Michael Crichton

Crichton earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard before attending Harvard Medical School, writing pulp novels under pseudonyms to help pay his tuition before deciding, upon graduating, to abandon medicine for writing entirely.

Long before he wrote the novel behind Jurassic Park, the Harvard-trained doctor turned novelist made his directing debut with a theme park where the robots learn to aim. He earned his medical degree before abandoning practice entirely to focus on writing, and this film marked one of his relatively rare forays into directing.

Its theme-park-technology-gone-wrong premise anticipated the central idea of his most famous novel by roughly two decades, an idea he would return to and develop far more fully in his own later fiction.