Jonathan Betuel's journey as a writer and filmmaker began when his first novel, "The Dogfighter", was published at the age of 21. Following its publication, he started reading screenplays with friends at NYU Film School, drawn to their expressive, visual, and minimal nature. This sparked a desire to pursue a career in screenwriting, leading him to abandon novel writing.
In the mid-1980s, Betuel wrote an original spec screenplay titled "THE LAST STARFIGHTER", a warm story about a boy from a trailer park who dreams of escaping and finding his destiny. The story takes a turn when the boy scores on an arcade video game and is recruited by aliens to save a benign civilization. The script caused a bidding war among studios, with Lorimar eventually producing the film, distributed by Universal Pictures. The film's success changed Betuel's life, and "The Last Starfighter" remains a cult classic with a multi-generational fan base.
After the success of "The Last Starfighter", Betuel moved to Hollywood, where he wrote original screenplays and became known as a reliable hired gun to doctor other scripts. He developed a passion for stories that dealt with love, dreams, and challenges, and was eager to direct his own original screenplays.
Betuel's opportunity to direct one of his original screenplays arrived when he was hired by Disney to direct "MY SCIENCE PROJECT", a unique science-fiction comedy set in an Arizona high school. The story follows misfit students who discover the warp drive of a crashed UFO and enter it in their high school science fair, leading to chaos and time travel VFX as they must save the world from destruction.
While preparing for his next feature film, Betuel met his future partner and co-founded a computer graphic visual effects studio, LUMA PICTURES. He believed that the artist team is the central ingredient of all masterworks, and over time, Luma grew from a team of two to a current staff of over 300 artists. Betuel's artist-first philosophy remains at the heart of his vision.
Throughout his career, Betuel has learned how to build artistic families, likening them to an orchestra that comes together, works in unison, and crafts sound moments for all to enjoy and experience. He has come to understand that a screenplay, like a composer's original music score, provides the first step - the roadmap for artists to rally around and travel. At the heart of a screenplay is the emotional core that binds everyone to the filmmaking process. When perfect pitch is achieved, a magic carpet appears to carry us away, transporting us, the audience, to times and places that only exist in our imagination.
