David Fincher. A stylish visual talent with a penchant for dark subjects blazoned with moody sensuality, Fincher eschewed the film school route and instead got a job loading cameras and doing other hands-on work for an animation company. He next finagled a position with George Lucas' esteemed special effects production company, Industrial Light and Magic, when he was only 18. Fincher stayed with the company for four years, learning the trade from the ground up and earning some screen credits, including matte work on "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984). Fincher left ILM when he got a chance to helm a TV commercial. His first was a precursor of grim things to come: working for the American Cancer Society, he shot an ad showing a fetus smoking a cigarette. A very successful director of commercials, Fincher went on to shoot advertisements for Revlon, Converse, Nike, Pepsi and Levi's. In 1986, he joined Propaganda Films at its inception and it was only natural that Fincher would expand from promoting products to working in a similar format promoting songs. Propaganda quickly came to dominate the field of music videos, and Fincher's work included Don Henley's "The End of the Innocence", Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" and "Cold Hearted", Billy Idol's "L.A. Woman" and Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun". His best-known, and some of his best, work was for Madonna: creating a sleek noir world of muscle hunks, black cats and bondage for "Express Yourself" and staging the equally memorable "Vogue" (1990), with its gorgeous black and white photography evoking a variety of movie divas of yore, slickly edited to Madonna's pop appropriation of gay male "vogue" dancing. Fincher's considerable success meant that a feature was inevitable, and it fell on his shoulders to follow up Ridley Scott and James Cameron for the sci-fi sequel "Alien3" (1986). Individual sequences had much to recommend them, and Fincher sustained his dark visual assurance for a feature film, but too many cooks, worried about production costs and trying to imitate past formulas, spoiled the broth to some extent. He enjoyed greater success, both with critics and at the boxoffice, with "Seven" (1995), an unrelenting serial killer story which pulled no punches via a downbeat ending Fincher fought to keep.