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Charles Band

Biography

In an industry where success is often measured by the impact of a single project, Charles Band has sustained a remarkable track record over the past twenty-five years. With nearly two hundred films under his belt, the Chairman and founder of Full Moon Pictures is poised to enter the new millennium with guns blazing.

This past year, Band has expanded his production schedule of quality sci-fi/horror direct-to-video films at his flagship company, Full Moon pictures. Never one to rest of his laurels, he has also added an urban film label (Alchemy Entertainent), lauched an in-house record lable (Big City Records), created a hot selling new product (Cinemaker), an negotiated a major world wide distribution deal for his action figure to cmopany (Full Moon Toys). All this while establishing a state of the art interactive division.

Band is, according the the Los Angeles Times, the "leader of the pack" among producers/distributors of movies that debut directly on home video. Among his greatest hits with the fans are the hugely popluar PUPPET MASTER series and the SUBSPECIES vampire series.

Band, the son of lauded veteran producer/director/writer Albert Band, literally grew up on the sets of his father's movies in and around Rome during the Italian cinematic renaissance of the 1960's. "My earlist memories are of being on the film sets and locations with my father," Band says. "It was like being inside a toy factory." He began learning his craft at an unusually early age, taking on every job he could commandeer, whether on a spaghetti western or on a sword & sandal epic." I learned how the fantasies were put together."

By the time he was a teenager, Band's short subjects were being shown as openers for Andy Warhol films in Italian art cinemas. In 1975, at 21 years of age, Band produced his first feature-lenght film (MANSON OF THE DOOMED) an unheard of feat at the time. It starred then newcomer Lance Henriksen (TV's Millennium). In the early 80's, he produced and directed a pair of theatrical features in the "new" 3-D format: METALSTORM for Universal Studios and PARASITE for Avco Embassy. Parasite premiered special effects by future Academy Award winner, Stan Winston, and starred a very young Demi Moore. Band began back then what would become a very strong track record of discovering great talents.

In 1977, when no one in the industry shared his vision that home video was the "shape of things to come", Band founded Media Home Entertainment, a company that became one of the original independant video distribution operations in America. His forsight and unwavering commitment to this marketplace helped pave the way for the colossal home video boom to come.

In the past decade since he founded Full Moon Pictures in 1989, Band has created a science-fiction/horror/fantasy empire that enjoys the envious position of instant label recognition. In thousands of video stores across America, Full Moon product has its own shelf or section. His films have been tranlated and shown on every major continent. Customers ask for the studio's product by label, and 60,000 Full Moon fans generate upwards of 500 letters per week.

To keep up with Full Moon's ever expanding fan base, Band has created a dedicated interactive division which oversees all of the company's web sites, fullmoonpictures.com, fullmoontoys.com and surrendercinema.com to only name a few of them.

In a highly competitive market place that usually ships less than 10,000 video units per title to video stores for genre films, Full Moon titles regularly surpass the 35,000 mark. With Full Moon action figures, T-shirts, caps and other merchandise selling at a brisk pace, and with the recent addition of DVDs and compact discs to its impressive arry of products, Full Moon is at the center of an ever growing universe whose appetite is as limitless as it is diverse.

Says Band of the company's enviable position, "Every film we make has the potential to become a series in the way that television series or comic books are created. If the pilot works, we make more. At the same time, as filmakers, we shoot all of our features with an eye towards high-definition, interactive and digital technologies. And, we intend to create films in anticipation of any of the newly emerging distribution channels, such as the Internet and beyond."

As Full Moon continues to expand, diversify and succeed, fans of the studio can continue to expect the unexpected. Charles Band wouldn't have it any other way.

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