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His debut, 2002's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, was an adaptation of the autobiography of sleazeball game-show host Chuck Barris, who claimed to have worked with the federal government in the 1970s, with his cover being the star of The Gong Show. True or not, Clooney's film is slickly entertaining, funny, and features a brilliant lead performance from Sam Rockwell (who has still not broken out as a star; why hasn't his luck changed?). The film co-starred Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, and even features a young Michael Cera, pre-"Arrested Development". His follow-up, Good Night, and Good Luck. told the story of Edward Murrow and his fight on CBS against Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare. Clooney shows up as Murrow's producer, but it's David Strathairn as the newsman who steals the show. Clooney's work has become less intrusive, but impressive, nonetheless.

Orson Welles

It's kind of hard to argue with this choice, as his debut film is considered to be the best film of all time (or one of the best) by almost everyone who's ever watched a movie. 1941's Citizen Kane is not only a great debut film, but it's a great film, one that chose to experiment with the way the camera moves in and around a scene and its characters. The film is a veiled biography of famed newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, with Welles as the title character, Charles Foster Kane. Though the film ends with his death, the rest of the story chronicles Kane's life, from childhood to death, and everything in between. Some people may watch the film nowadays and wonder what all the fuss was about, but it's hard not to be blown away by the craftsmanship at work here, especially by Welles' cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

Welles wouldn't ever hit the exact same high with any of his other films, though his immediate follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, is not only a great movie, but one of the earliest and most prominent examples of why studio interference is never a good thing. Also, his 1958 south-of-the-border noir, Touch of Evil, is well-respected and weirdly offbeat enough to be remembered over 50 years later, despite Charlton Heston being the star with an unfortunate Spanish accent. Still, Welles would find his future films constantly tampered with, even as he continued to work with stranger and stranger ideas. Though his other films are not as frequently name-dropped as Citizen Kane, Orson Welles was a visionary director and actor.

Jon Favreau

Only in this column, I suppose, would this kind of odd sacrilege, where Orson Welles and Jon Favreau are mentioned in the same sentence, occur. It's just a tad askew, I suppose, that, when it comes to commercial success, the latter man has had his fair share, whereas Welles struggled to get any commercial acclaim in his waning years. Of course, when some of your movies feature Will Ferrell as an elf and Robert Downey, Jr. as a superhuman, rich lush, you just might find yourself as one of the hottest directors on the planet. Before Jon Favreau was thought of as a big-budget director, he was making small films behind and in front of the camera, with one of his best friends, a little-known, chatty, tall, and thin actor named Vince Vaughn.

Since the time of Swingers and the underrated Made, Favreau has made major strides as a director, despite being about as wildly stylish as Ron Howard. Then again, why did Iron Man need to have anything flashy when Downey, Jr. and Jeff Bridges play nemeses? Favreau is hard at work on the highly anticipated sequel to Iron Man, which should be as successful as the first film, even if it ends up falling in the same trap as pretty much every other sequel ever made. However, I doubt Favreau's directing career is going to find any major road blocks in the near future. Moreover, his acting career is gaining more steam; next week, he co-stars in Couples Retreat, a film he co-wrote with another of the film's stars, Vaughn. Sure, it looks a bit....silly, but the writers of Swingers and Made can't go wrong, right?

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