Crew Bios

Director/Writer/Producer - David Hoffman

David Hoffman is one of America's veteran documentary filmmakers. During his 40-year career, he has made four feature-length documentaries including King, Murray; It's All Good ; SingSing Thanksgiving with BB King ; and Earl Scruggs: His Family & Friends .   King, Murray --an experimental feature doc about an insurance salesman who goes to Las Vegas on a junket to gamble with other high rollers--was the winner of the Critics Award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, besting several other films, including Easy Rider .

Hoffman (see some of his work at www.thehoffmancollection.com) has also made more than 100 primetime documentary television specials and series, mostly for PBS and Turner Broadcasting. Among his most notable projects:

• The acclaimed 10-part Ten Who Dared, with Anthony Quinn
• The landmark 6-part PBS series Making Sense of The Sixties
• Turner Broadcasting's Moon Shot, winner of the Peabody Award for best TV series
• Four Episodes of The American Experience
• Four Episodes of NOVA

Many of Hoffman's reality-style films present a view of recent American events and how the American people experienced them.   Hoffman is a traditional filmmaker who often functions as director, writer, cameraperson, and film editor. Sputnik Mania was made by three people, Hoffman, his editor John Vincent Barrett, and his producer, 23 year-old Eric Reid.

Hoffman's documentaries have received top awards at many major American and international film festivals. Hoffman has made films on subjects as diverse as double-dutch jump roping - Black Magic - (blue ribbon winner at the American Film Festival), the history of naval aviation - Wing over Water (2nd highest rated program of the year on PBS), and Remembering Life (for the 50th anniversary of Life Magazine).  

Hoffman has founded several startup companies and is currently founder and CEO of Sagas for locally based remote video interviewing (www.sagas.com/interview).

Hoffman founded his production company, Varied Directions, 35 years ago and spent much of his career making films in Camden, Maine. Today he lives and works in Santa Cruz, California.


Executive Producer - Jay S. Walker

Jay Walker is chairman of Walker Digital, a privately-held R&D lab based in Stamford, Connecticut.

He founded the lab in 1994 with the vision that consumer-focused applications that sit on top of large-scale networks will be a key driver of business growth. In total, Walker Digital has invented hundreds of solutions for many different kinds of business problems in fifteen different industries.

Mr. Walker is best known as the founder of Priceline.com, which brought a new level of value to the travel industry. Today, Priceline is a profitable, billion-dollar public company with more than ten million active customers.

Mr. Walker also co-founded Synapse, a company that used the credit card processing network to revolutionize the magazine subscription business. Mr. Walker served as the marketing leader for the company for five years during which he produced more than two billion pieces of direct mail and created a customer database of 25 million active buyers. For his work, he won the Direct Marketer of the Year award in 1999. Synapse is now a unit of Time Warner.

Walker Digital employs teams of inventors, engineers and designers to solve problems using network technologies and a strong customer orientation. The company often partners with Fortune 500 firms, such as Federal Express, Time Inc and IGT, to bring its inventions to market.

Mr. Walker's innovations have been widely recognized. He has twice been named by the editors of TIME magazine as one of the "50 most influential business leaders in the digital age." Business Week selected him as one of its 25 Internet pioneers most responsible for "changing the competitive landscape of almost every industry in the world." Newsweek cited him as one of three executives at the forefront of the Internet commerce revolution.

He holds a B.S. degree in Industrial Relations from Cornell University. Jay and his wife Eileen have two children and live in Connecticut.


Author of "Sputnik: The Shock of the Century" - Paul Dickson

Chief consultant for SPUTNIK MANIA is best selling novelist Paul Dickson.   His recent book, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century , dramatically chronicles the post Sputnik year with fascinating parallels to the present.

Dickson is an east coast native of Yonkers, NY, and a graduate of Wesleyan University.   He recalls the night Sputnik went up, which occurred when he was just a freshman in college. On that night, he says, "a friend stopped me in the middle of the campus to say that he had heard about it on the radio.   Instinctively, we both looked up."

After completing school, he joined the U.S. Navy for a short time and then began serving as a reporter for McGraw-Hill Publications.   Since then, his articles have appeared in the Smithsonian, Esquire, The Nation, Town & Country , The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times , and The Washington Post .  

Dickson has written over 50 books. Some of his most popular titles aside from Sputnik are War Slang , The Hidden Language of Baseball , and Toasts .   His latest books Slang:   The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms and The Joy of Keeping Score are being published this year, 2007.

An important intellectual figure in the popular media, Dickson spent years in the archives uncovering formally classified or unnoticed material to bring out the full story of the power and meaning of Sputnik.