Tickets for students are FREE! Adult tickets are only $10 and can be purchased at the door or on the Justin-Siena website: www.justin-siena.org/tickets.

Hailing from Phoenix, Arizona, Cinco Paul is a writer and producer whose movies have grossed over one billion dollars in the U.S. alone. Paul was named after Cinco de Mayo, a celebration held on his birthday. After graduating summa cum laude from Yale University, Paul served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Tokyo. After working for several years as a jingle writer, he won a short film competition and received a fellowship at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he graduated in 1993 from the Graduate Screenwriting Program. The next year, he sold his first screenplay to Columbia Pictures.

Since 1999 Paul has collaborated with fellow screenwriter, Ken Daurio. They began by writing the cult comedy Bubble Boy, followed up with Disney’s Santa Clause 2, but now the two are primarily known for writing screenplays for animated films, including Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!, Despicable Me, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Despicable Me 2, and the upcoming Secret Life of Pets.

Paul and Daurio also recently turned their movie Bubble Boy into a musical, which has had productions in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Canada, and Australia, among others. Stephen Schwartz called it “One of the cleverest, funniest, and most endearing musicals I’ve seen in a long time.” Last year they also founded their own film festival in Agoura Hills, CA, The Greatest Movies Ever Written, which is the only film festival in the world focused exclusively on screenwriters.

The bottom line is that the world can’t get enough of the Minions, and no one knows why, not even Despicable Me’s screenwriter Cinco Paul, who admitted, “We never knew the minions were going to be so popular; it just became a force of nature.” Love them or hate them, they’re a great case study in creating successful animated characters, which is our subject today.