JAMES GUNN BIOGRAPHY - Writer, Actor, Executive Producer

James Gunn was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri in a large Irish Catholic family. At the age of twelve he began his filmmaking career with an eight-millimeter camera. His first film featured his brother Sean, now an actor on WB's The Gilmore Girls , being disemboweled by zombies.

While attending Columbia University in New York, Gunn applied for a part-time job filing papers at famed B-movie studios Troma Entertainment, and ended up writing the screenplay for a movie called Tromeo & Juliet instead. He was paid $150 to do so. In 1997, Tromeo became a cult hit, playing in theaters around the world, including over a year of midnight screenings in Los Angeles. Gunn stayed at Troma for two years as Troma's president of production. He wrote and directed television segments for the BBC and HBO/Cinemax, and for a time even ran his own television station, Troma's Edge TV, in the Netherlands and Amsterdam. Gunn has also acted in the Troma films Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger 4 and the appropriately entitled , Tales from the Crapper .

Gunn left Troma to write and star (along with Rob Lowe, Jamie Kennedy and his own brother, Sean) in the feature film, The Specials , about a group of superheroes on their day off. In the year 2000, literally dozens of people flocked to the theater while it played in LA and New York.

Gunn wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Toy Collector , released by Bloomsbury Press in 2000. It's the story of a hospital orderly who sells drugs to finance his escalating toy collecting addiction. He also wrote, with Lloyd Kaufman, the non-fiction book All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger .

In 2002 the live action Scooby-Doo movie was released into theaters. Gunn wrote the screenplay for the film, the first movie he was involved with that he allowed his mother to see. The film has grossed over $275 million worldwide.

In March of 2004 Gunn became the first person in cinema history to write back-to-back #1-for-the-weekend box office hits, with Dawn of the Dead on March 19, 2004 and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed on March 26, 2004.

Gunn lives in Studio City with his wife, actress Jenna Fischer. Currently, Gunn has wrapped post-production of his writing and directing effort, SLiTHER , to be released in the end of March, 2006 by Universal Studios.

You can find out more about James Gunn than you'd ever want to know at www.jamesgunn.com.