Dino de Laurentiis and Martha Schumacher
(Associate Producers)

Dino De Laurentiis was born in Naples, Italy, and left home in his teens to attend the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the famed Roman film school. After working odd job within the industry, he managed to produce his first film by the time he was 20. After a stint in the Italian army during World War II, he returned to film production and scored a hit with Bitter Rice (1949). He would later marry the film's leading lady, Silvana Mangano. He formed a partnership with producer Carlo Ponti, and the pair went on to a string of hits that included the Federico Fellini classics La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957), both of which won Academy Awards® for Best Foreign Language Film. In addition to those Fellini films, De Laurentiis also produced films by Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica and Michelangelo Antonioni during the Italian neorealist movement. Recalling the period, De Laurentiis once said that actually, "Neorealism was an invention of the journalists...the Italian movie industry was so poor that there was no money to shoot in the studios, to build sets, to travel. That's why everything was shot on the street." His 60 years in the film industry have included work on such diverse Hollywood projects as War and Peace (1956), Barbarella (1968), Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Ragtime (James Cagney's last film, 1981), a remake of King Kong (1976), Flash Gordon (1980), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Silver Bullet (1985) among others. In 1984, he unveiled his De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) Film Studios, based in Wilmington, N.C., which conveniently served as the location for the De Laurentiis production of Firestarter that same year.

Associate producer on the film was Martha Schumacher. Schumacher began her career as an assistant auditor on the NBC mini-series The Dain Curse (1978) soon after college. She met Dino De Laurentiis in 1980, when she was hired as the New York accountant on his production of Ragtime (1981). Afterwards she became head of administration for Dino De Laurentiis Productions. Firestarter marked her debut as a producer. Together the couple produced several other King films, including Cat's Eye (also starring Drew Barrymore), Silver Bullet (both 1985) and Maximum Overdrive (1986). She also worked as associate producer on the suspense drama The Bedroom Window (1987), which starred Steve Guttenberg and Isabelle Huppert. She married De Laurentiis in 1990. The couple have teamed up to produce the Oscar®-nominated Crimes of the Heart (1986); Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours (1990); the critically acclaimed Bound (1996), starring Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon; Breakdown (1997), starring Kurt Russell; and, more recently, U-571 (2000), Hannibal (2001) and the upcoming Red Dragon (2002) and Alexander the Great (2003).