While a teen growing up in St. Louis, Richard L. Anderson fell in love with the movies. Unfortunately, there were no film companies there, so he took the long train ride to Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood. After graduating from the Cinema Department at the University of Southern California, Richard found that there were no directing jobs for a young man with big dreams and no experience, so he got his first job in the professional industry in another field—sound editing on dubbing a Chinese kung-fu film into English.
From there, he worked his way up through the ranks on many low budget films, sometimes as a film editor, but primarily as a sound designer, until he finally graduated to A pictures, such as “Star Wars” (1977) and “Star Trek: the Motion Picture” (1979). During the 1980’s through 2011, Richard supervised the sound editing on many of Hollywood’s biggest hits. Along the way, he won an Oscar for his work on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) and received two other nominations for “Poltergeist” (1982) and “Daylight” (1996). He also won an Emmy Award for the Steven Spielberg directed TV show, “Amazing Stories” (1985) and five Golden Reel Awards for the above three pictures, as well as “Predator” (1987) and the animated classic, “The Lion King” (1994).
But Richard still wanted to make his own films, so he quit his successful sound career to concentrate on writing and directing. Since then, he has written several feature film scripts and directed a few films, including a giant screen, 3D film about Genghis Khan, titled “Temujin” (2011), shot on location in Mongolia. He is currently developing a suspense/science fiction film and a TV series about a Chinese detective, while waiting to direct the Hollywood version of this story of American POWs in Mukden.