Guggenheim, 44, credits his late father, Washington-based biographical filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, for his first brush with the art of political ad-making: "My father woke me up in the middle of the night. I was five," he explained in an interview posted on the Academy Awards Web site. "`You want to come to work with me?'" We boarded a plane -- it was Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign -- he was doing a political film. Weeks later [Kennedy] was assassinated. And my father made the Academy Award-winning film, Robert F. Kennedy Remembered, from the footage he shot on the campaign. I was hooked forever."

                                                                                                     -- Alexis Simendinger