He's best known for dabbling in the macabre, but when I talked to the 67-year-old director/musician John Carpenter by phone earlier this week, he told me he was "just delighted." We were discussing his new (and first) album John Carpenter's Lost Themes and the glowing reception it has received thus far. Carpenter is best known for directing horror movies like Halloween and 1982's The Thing, as well as gritty action fare like Escape from New York, but all the while he's been composing music (in fact, he has scored most of this movies, including all of the aforementioned).

Peter Gould is the most important man in television who many people have still never heard of. As executive producer of Breaking Bad, he wrote and directed some of that series' best known episodes. Now Gould is moving to showrunner status as a co-creator—with Breaking Bad lead Vince Gilligan—of the spinoff Better Call Saul, to be centered on Bob Odenkirk's shady attorney character, Saul Goodman.