The multi-talented James Mangold, TCM's Guest Programmer for October, is a producer, screenwriter, director and occasional actor. He is probably best known for co-writing and directing the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005), for which Reese Witherspoon won a Best Actress Oscar®. His other writing/directing credits include Cop Land (1997), Girl, Interrupted (1999), Kate and Leopold (2001) and Identity (2003).

A native New Yorker, Mangold chooses Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) because "It's not only a kind of postcard to New York, but captures both the idiocy of the intellectual world and the self-obsessed of New York, and also the odd and wonderful beauty of that culture."

Having just created his own Western, the current 3:10 to Yuma, Mangold is fascinated by Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) because it brought "exuberance and a kind of aggressiveness and modernism" to the genre.

Mangold finds Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (1941) pertinent in "a period of political unrest" because it "addresses adult, complex aspects of life in this country."

He remembers seeing Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) at the age of 11 when "it scared the pants off me." He admires the "intense craft" involved in Spielberg's approach in barely showing the scary shark "and yet conveying such a concrete image of it in our mind."

by Roger Fristoe