As we do every year, we've asked 52 celebrities to tell us about the movies that changed their lives. The next time you're in a quandary over what to rent at the video store, pick up one of these life-changing flicks!
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1. Wesley Snipes
(actor, Demolition Man)
"Without a doubt, I'd say Birdman of Alcatraz. Why? I just felt so sad for the guy played by Burt Lancaster. I felt like the guy was so caring--if he could take care of those birds, he could certainly have been a viable citizen. You know, let the guy out! He could have had a whole new career. Good stuff."
2. Jeff Bridges
(actor, Blown Away)
"The movie I remember most vividly from my youth was High Noon. My father [Lloyd Bridges] played a villain, and he had a big fight with Gary Cooper. It's become something of a legend in my family that Cooper and Dad did the fight themselves, and they rolled under a horse--Cooper even got hurt. But the real reason I can't forget High Noon is that take after take was ruined because [my brother] Beau, who was sitting in a hayloft nearby, kept laughing and yelling."
3. Chen Kaige
(director, Farewell My Concubine)
"When I went to film school in Beijing in 1977, we went to the film archives to see movies not seen by the public. The movie that had the most influence on me was Citizen Kane. Why? Because it's the best film."
4. Joe Pesci
(actor, Jimmy Hollywood)
"I liked most of the James Cagney pictures--_The Roaring Twenties_ was my favorite. I identified with little guys like Cagney--when you're a kid you like somebody who's a fighter."
5. Fernando Trueba
(director, Belle Epoque)
"I was impressed by the films of Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch. I remember, when I was young, I was having dinner with a Spanish writer and he said Lubitsch's Ninotchka was a horrible, reactionary, stupid movie. I said, 'Can you repeat that for me on the street? I'm not going to convince you that Ninotchka is a masterpiece, so let's go to the street and we'll fight.' But he was a coward and refused."
6. Brendan Fraser
(actor, Airheads)
"The first film I ever saw was The Apple Dumpling Gang, with Don Knotts and Tim Conway, and it made a profound impression on me. Though I had seen movies on television, it was the first film I sat through in a theater. The first time is always unforgettable--I remember the exact feelings I had watching Don Knotts trying to rip off a bank with a donkey and a rope."
7. Charlie Sheen
(actor, Terminal Velocity)
"I'll tell you why I could never forget seeing Dog Day Afternoon. My family was in Italy, where my dad was making a bad movie called The Cassandra Crossing. We were all at Sophia Loren's house--the Carlo Ponti mansion--for a weekend party. During a terrible rainstorm, she invited everybody downstairs to watch a movie that hadn't been released yet. We had no idea what it was. It was Dog Day, and that was the first time I ever saw a performance that didn't feel like a performance. It looked like they had captured this guy played by Al Pacino in the middle of the siege. Afterwards, I wanted to talk about the movie, but all my dad wanted to talk about was why Sophia Loren didn't provide shelter for the drivers--it was a bad storm, but even so--I remember how frustrated I was that I didn't have anyone to discuss the movie with."
8. Phil Hartman
(actor, "Saturday Night Live")
"Peter Sellers, in multiple roles in Dr. Strangelove, made such an impression on me. He could play an American president, a British World War II flier and a mad scientist. I related because I had in myself this quality of wanting to play a lot of different characters."
9. Jonathan Lynn
(director, Greedy)
"The Apartment showed me that a very funny movie could also be deeply satirical about human nature, yet remain very touching. It has that wonderful trait of being a tough com¬edy and, at the same time, having real sentiment."
10. Garry Marshall
(producer/director, Exit to Eden)
"I think the Lou Gehrig story, The Pride of the Yankees was the first non-cartoon I ever saw. Since I was crazy about sports, I loved that picture. Why? I laughed and then I cried."
11. Charles Grodin
(actor, Beethoven)
"A Place in the Sun was so romantic, so dramatic, so exciting. That specific movie got Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty and me all into show business. Montgomery Clift was an inspiration for my generation of actors--he made it look so easy, it fooled us all. We thought, you go up there and act natu¬ral. Then you find out 10 years later, maybe you can do it--if you're lucky."
12. Dana Delany
(actress, Exit to Eden)
"For me, it's Mean Streets. I was 17 and Stephen Marx, my film teacher at boarding school, took me into Boston to see it. Being a white girl from Connecticut, I'd never seen anything like it; Mean Streets is so edgy and visceral and violent--so alive it explodes out at you. Amy Robinson, who never acted again, I think, played the epileptic, and she seemed so exotic to me. Bobby Carradine played a hippie who shoots a drunk, and he looked like all my hippie friends. I imagine that the impact of this Martin Scorsese movie was similar to what people felt the first time they saw Marlon Brando act. Of course, my having a crush on my film teacher might have had something to do with it."
13. Martin Short
(actor, Clifford)
"The 7th Voyage of Sinbad--I just loved Ray Harryhausen's special effects. I mean, I wanted to be the genie in that movie. And I was in love with Kathryn Grant, too--the pre-Crosby Kathryn Grant, that is."
14. Jerome Hellman
(producer, Midnight Cowboy)
"There are many films that influenced me, but the one that comes to mind was a film of Henry Fonda's called You Only Live Once. He played a man wrongly convicted. He went to prison, and he escaped. I remember a scene at the end of the movie where he's hurrying through the woods, carrying his wife, Sylvia Sidney. There's this great light shining through the trees, and just as they get to the border where they would be safe, the cops get Fonda in the telescopic sights and shoot him. I was outraged. I couldn't believe the injustice of it all."
15. Rebecca De Mornay
(actress, Guilty as Sin)
"If I had to choose just one movie, it would be Gone With the Wind. I saw it when I was 10 years old and, basically, it changed my life. I saw expressed in the character of Scarlett O'Hara everything I'd come to feel about how you were perceived if you were a strong woman. I saw her as a strong woman who was very misunderstood. She did things that caused people to say, 'Oh, she's a liar,' or, 'Oh, she's a bitch,' but in fact she felt more passionately than anyone. She was the strength, the backbone, that everyone relied on when things were the hardest."
16. Jean-Claude Van Damme
(actor, Hard Target)
"Star Wars, definitely. I was just a teenager when I saw the movie. I remember watching Luke Skywalker, who left his home to go traveling through space on these incredible adventures. It inspired me to, eventually, leave my home in Brussels to pursue my dreams of adventures in Hollywood."
17. & 18. Steven Spielberg and Holly Hunter Duke It Out
Holly Hunter: "What film made the biggest impact on me? Oh, The Best Years of Our Lives. I just loved that film. It seemed so real, and Fredric March was simply marvelous."
Steven Spielberg: "For me, it would have to be It's a Wonderful Life."
Hunter: "Oh, It's a Wonderful Life sucks. I liked The Best Years of Our Lives much better."
Spielberg: "Yes, that's a fine film, too. It had so much meaning, not only after World War II, but after Vietnam as well."
Hunter: "And that scene where Fredric March comes home, and surprises his wife that he's back from the war..."
Spielberg: "Yes, that was marvelous. The look on Myrna Loy's face in the kitchen when she knows by instinct that her husband is back! But I still like It's a Wonderful Life better."
19. Sophia Loren
(actress, A Special Day)
"When I was a little girl in my little town in Italy, I liked to see musicals with Judy Garland, especially The Magician of Oz [sic]. That film brought me into a magic world, a world of dreams--for two hours I was able to forget the anguish, to forget for a moment the desperation for food."
20. Robert Downey Jr.
(actor, Heart & Souls)
"King of Hearts made a big impression on me, as did my father's films, but the biggest impact of all was seeing A Clockwork Orange. It's such a surreal film that maybe someone underage shouldn't have seen it."
21. Don Bluth
(filmmaker, Thumbelina)
"I loved seeing movies as a kid, but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first time I took real notice and said, 'There's something different here.' The colors were subtle, the story was frightening yet triumphant--it's the movie that got me interested in animation."
22. Emilio Estevez
(actor, The Mighty Ducks)
"I'd have to say Badlands. Why? My father played the Charlie Starkweather character, and he's great in it--in fact, it's a great movie."
23. Alek Keshishian
(director, Truth or Dare)
"Oh, Lawrence of Arabia made a huge impression because it transported me to another world I knew nothing about."
24. Moira Kelly
(actress, With Honors)
"I loved The Quiet Man with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, because I'm Irish and it made me proud. I used to watch it every Saint Patrick's Day."
25. Carol Burnett
(actress, Annie)
"Though I know people call it 'Capra-corn,' I have to say I loved It's a Wonderful Life because of Jimmy Stewart's performance. I was a kid when it came out, and though the movie was not subtle by any means, I think Stewart's scene in the bar-- before he decides to throw himself off the bridge--is one of the most beauti¬ful acting jobs I have ever seen."
26. Stephen Dorff
(actor, BackBeat)
"I was taken by movies made in the late '60s and early '70s like Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange. Why? They're movies that shook people and actually made connections. That's lacking in movies today--there's almost a distance put up between the audience and the screen."
27. John Schlesinger
(director, The Innocent)
"Despite the hatred of the Nazis in the '30s, there was a great interest [in England] in all things German. I suppose the first time I really became conscious of the style in movies was when I was 11 or so at school, and I saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. No other film ever looked like that, and I never forgot it."
28. Nancy Travis
(actress, So I Married an Axe Murderer)
"Gone With the Wind made a huge impression on me when I was young. When they rereleased it, my mother took me to see it on the huge screen. I'd read the book beforehand, but nothing prepared me for how much I loved Vivien Leigh. I had to know everything about her."
29. Alan Ladd Jr.
(producer, The Brady Bunch)
"I went to see Psycho not really knowing what it was, and I was never so scared in my life. How did it change my life? For a long time afterward, I was wary every time I got in the shower--I listened for any sound of the bathroom door opening!"
30. Laurence Fishburne
(actor, What's Love Got to Do With It)
"The Ten Commandments really knocked me on my heels. The parting of the Red Sea amazed me. Yul Brynner fascinated me, the way he was so stern, and then how gentle he was when he tried to bring his baby back to life. I especially admired how Brynner and Edward G. Robinson handled the mock-biblical dialogue. Here Robinson was famous for gangster movies, and Brynner for The King and I, yet they were totally convincing."
31. Craig Chester
(actor, Swoon)
"The movie that changed my life--after Xanadu, of course--was A Place in the Sun. It was the first time I saw Montgomery Clift and he was so brilliant and true, I decided to become an actor. His love scenes with Elizabeth Taylor were totally heartbreaking. The movie reinforced my belief that no matter how much you love somebody, fate always has the upper hand. Come to think of it, that's sort of the message of Xanadu, too, isn't it?"
32. Jason James Richter
(actor, Free Willy)
"I loved The Goonies; I thought it was a great movie. I still remember all the characters. It was the first time I wanted to be in a group up there on the screen--I said, 'I wanna be Mikey, I wanna be any of those guys.' It was a great adventure."
33. Ken Olin
(director, White Fang 2: Myth of the White Wolf)
"When I started acting, the performances in On the Waterfront probably had the biggest impact on me. I wanted to be part of having that kind of impact on other people."
34. Ed Begley Jr.
(actor, Greedy)
"Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life. Why? It's about what is important, what is valuable: friends and family. Jimmy Stewart goes mad, wants to end his life, because he thinks it's worth nothing--he believes that he was his money. Life isn't about that, as he discovers."
35. Robert Radnitz
(producer, A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich)
"Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky stands out in my memory. Why do I remember it? The battle on the frozen lake was a tremendous piece of filmmaking--it was so visual. Ask people for a movie they cannot forget and they will invariably describe some scene, but not quote the dialogue. That's because movies are a visual medium."
36. Donald Sutherland
(actor, JFK)
"There were a lot of films which had a profound effect on me, but only Paths of Glory had a message that wasn't spelled out in black-and-white. It wasn't some intellectual sentence that you could reduce down and put in, say, Sam Goldwyn's telegram-- that film's just a totally whole, extraordinary piece of work."
37. Jon Voight
(actor, Return to Lonesome Dove)
"One of the movies that fascinated me as a youngster was Sinbad the Sailor with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was the most spectacular movie for me as a kid--the sets, costumes, music, everything--the whole movie was just so magical. I just saw it the other night and it was every bit as good as I'd imagined it was. For the same reasons, I also loved The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn, and The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat."
38. Jackie Beat
(actor, Grief)
"I was completely blown away when I saw Carrie with my sister in 1976. I remember cringing during the blow-job scene (I was with my sister, for crissakes!) and literally being hypnotized by the ground-breaking prom sequence. Why don't more directors use split screens? If there's any moral to Carrie, it's that denial can turn a gift into a curse. How'd the movie change my life? Well, I used to publish a magazine called Carrie: The Magazine That Can Move Things. I named my dog Carrie, I even staged a live version using sock puppets called Carrie Is So Very ... Scary! Afterwards, Lily Tomlin said, 'That was great!' I have Carrie posters, stills, T-shirts, but it would be nice if someone could send me the script--hint, hint!"
39. Ernie Hudson
(actor, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle)
"I'd have to say Meet John Doe. I always thought Gary Cooper was a pretty straight-up guy in that film, the kind of guy I'd like to be."
40. Arthur Hiller
(director, Married to It)
"Open City hit me hard because I was back from the war, going to college in Toronto, and my folks were back in Edmonton. I found the film very realistic and very sad."
41. Sam Neill
(actor, Jurassic Park)
"When I was a kid, Notorious really struck me. It's probably still my favorite film. I think it has all the elements that make a great movie, and if I was to say there was one film that most influenced me to want to become part of the business, it's that one."
42. Harvey Fierstein
(actor, Mrs. Doubtfire)
"Stage Door definitely changed my life--after the first time I saw it, I'd fake illness to stay home from school to watch it anytime it was on TV. We had this show called 'The Million Dollar Movie,' and they used to show a movie twice a day, five days a week. The week they showed Stage Door I was the sickest little boy--I stayed home and watched it 10 times."
43. Walter Mirisch
(producer, The Apartment)
"Sunset Blvd. was the film that most impressed me. Why? It was brilliant, original and fascinating, and you know something? It's still fascinating today."
44. Ann Miller
(host, performer, That's Entertainment! III)
"When I was a girl in Texas, I saw Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra, and I fell madly in love with Henry Wilcoxon, who played Marc Antony He was so handsome and strong. Years later, I met him at the premiere of Gone With the Wind, and I just melted. I was so in awe of him."
45. Matthew Broderick
(actor, Glory)
"The first movies that really got me were the Chaplin movies my mother took me to. I thought Modern Times was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. I just fell in love with Chaplin."
46. James Belushi
(actor, Mr. Destiny)
"There are a couple of films that have affected me, and they both starred my brother John: National Lampoon's Animal House and The Blues Brothers. I thought they both changed the wave of comedy, started a whole new style of comic films. The Blues Brothers was a great musical, too--the image of John dancing is one I'll never forget. I'm still jealous about the way he could dance!"
47. Joanna Going
(actress, Wyatt Earp)
"The film Persona changed the way I thought about movies and what I expected and valued in them. I was profoundly affected by the acting and by the film's simplicity."
48. Tom Skerritt
(actor, "Picket Fences")
"I saw a picture a couple of years ago that moved me more than any other film, and in any number of ways: Platoon. I don't think I've ever been so affected by a movie--I couldn't drive home. Fortunately, my son was with me and was able to drive the car."
49 Jay Kanter
(producer, The Nightcomers)
"I saw The Birds at a screening at Universal, and I was terrified. It seemed so real--and even more so when, as I was driving home over Coldwater Canyon, an owl swooped down right in front of my windshield. Scared the hell out of me."
50. Olivia d'Abo
(actress, Greedy)
"I would have to say Harold and Maude because though it's bizarre, it expresses my feeling about life: Get as much as you can, because you never know when it's going to end."
51. Sammi Davis
(actress, The Rainbow)
"Rebecca is, to me, the ultimate film. It's perfect because it's so human, so filled with pure, sensitive emotion, that it captures you completely. Also, it has a really amazing balance of minuteness and enormity."
52. Brenda Vaccaro
(actress, "Red Shoe Diaries")
"I grew up in New York, so I went to the art houses. The picture that knocked me out was Rene Clement's Forbidden Games. It was war as seen through the eyes of two little kids. In the end, when the little girl can't find the boy, well, I don't think I'd ever felt the impact of what war could be like. For me as a youngster, it hit me hard."
Bob Thomas has reported on Hollywood for Associated Press since 1943. His book Walt Disney, An American Original was recently republished by Hyperion.