• Andrew Sarris, auteurist film critic, author of American Cinema: Directors and Directions, and professor of film studies at Columbia University.
• Robert Ray, author of The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, and A Certain Tendency of the American Cinema: 1930-1980. He is director of Film Studies at the University of Florida.
  
• Craig Saper, author of Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in film and popular culture.
  
• Donald Pease, professor of English at Dartmouth College and author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context.

Distinguished participants:

• Timothy Corrigan, author of A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Viet Nam, and New German Film: The Displaced Image, as well as The Films of Werner Herzog. He teaches at Temple University.
  
• Jean-Michel Rabate, author of Joyce Upon the Void and Ghosts of Modernity, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
• The trailblazing group of Smithee scholars from The Smithee Roundtable.

and:

• Allen Smithee, America's only director. He is credited with over 25 films spanning 4 decades, including the legendary sequel to Hitchcock's masterpiece The Birds, and the underground classic Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh.