Iain Johnstone obituary

Iain Johnstone presented the BBC’s Film 82 in the absence of Barry Norman and later, for eight years in the late 80s, he was the host of the Radio 4 quiz Screenplay Photograph: no credit requested

There were few great movie stars of the late 20th century not filmed, interviewed or profiled by the television producer, film-maker and author Iain Johnstone, who has died aged 80. He was both a respected critic of the movie business and a participant, as screenwriter and maker of documentaries about the making of films.

He had a long professional relationship with Steven Spielberg, beginning in 1974, when Iain had just spent a year in the US as professor of broadcasting at Boston University. Having heard that the movie Jaws was being shot on Martha’s Vineyard, he made a short film, The Jaws Report, for the BBC. He went on to make seven more films about the director’s works, including Jurassic Park, Minority Report, the Indiana Jones sequence and War of the Worlds.