 The Good Guys
2011 Breaking In
2011 Game of Thrones
2011 Happy Endings
2011 New Girl
2011 Revenge
2012 GCB
2014 Fargo
2014 You're the Worst
2015 Grace and Frankie
2015 Heroes Reborn
2016 American Gothic
2016 Billions
2018 Strange Angel
2018 Succession
2019 The Boys
2020 The Great
2021 WandaVision
2022 Welcome to Chippendales
2023 Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
2023 The Consultant
Executive Producer:
1999 Judging Amy
1999 Once and Again
2001 Six Feet Under
2002 Everwood
2003 Oliver Beene
2003 One Tree Hill
2004 Boston Legal
2004 House
2004 Huff
2004 Summerland
2005 Everybody Hates Chris
2005 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
2005 Kitchen Confidential
2005 Weeds
2006 Brothers and Sisters
2006 Men in Trees
2006 Psych
2006 Ugly Betty
2006 What About Brian
2006 Windfall
2007 Chuck
2007 Mad Men
2007 The Riches
2008 Childrens Hospital
2009 Hung
2009 The Good Wife
2010 Outsourced
2010 Raising Hope
2010 The Good Guys
2011 Breaking In
2011 Game of Thrones
2011 Happy Endings
2011 New Girl
2011 Revenge
2012 GCB
2014 Fargo
2014 You're the Worst
2015 Grace and Frankie
2015 Heroes Reborn
2016 American Gothic
2016 Billions
2018 Strange Angel
2018 Succession
2019 The Boys
2020 The Great
2021 WandaVision
2022 Welcome to Chippendales
2023 Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
2023 The Consultant
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.