"Filmmaker Sydney Pollack found his greatest success as the director of such celebrated pictures as They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The Way We Were , Tootsie , and Out of Africa which won Pollack Oscars for both director and producer. Pollack found early success as an actor, an acting teacher, and later as a producer. In ensuing years, he would be praised as a character actor, from Dustin Hoffman's scene stealing agent in Tootsie to a sympathetic cynic in Eyes Wide Shut. Forever curious, Pollack often used these films to see how other significant directors plied their trade. Trying to balance time for family and his many other soon-to-be-explored talents, Pollack's ability to recognize quality material also made him a producer of such memorable works as The Fabulous Baker Boys, Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Iris, and Michael Clayton. This work weaves the story of Pollack's life and career through ten of his films and covers his relationship with two actors; teacher and mentor, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Redford, with whom he frequently collaborated"-- WES D. GEHRING is Ball State University’s Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Editor for USA Today Magazine, for which he also writes the column “Reel World.” Gehring is the author of more than forty books. CNN and Forbes’s “Book Authority” recently ranked his Genre-Busting Dark Comedies of the 1970s at number thirty-nine on their list of the “100 Best Comedy Books of All Time.” In 2017 and 2018 he was one of Turn er Classic Movies’ on-screen scholars for its summer online classes. His writing has resulted in speaking engagements from the Paris-Sorbonne University to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.