"The Letters:" About the Cast and Crew

WILLIAM RIEAD (Writer/Producer/Director)

William Riead is a writer, director and producer. His filmmaking credits include the thriller Island Prey, starring Olivia Hussey and Don Murray, and the action film Scorpion, also starring Murray.

Riead went to high school and college in Illinois, graduating from Western Illinois University with a degree in communications. While in college he worked for local CBS affiliate KHQA-TV as a news cameraman and was then a radio reporter at sister-station WTAD. In 1968 he joined NBC affiliate WGEM-TV as a television reporter and co-anchored a weekend news program called the "Bill Riead/Jim Young Saturday Night Report."

In 1972 he joined CBS News in New York and was assigned to the network's chief European bureau in London, where he became the network's foreign news editor. He was later assigned to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Miami. There, he was recruited by TVN, predecessor to today's CNN, to be their West Coast correspondent. He accepted the position and while assigned to the White House press corps witnessed two assassination attempts on then-President Gerald Ford.

Wanting to gear his career more in the direction of production, Riead left network news in 1975 and formed his own company, CinemaWest, in Los Angeles. They began producing corporate videos for major corporations throughout the U.S. and Europe. Regis Philbin hosted one such video and recommended Riead to Columbia Pictures. The studio hired him to write and direct promotional film product and, over a 12-year period, he helmed "making of" docs for 47 feature films including Midnight Express, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Front, Absence of Malice<, The China Syndrome, The Goodbye Girl, Gorky Park, First Blood, Lone Wolf McQuade, Easy Money,Casey's Shadow, Summer Lovers, The Woman in Red, The Bounty, Mrs. Soffel, Never Cry Wolf and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

In the 1980s Riead segued into producing informational specials for television including "Change of Heart," which he wrote and directed for the Discovery Channel. Featuring Walter Matthau and Brooke Shields, the telefilm went on to win numerous awards in addition to a CableACE Award nomination.

His next two informational specials were "One for the Road" and "Dying for a Smoke." The latter project took First Place at the HUeSCA International Film Festival and won the Gold Award at Worldfest Charleston, the distinguished Silver Plaque Award at Intercom, the Golden Eagle Award at the Council of International Non-Theatrical Events in Washington, D.C., the Silver Certificate at the John Muir Film Festival, the M.I.P. Award at the World Health Organization, the Magna Cum Laude Award at the Province of Parma and Honorable Mention at the Columbus International Film Festival.