Patrick Read Johnson

Patrick Read Johnson (born May 7, 1962) is an American filmmaker, special effects artist and screenwriter. Born in Wadsworth, Illinois, he is best known for his directorial work on the films Spaced Invaders, Angus, Baby's Day Out, The Genesis Code and 5-25-77. He also has written and produced such films as Dragonheart. Career Starting out in the field of practical special effects and models, Johnson was one of the first people outside of Industrial Light and Magic to see Star Wars (albeit in an incomplete form) as chronicled in his semi-autobiographical film 5-25-77. He first saw the film during Spring Break, sometime between late March and early April 1977, when ILM was scrambling to complete VFX shots. He had also visited the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind at Future General Corporation a few days before and found Douglas Trumbull's work to be "engineered, intimidating and mature" compared to John Dykstra's "shooting-from-the-hip" style. Johnson ascended into mainstream Hollywood filmmaking following the modest success of Spaced Invaders, invited by John Hughes to work on his adaptation of Dennis the Menace, and then later, the comedy Baby's Day Out. Baby's Day Out was tremendously popular in South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In India, it was played at the largest theater in Calcutta for over a year. He also wrote the fantasy film Dragonheart, which spawned a franchise. He proposed the idea for the film to producer Raffaella De Laurentiis. Johnson described it as "The Skin Game with a dragon in it...or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Dragon", and that he wanted "the idea of a dragon and a knight conning villages for money" because he thought that the concept was "not only funny, but kind of sweet".