My own repertoire (directors)
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- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Rainer Erler was born on 26 August 1933 in Munich, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Die Delegation (1970), Sieben Tage (1973) and Seelenwanderung (1962). He was married to Renate Erler. He died on 8 November 2023 in Perth, Australia.Operation Ganymed (1977)- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Franz Novotny was born on 30 May 1949 in Vienna, Austria. He is a producer and director, known for Angelo (2018), 7500 (2019) and Yu (2003).Exit... nur keine Panik (1980)- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Born in Massa Marittima, Italy on August 6, 1931, Umberto Lenzi was a movie enthusiast since his early grade school years. During those years, he founded various film fan clubs while studying law. Lenzi started out as a journalist for various local newspapers and magazines. Lenzi put off his law studies to pursue the technical arts of filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografia.
After graduation from the school, Lenzi continued working as a writer and film critic. He found employment as an assistant director before making his directorial debut with Queen of the Seas (1961). Other pirate/sword flicks followed, starting with I pirati della Malesia (1964) (Pirates of Malaysia), which was part of the height of the career of fictitious tales of historic legendary characters including Robin Hood, Catherine the Great, Zorro, Sandokan and Maciste. For the movie Kriminal (1966), Lenzi turned to the new wave of adult-oriented comic books (known as fumetti) for fresh inspiration and initiated a popular trend.
After directing a war film and two "spaghetti westerns," Lenzi turned to the giallo gene with Paranoia (1969) (originally called "Orgasmo"), starring Carroll Baker and Lou Castel, which was the first of his thrillers and one of his personal favorites. Retitled Paranoia for its USA release, Orgasmo caused some confusion since Lenzi directed a movie with the same name, Paranoia, in 1970 also with Carroll Baker. During the 1970s, Lenzi directed a number of giallo thrillers among them So Sweet... So Perverse (1969), Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972) and Eyeball (1975). None of them were particularly successful since Lenzi blamed his tight budgets and poor scripts, which he believed no director could do well with.
In the late 1970s, Lenzi turned to the police thrillers (polizieschi), which rejuvenated his confidence and his popularity. Titles like Almost Human (1974), Tough Cop (1976) (Free Hand For a Tough Cop), and Brothers Till We Die (1978) (Brothers Till We Die) were the most popular and brutal of the thrillers. Prior to the polizieschi, Lenzi directed Sacrifice! (1972) (Man from Deep River), which was the start of the Italian cannibal sub-genre. A re-telling of the western A Man Called Horse (1970), with a south Asia setting, set the stage for a later group of extremely gory cannibal sub-genre movies most noteworthy being Ruggero Deodato's Last Cannibal World (1977) which featured a potent combination of extreme violence in a documentary realism. Lenzi responded with two very gory jungle cannibal features, Eaten Alive! (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981) (Make Them Die Slowly), which attempted to outdo Deodato's thrillers. The excess of Cannibal Ferox, which was banned in 31 countries, made Lenzi distance himself from the cannibal genre.
In between Eaten Alive and Cannibal Ferox, Lenzi directed Nightmare City (1980), a zombie flick, with Lenzi rejected the slow-moving zombies of the Romero and Fulci movies for a more type of fast-moving, weapons toting, super zombies with action and an anti-nuclear message.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Lenzi turned his attention to other genres: action-adventure, war films and even made-for-TV dramas, although he directed the occasional thriller most notable in that time was Ghosthouse (1988). His movie Le porte dell'inferno (1989) is a seldom-seen horror film, which makes the most of its low budget. Lenzi claimed to have shot it in three weeks at a cost of 300 million lire, whereas low-budget Italian horror films shot in Italy or abroad cost an average of a billion lire or more. It represented a personal challenge for Lenzi since the entire movie takes place in a cave and the suspense is maintained for the entire 90 minutes.
As his budgets and financing for his films dwindled, so did his output. The 1990s saw Lenzi directing a number of TV productions that were never broadcast, causing him lament upon the change in Italian film industry. After 40 years and directing over 60 films, Lenzi more or less retired from film directing and left his mark as one of the most creative and inexhaustible cult film directors of Italy.
Umberto Lenzi died on October 19, 2017 at a hospital in the Ostia district of Rome, Italy at age 86.Un posto ideale per uccidere (1971)- Writer
- Director
- Actor
The women who both attracted and frightened him and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII - inspired the dreams that Fellini started recording in notebooks in the 1960s. Life and dreams were raw material for his films. His native Rimini and characters like Saraghina (the devil herself said the priests who ran his school) - and the Gambettola farmhouse of his paternal grandmother would be remembered in several films. His traveling salesman father Urbano Fellini showed up in La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963). His mother Ida Barbiani was from Rome and accompanied him there in 1939. He enrolled in the University of Rome. Intrigued by the image of reporters in American films, he tried out the real life role of journalist and caught the attention of several editors with his caricatures and cartoons and then started submitting articles. Several articles were recycled into a radio series about newlyweds "Cico and Pallina". Pallina was played by acting student Giulietta Masina, who became his real life wife from October 30, 1943, until his death half a century later. The young Fellini loved vaudeville and was befriended in 1940 by leading comedian Aldo Fabrizi. Roberto Rossellini wanted Fabrizi to play Don Pietro in Rome, Open City (1945) and made the contact through Fellini. Fellini worked on that film's script and is on the credits for Rosselini's Paisan (1946). On that film he wandered into the editing room, started observing how Italian films were made (a lot like the old silent films with an emphasis on visual effects, dialogue dubbed in later). Fellini in his mid-20s had found his life's work.Il bidone (1955)- Fellini - Satyricon (1969)
- Writer
- Director
- Additional Crew
Luigi Magni was born on 21 March 1928 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Nemici d'infanzia (1995), In the Name of the Pope King (1977) and Nell'anno del Signore (1969). He was married to Lucia Mirisola. He died on 27 October 2013 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Scipione detto anche l'africano (1971)- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Yannick Bellon was born on 6 April 1924 in Biarritz, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France. She was a director and writer, known for La femme de Jean (1974), Somewhere, Someone (1972) and The Cheat (1984). She was married to Henri Magnan. She died on 2 June 2019 in Paris, France.L'amour violé (1978)- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Born in 1930 in Genoa. Still a young student in 1950 when director Carlo Lizzani gave him a role in the film Achtung Banditi!. Following this experience he traveled to Rome where, after acting in film and theater, he became the assistant director to Lizzani, Gillo Pontecorvo, Sergio Leone, Francesco Rosi. In 1960 he made his debut as a Director with Pigeon Shoot, a film about the Partisan Resistance, on competition at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. In 1964 he directed La Moglie Svedese, an episode of the film Extramarital. His second movie, The Reckless, won the special prize of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 1965; it's about a social climber in Italy during the time of the economic miracle. That year he also directed the second unit of Pontecorvo's masterpiece The Battle Of Algiers.
After having filmed for Paramount the heist movie Grand Slam (1967) and the gangster film Machine Gun McCain (1969) in the US, Montaldo returned to Italy to direct The Fifth Day of Peace (1970), Sacco and Vanzetti (in competition at Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Actor 1971) and Giordano Bruno (1973). These films received great recognition and were widely appreciated at various film festivals around the world. The theme of the Resistance underlined And Agnes Chose to Die (1977).
In 1980 the director engaged in the production of a television series about the exploration of Marco Polo, an international co-production with RAI, BBC and NBC. It was filmed in Italy, the Middle East, Tibet, Mongolia and China. It was shown in 76 nations, and won 4 Emmy Awards. Other awards worldwide for cinematography, production design and costumes were received. Montaldo's experience with China reveals a turning point in his work.
Other films he directed are Closed Circuit (in competition at the Berlinale in 1978 and in permanent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art), A Dangerous Toy (1979), The Gold Rimmed Glasses (1987), Control (1987), and Time to Kill (1989).
Always worked with an international cast. Some of the actors that worked with him are: Burt Lancaster, Rupert Everett, Nicolas Cage, Philippe Noiret, Janet Leigh, Edward G. Robinson, John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Rade Serbedzija, Charlotte Rampling, Ingrid Thulin, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, F. Murray Abraham, Leonard Nimoy.
Some of his usual collaborators have been score composer Ennio Morricone and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
Montaldo is also internationally recognized as a Opera director, directed commercials, documentaries and experimental film technology projects. From 1999 he was president of RAI Cinema, a major film production company, for 5 years in which the movies he produced became box office hits, won awards all over the world and formed a new generation of Italian directors.
In 2001 he was appointed Cavaliere di Gran Croce by the president of Italy, one of the top honors of the Republic.Giordano Bruno (1973)- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee idol of the Italian theatre, and repeated that achievement in Italian movies, mostly light comedies. He turned to directing in 1940, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film The Children Are Watching Us (1943), he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. It was also the first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established. After the box-office disaster of Umberto D. (1952), a relentlessly bleak study of the problems of old age, he returned to directing lighter work, appearing in front of the camera more frequently. Although Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) won him another Oscar, it was generally accepted that his career as one of the great directors was over. However, just before he died he made The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film A Brief Vacation (1973). He died following the removal of a cyst from his lungs.Matrimonio all'italiana (1964)- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Michel Mitrani was born on 14 April 1930 in Varna, Bulgaria. He was a director and writer, known for Black Thursday (1974), Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1985) and La nuit bulgare (1970). He died on 9 November 1996 in Paris, France.Les guichets du Louvre (1974)- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Gianni Franciolini was born on 1 June 1910 in Florence, Tuscany, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Racconti romani (1955), L'ispettore Vargas (1940) and The World Condemns Them (1953). He died on 10 May 1960 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Siamo donne (1953)- Writer
- Producer
- Director
Alfredo Guarini was born on 23 May 1901 in Sestri Ponente, Genoa, Liguria, Italy. He was a writer and producer, known for Senza una donna (1943), La zia di Carlo (1943) and Documento Z-3 (1942). He was married to Isa Miranda. He died on 6 April 1981 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Siamo donne (1953)- Director
- Cinematographer
- Producer
Victor Fleming entered the film business as a stuntman in 1910, mainly doing stunt driving - which came easy to him, as he had been a mechanic and professional race-car driver. He became interested in working on the other side of the camera, and eventually got a job as a cameraman on many of the films of Douglas Fairbanks. He soon began directing, and his first big hit was The Virginian (1929). It was the movie that turned Gary Cooper into a star (a fact Cooper never forgot; he and Fleming remained friends for life). Fleming's star continued to rise during the '30s, and he was responsible for many of the films that would eventually be considered classics, such as Red Dust (1932), Bombshell (1933), Treasure Island (1934), and the two films that were the high marks of his career: Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ironically Fleming was brought in on both pictures to replace other directors and smooth out the troubled productions, a feat he accomplished masterfully. His career took somewhat of a downturn in the '40s, and most of his films, with the exception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), weren't particularly successful. He ended his career with the troubled production Joan of Arc (1948), which turned out to be a major critical and financial failure.The Virginian (1929)- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Jean-Pierre Dougnac was born on 27 May 1933 in Paris, France. He was an actor and writer, known for Un amour interdit (1984), Le bâtard (1983) and Stella (1983). He died on 27 September 2006 in Ferolles-Attilly, Seine-et-Marne, France.Un amour interdit (1984)- Director
- Editor
- Writer
Maurizio Lucidi was born in 1932 in Florence, Tuscany, Italy. He was a director and editor, known for Street People (1976), The Designated Victim (1971) and Probabilità zero (1969). He died in 2005 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.L'ultima chance (1973)- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Anthony Mann was born on 30 June 1906 in San Diego, California, USA. He was a director and writer, known for El Cid (1961), Men in War (1957) and The Glenn Miller Story (1954). He was married to Anna, Sara Montiel and Mildred Mann. He died on 29 April 1967 in London, England.The Great Flamarion (1945)- Actor
- Writer
- Director
One of Italy's most captivating and talented cinematic comedy stars, Italian veteran Alberto Sordi was known for satirizing his country's social mores in pungent black comedies, farcical tales and grim drama. He, along with peers Vittorio Gassman, Ugo Tognazzi and Nino Manfredi, arguably represent the finest of post-war Italian cinema history. Born in Rome on June 15, 1920 in the Trastevere district, Sordi grew up in a musical family, his father being a tuba player for the Rome Opera House. A choir boy at the Sistine Chapel, he later trained for the theater in Milan but returned to Rome to work in radio and musical halls in comedy shows. In the late 30s he found his way into film as an extra. His first important role was in The Three Pilots (1942), a fascist war picture, but he wouldn't hit international stardom until a decade later when he starred in Federico Fellini's early films The White Sheik (1952) and I Vitelloni (1953). The titles of some of his most prolific characters were as simple as their titles: The Seducer, The Bachelor, The Husband, The Widower, The Traffic Cop, and The Moralist. Most of his protagonists amusingly, but not always pleasantly, stereotyped the worst attributes of Italian men and society, yet many of his films are unparalleled in quality and considered masterpieces. Sordi went on to star, direct and co-write more than 150 films. Never married and rather an introvert, he enjoyed a quiet, reclusive personal life. On his 80th birthday, he was made Mayor of Rome for the day. In 2002, after 190 films, he announced his retirement, and died of a heart attack the following year at age 82.Il comune senso del pudore (1976)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Alan Gibson was born on 28 April 1938 in London, Ontario, Canada. He was a director and producer, known for The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), Journey to the Unknown (1968) and 1990 (1977). He died on 5 July 1987 in London, England, UK.Dracula A.D. 72 (1972)- Director
- Actor
- Producer
Lamont Johnson was born on 30 September 1922 in Stockton, California, USA. He was a director and actor, known for Wallenberg: A Hero's Story (1985), Lipstick (1976) and Lincoln (1988). He was married to Tony Johnson. He died on 24 October 2010 in Monterey, California, USA.You'll Like My Mother (1972)- Director
- Actor
- Producer
Joseph Pevney was born on 15 September 1911 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and actor, known for Star Trek (1966), Tammy and the Bachelor (1957) and Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). He was married to Margo Yvette Collins, Philippa Hilber and Mitzi Green. He died on 18 May 2008 in Palm Desert, California, USA.Back to God's Country (1953)- The Midnight Story (1957)
- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Theodore J. Flicker was born on 6 June 1930 in Freehold Borough, New Jersey, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The President's Analyst (1967), Up in the Cellar (1970) and Spinout (1966). He was married to Barbara Flicker. He died on 12 September 2014 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.Soggy Bottom, U.S.A. (1961)- Director
- Producer
Lee Auerbach is known for The Jupiter Menace (1982).The Jupiter Menace (1982)- Writer
- Producer
- Director
Peter Matulavich is known for Harry Comes Home (1991), In Search of... (1977) and The Jupiter Menace (1982).The Jupiter Menace (1982)- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Gabriel Axel was born on 18 April 1918 in Århus, Denmark. He was a director and actor, known for Babette's Feast (1987), The Red Mantle (1967) and Christian (1989). He was married to Lucie Axel Moerch. He died on 9 February 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark.La ronde de nuit (1978)- Director
- Cinematographer
- Editor
Jan Troell was born on 23 July 1931 in Limhamn, Malmö, Skåne län, Sweden. He is a director and cinematographer, known for Here Is Your Life (1966), The Emigrants (1971) and Il capitano (1991). He is married to Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell. They have one child.Zandy's Bride (1974)- Producer
- Director
- Actor
Martin Charles Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 in Queens, New York City, to Catherine Scorsese (née Cappa) and Charles Scorsese, who both worked in Manhattan's garment district, and whose families both came from Palermo, Sicily. He was raised in the neighborhood of Little Italy, which later provided the inspiration for several of his films. Scorsese earned a B.S. degree in film communications in 1964, followed by an M.A. in the same field in 1966 at New York University's School of Film. During this time, he made numerous prize-winning short films including The Big Shave (1967), and directed his first feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967).
He served as assistant director and an editor of the documentary Woodstock (1970) and won critical and popular acclaim for Mean Streets (1973), which first paired him with actor and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro. In 1976, Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), also starring De Niro, was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and he followed that film with New York, New York (1977) and The Last Waltz (1978). Scorsese directed De Niro to an Oscar-winning performance as boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), which received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and is hailed as one of the masterpieces of modern cinema. Scorsese went on to direct The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995) and Kundun (1997), among other films. Commissioned by the British Film Institute to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema, Scorsese completed the four-hour documentary, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), co-directed by Michael Henry Wilson.
His long-cherished project, Gangs of New York (2002), earned numerous critical honors, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Director; the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004) won five Academy Awards, in addition to the Golden Globe and BAFTA awards for Best Picture. Scorsese won his first Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), which was also honored with the Director's Guild of America, Golden Globe, New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and Critic's Choice awards for Best Director, in addition to four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Scorsese's documentary of the Rolling Stones in concert, Shine a Light (2008), followed, with the successful thriller Shutter Island (2010) two years later. Scorsese received his seventh Academy Award nomination for Best Director, as well as a Golden Globe Award, for Hugo (2011), which went on to win five Academy Awards.
Scorsese also serves as executive producer on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010) for which he directed the pilot episode. Scorsese's additional awards and honors include the Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival (1995), the AFI Life Achievement Award (1997), the Honoree at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 25th Gala Tribute (1998), the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), The Kennedy Center Honors (2007) and the HFPA Cecil B. DeMille Award (2010). Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio have worked together on five separate occasions: Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).Mean Streets (1973)- Cinematographer
- Director
- Producer
A British filmmaker who, over the years, worked as assistant director, cinematographer, producer, writer and ultimately director, Ronald Neame was born on April 23, 1911. His father, Elwin Neame, was a film director and his mother, Ivy Close, was a film star. During the 1920s, he started working at famous Elstree Studios. One of his first jobs was assistant cameraman for Alfred Hitchcock on Blackmail (1929), the first talking picture made in England.
Neame became a cinematographer during the 1930s. In 1942, he and sound designer C.C. Stevens received a special effect Oscar nomination for One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), a film by the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger team. In 1944, after working together on In Which We Serve (1942), Neame, David Lean and producer Anthony Havelock-Allan formed a production company, Cineguild. The screenplays for its films Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946) received best writing Oscar nominations.
After a fall-out with Lean and the demise of Cineguild in 1947, Neame turned to directing with Take My Life (1947). As a director, he would be quite versatile, touching genres like comedy (The Promoter (1952), Hopscotch (1980)), psychological studies (The Chalk Garden (1964)), musical (Scrooge (1970)), thriller (The Odessa File (1974)) and even disaster movies (The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the one that started the trend, produced by Irwin Allen). Under Neame's guidance, Alec Guinness won the best actor trophee at the 1958 Venice festival for The Horse's Mouth (1958), a comedy based on a book adapted by Guinness himself. Two years later, John Mills received the same award for Tunes of Glory (1960), also directed by Neame. In 1969, Maggie Smith got her first Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) under Neame's direction, and in 1970, Albert Finney got his first Golden Globe for his role in Neame's "Scrooge".
In 1996, Neane was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition for his contributions to the film industry. In 2003, he published his autobiography, "Straight from the Horse's Mouth". Keeping up the family tradition, his son Christopher Neame is a movie producer and his grandson, Gareth Neame, works for the BBC. Ronald Neame died at age 99 of complications from a fall on June 16, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.Gambit (1966)- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Luigi Comencini was born on 8 June 1916 in Salò, Lombardy, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Voltati Eugenio (1980), Everybody Go Home! (1960) and Bread, Love and Dreams (1953). He was married to Giulia Grifeo. He died on 6 April 2007 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Italian Secret Service (1968)- Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze di Giacomo Casanova, veneziano (1969)
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Writer
Giovanni Fago was born on 25 April 1933 in Rome, Italy. He is a director and assistant director, known for Fatevi vivi, la polizia non interverrà (1974), Mai con le donne (1985) and Sulla spiaggia e di là dal molo (2000).La freccia nel fianco (1983)- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Wilhelm Dieterle was the youngest of nine children of parents Jacob and Berthe Dieterle. They lived in poverty, and when he was old enough to work, young Wilhelm earned money as a carpenter and a scrap dealer. He dreamed of better things, though, and theater caught his eye as a teen. By the age of 16 he had joined a traveling theater company. He was ambitious and handsome, both of which opened the door to leading romantic roles in theater productions. Though he had acted in his first film in 1913, it was six more years before he made another one. In that year he was noticed by producer/director/designer/impresario Max Reinhardt, the most influential proponent of expressionism in theater; while in Berlin, Reinhardt hired him as an actor for his productions. Dieterle resumed German film acting in 1920, becoming a popular and successful romantic lead and featured character actor in the mix of German expressionist/Gothic and nature/romanticism genres that imbued much of German cinema in the silent era. He was interested in directing even more than acting, however, and he had the iconic Reinhardt to provide inspiration. Dieterle had acted in nearly 20 movies before he also began directing in 1923, his first female lead being a young Marlene Dietrich.
With his wife Charlotte Hagenbruch he started his own film production . He was said to have tired of acting; he appeared in nearly 50 films over the course of his career, mainly in the 1920s, and in several of his films he also functioned as director. As an actor he worked with some of the greatest names in German film, such as directors Paul Leni (in Waxworks (1924) [Waxworks]) and F.W. Murnau (in Faust (1926)) and actors Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings. By 1930, however, he had emigrated to the US--now rechristened as William Dieterle--with an offer from Warner Brothers to direct their German-language versions of the studio's popular hits for the German market. In that capacity he made Those Who Dance (1930), The Way of All Men (1930) and Die heilige Flamme (1931) (aka "The Holy Flames"). He even stood before the camera for another of these, Dämon des Meeres (1931) (aka "Demon of the Sea", a version of "Moby Dick") in 1931, in which he played Capt. Ahab. The film was directed by another European who was soon to become one of Warners' most successful directors: the Hungarian Michael Curtiz.
Having taken to the Hollywood brand of filmmaking with ease--helped by his own brilliance in defining and executing the telling of a story--into 1931, he was soon promoted to directing some of Warners' "regular" films (his first, The Last Flight (1931), is now regarded as a masterwork) and he wold average directing six pictures a year for the studio through 1934. In that year Reinhardt came to the US, the Nazi threat finally having driven him off the Continent. He arrived with a flourish, ready to stage William Shakespeare's "A Midsummers Night's Dream"--an extravaganza at the Hollywood Bowl that would become legend. It was impressive enough to interest the execs of Warner Bros. They opted for a film version in 1935 with the great Reinhardt--even studio boss Jack L. Warner knew who he was--reunited with his disciple, Dieterle, as co-director. Reinhardt knew nothing about Hollywood and had to learn via Dieterle's diplomacy the differences between the overemphasis of stage and the subtlety of the camera. He learned from other directors as well about the realities of making films, in particular ratchet down the tendency that stage directors had to let their actors perform "too" much. It was all for naught, however, as the film was a major box-office flop, but it was one of the great moments in the evolution of film. Dieterle would direct Paul Muni for Warners in three first-rate bio movies: The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Juarez (1939) and all received Oscar nominations. After that Dieterle moved on to do The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) at RKO with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. This was one of Dieterle's best efforts, both in its romantic style and the great dark scenes of the Parisian medieval underworld with dramatic minimal lighting that gave vent to his expressionist roots.
Through the 1940s Dieterle moved around among Hollywood's studios, turning out vigorously wrought pictures, such as his two 1940 bios with Edward G. Robinson at Warner's. He became associated with independent producer David O. Selznick and actor Joseph Cotten, first with his direction of I'll Be Seeing You (1944). His romantic fires as a director had been restoked, as it were, and kept burning in the subsequent series of films with them which included the wonderful acting talents of Selznick's soon-to-be-wife (1949), Jennifer Jones: Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946)--for which he shared directing but not credit with King Vidor--and the ethereal Portrait of Jennie (1948). "Jennie" was one of Dieterle's masterpieces, bringing into play a fusion of all his artistic fonts. The romantic fantasy with edges of darkness from the novel by Robert Nathan was just the vehicle to challenge Dieterle. His use of light and dark and gauzed--at one point the textured field of a painting canvas--backdrops conveyed the dreamlike state and netherworld atmosphere of the story of lovers from different times. Certainly the film influenced others to follow with similar themes.
Through the 1950s Dieterle's work--two more with Joseph Cotten--though sturdily in the director's hands, came off like good Hollywood fare, but were inspired more by the films' tight shooting schedules than by any artistic pretensions. His output during that decade was small, and that was partly due to bane of McCarthyism. He was never blacklisted as such, but his film Blockade (1938) was too libertarian to keep him completely away from the shadow of suspicion as a "socialist" / "communist" sympathizer. In 1958 he returned to Germany and directed a few films there and in Italy before retiring in 1965.
Though regrettably not as well known as his German and European directorial compatriots in Hollywood, he had great artistic style and worked with much energy in providing some of Hollywood's and the world's crown jewels of cinematic art.Blockade (1938)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
André Hunebelle (b. 1896) was an odd-job man ,always seeing which way the wind would blow when he made his movies;hence his eclecticism ,so to speak:comedies,swashbucklers (genre in which his gave his most pleasant works ),spy thrillers ,spoofs ....
His comedies (his dominant genre in the fifties) were mostly "Théatre De Boulevard " ,many of them ponderous and heavy-handed,occasionally funny when the original material was not bad ('"Treize A table" " L'Impossible Monsieur Pipelet").
He had begun the swashbuckler in 1953 ("Les Trois Mousquetaires") but he is mostly remembered for the late fifties/ early sixties trilogy ,"Le Bossu " "Le Capitan" and "Le Miracle Des Loups " ,all remakes of silent movies,but the color and the presence of Jean Marais as the sword hero in all of them made these works entertaining even today.On the other hand, his remake of Eugene Sue's "Les Mysteres De Paris" was looked upon as a failure.
In the wake of James Bond, he tackled the spy thriller with his four OSS 117 episodes .Of course they did not compare favorably with the Salzmann/Broccoli productions ;the best of the lot was certainly the third one "Furia A Bahia Pour OSS 117" (1965).
Like Eugène Sue 's "Mysteres De Paris" , Souvestre-Allain 's "Fantomas" saga was given a totally false rendering;the screenwriters turned horror bloody thrillers into farces ;however ,the last one "Fantômas Contre Scotland Yard" was unusually inventive and owed a lot to De Funès's comic skills.
His final works were spoofs on "Les Trois Mousquetaires " featuring the abominable Charlots,but the first part was not bad.His swansong "Ca Fait Tilt" (1977) got unanimous thumbs down and Hunebelle called it a day .He died in 1985.Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117 (1965)- Director
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Kurt Neumann was born on 5 April 1908 in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Rocketship X-M (1950), The Fly (1958) and She Devil (1957). He was married to Irma Ely Neumann. He died on 21 August 1958 in Hollywood, California, USA.Son of Ali Baba (1952)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Paul Annett was born on 19 February 1937 in London, England, UK. He was a director and producer, known for Emmerdale Farm (1972), Partners in Crime (1983) and Dead of Night (1972). He was married to Margo Andrew. He died on 11 December 2017.Never Never Land (1980)- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Jean-Charles Tacchella was born on 23 September 1925 in Cherbourg, Manche, Haute-Normandie, France. He is a writer and director, known for Cousin, Cousine (1975), Silver Anniversary (1979) and Travelling avant (1987). He has been married to Ginette Tacchella since 27 December 1969.Croque la vie (1981)- Actress
- Director
- Writer
Margarethe von Trotta was born in Berlin in 1942. In the 1960s she moved to Paris where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films. She also pursued an acclaimed acting career, starring in films by well known German directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlöndorff. In 1971, von Trotta divorced her first husband Juergen Moeller (with whom she had a child) and married Schlöndorff. She co-wrote many of the scripts for his films, and in 1975 the two of them co-directed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). In 1977, von Trotta directed her first solo feature The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978). With her third film, Marianne & Juliane (1981), von Trotta's position as New German Cinema's most prominent and successful female filmmaker was fully secured.
Her films feature strong female protagonists, and are usually set against an important political background. Themes in her work include the effect of the political on the personal, and vice versa, as well as the relationships between female characters, often sisters.Heller Wahn (1983)- Director
- Art Department
- Producer
Oscar Dufau was born on 23 January 1922 in El Paso, Texas, USA. He was a director and producer, known for The Smurfs (1981), The Jetsons (1962) and Super President (1967). He died on 8 February 1994.Shirt Tales (1982)- Director
- Art Department
- Animation Department
George Gordon was born on 2 September 1906. He was a director, known for The Smurfs (1981), Super Friends (1973) and The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show (1983). He died on 24 May 1986 in Apple Valley, California, USA.Shirt Tales (1982)- Director
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Coming from a show business family (his parents were stage actors), Rowland V. Lee began his career as a child actor in stock and on Broadway. He interrupted his stage career for a stint as a Wall Street stockbroker, but gave that up after two years and returned to the stage. Lee was hired by Thomas H. Ince as an actor in 1915, and after service in World War I returned to Ince, but this time as a director. Lee didn't specialize in any particular genre in the many films he directed, but several of his lower-budget horror films were especially effective in their grim, gritty atmosphere, and his last film, Captain Kidd (1945) with Charles Laughton, had the potential to be a first-rate adventure yarn, but was hampered by its low budget.The Count of Monte Cristo (1934)- Actor
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Coming from a Mormon family in Utah, James Cruze was reportedly part Ute Indian. He worked as a fisherman to pay his way through drama school. Among his former wives were actresses Betty Compson (also from Utah) and Marguerite Snow. He was also married to Alberta McCoy (died on July 7, 1960), who is interred in the Columbarium at Hollywood Forever Cemetery (unmarked). Many of the films Cruze directed in the 1920s and 1930s have been lost. He directed a large variety of films, from Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle slapstick two-reelers to suspense thrillers to big-budget epics. In 1929 he appeared before a grand jury in Los Angeles that was investigating an accident on one of his films in which one man was killed and others were injured, one of many run-ins Cruze had with the law. He used the name Cruze on screen, but in real life remained James Bosen.The Great Gabbo (1929)- Writer
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His father was a shipowner. After school, Rosi initially began studying law, which he soon dropped out to work as a broadcast journalist and book illustrator in Naples. From 1944 to 1945 he worked for "Radio Napoli". In the immediate post-war years, Rosi moved to Rome, where he came into contact with the film world. He initially acted as an assistant to several directors and thus played a key role in the development of Italian "Neorealismo". From 1947 to 1948, Rosi assisted Luchino Visconti in the filming of the masterpiece of neorealism "La terra trema". In addition to working on other Visconti films, he also studied with Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1957 Rosi celebrated his directorial debut with "La sfida".
The success led to a long series of films in the following decades, some of which courageously dealt with unpleasant and critical topics in Italian post-war society. Rosi's films such as "Le mani sulla città" (1963), "Cadaveri eccellenti" (1976) and "Cristo si è fermato a Eboli" (1979) are dedicated to the ruthless analysis of events in contemporary Italian history and the present. The director bluntly denounces the grievances resulting from war, crime and corruption as social processes that are tolerated, accepted or even intended by political power. With the film adaptation of the opera "Carmen" (1984) and the novel by Gabriel García Márquez "Cronaca di una morte annunciata" (1987), Rosi approached emotional productions, abandoning his previous materialistic analysis.
However, both films remain connected to the basic theme of Rosi's work, the Italian South, which the director deepened again through the pessimistic study of the global character of the Italian-American mafia in "Dimenticare Palermo" (1989). Rosi received numerous awards for his work. His directorial debut won an award in Venice in 1958. In 1962 he was awarded the Berlin Silver Bear for the film about "Salvatore Giuliano". In 2000 he received the "Grand Prix des Amériques" in Montreal for his life's work.
Francesco Rosi is married to Giancarla Rosi Mandelli and lives in Rome.I magliari (1959)- Director
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Luigi Perelli was born on 26 October 1937 in La Spezia, Italy. He is a director and writer, known for La piovra (1984), Roma dodici novembre 1994 (1995) and Amore grande, amore libero (1976).Dramma d'amore (1983)- Director
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- Actor
John Berry was born on 6 September 1917 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Ça va barder (1955), 'Round Midnight (1986) and A Captive in the Land (1990). He was married to Myriam Boyer and Gladys Berry. He died on 29 November 1999 in Paris, France.Tamango (1958)- Director
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- Producer
Alain Tanner was born on 6 December 1929 in Geneva, Switzerland. He was a director and writer, known for Charles, Dead or Alive (1969), In the White City (1983) and Return from Africa (1973). He was married to Janine Giudici. He died on 11 September 2022 in Geneva, Canton de Genève, Switzerland.Le milieu du monde (1974)- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Bert Convy was born on 23 July 1933 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He was an actor and producer, known for The Cannonball Run (1981), Hero at Large (1980) and Weekend Warriors (1986). He was married to Catherine Hall and Anne Anderson. He died on 15 July 1991 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Weekend Warriors (1986)- Cinematographer
- Special Effects
- Director
Italian director Mario Bava was born on July 31, 1914 in the coastal northern Italian town of Sanremo. His father, Eugenio Bava (1886-1966), was a cinematographer in the early days of the Italian film industry. Bava was trained as a painter, and when he eventually followed his father into film photography his artistic background led him to a strong belief in the importance of visual composition in filmmaking.
Other than a series of short films in the 1940s which he directed, Bava was a cinematographer until 1960. He developed a reputation as a special effects genius, and was able to use optical trickery to great success. Among the directors for whom Bava photographed films were Paolo Heusch, Riccardo Freda, Jacques Tourneur and Raoul Walsh. While working with Freda on Lust of the Vampire (1957) in 1956, the director left the project after an argument with the producers and the film mostly unfinished. Bava stepped in and directed the majority of the movie, finishing it on schedule. This film, also known as "The Devil's Commandment", inspired a wave of gothic Italian horror films. After a similar incident occurred on Freda's Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959), and Bava's having been credited with "saving" Tourneur's The Giant of Marathon (1959), Galatea urged Bava to direct any film he wanted with their financing.
The film that emerged, Black Sunday (1960), is one his most well known as well as one of his best. This widely influential movie also started the horror career of a beautiful but then unknown British actress named Barbara Steele. While Black Sunday is a black and white film, it was in the color milieu that the director excelled. The projects which followed began to develop stunning photography, making great use of lighting, set design, and camera positioning to compliment mise-en-scenes bathed in deep primaries. Through works such as Hercules in the Haunted World (1961), The Whip and the Body (1963), and Planet of the Vampires (1965), Bava's films took on the look of works of art. In the films The Evil Eye (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964), he created the style and substance of the giallo, a genre which would be perfected in the later films of Dario Argento.
Bava worked in many popular genres, including viking films, peplum, spaghetti westerns, action, and even softcore, but it is his horror films and giallo mystery films which stand out and for which he is best remembered. Recommended are Black Sunday (1960), The Whip and the Body (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966), A Bay of Blood (1971), and Lisa and the Devil (1973). Bava's son Lamberto served as his assistant on most of his films since 1965, and since 1980 has been a director himself. Lamberto Bava's films include Macabre (1980), Demons (1985) and Body Puzzle (1992).
But after the commercial failure of his later films, as well as the unreleased works of Rabid Dogs (1974), Bava went into a decline and by 1975, retired from filmmaking all together. He was persuaded to come out of retirement at the request of his son, Lamberto, to direct Shock, as well as a made-for-Italian television movie. Mario Bava died from a sudden heart attack on April 27, 1980 at age 65. With his death, an era in Italian filmmaking had come to a close.Gli invasori (1961)- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Richard Pottier, born in 1906 in Budapest, began his career as Sternberg's assistant. His debut as a director coincided with the coming of the talkies. He broached many genres along his long career: plenty of comedies ("Si J'Etais Le Patron" ), adventures ("Les Secrets De La Mer rouge"), sci -fi ("Le Monde Tremblera", with its machine which could predict the date of your death), detective films ("Picpus" ) musicals ("Violettes Imperiales"), melodramas ("Defense D'Aimer" ), you name it. He was a solid craftsman and certainly did not deserve the critics' contempt. Without him, "Some like it hot" would never have happened for Billy Wilder used the German remake of "fanfare D'Amour" as a model. He was the first to talk about euthanasia in "Meurtres" (1950) at a time when the subject was thoroughly taboo; his buoyant "Caroline Chérie" predated the "Angélique Marquise Des Anges" saga by ten years. His rural thriller "La Ferme Aux Loups" renewed the story of twins. His career neatly declined after 1950,and his last works were cheap sword and sandals flicks such as "David Et Goliath" (starring Orson Welles) and "L'Enlèvement Des Sabines" (starring Roger Moore). He retired in the mid-sixties. He was to live thirty more years.(d.1994)La bella Otero (1954)- Director
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Tony Flaadt is known for L'or noir de Lornac (1987), Opération O.P.E.N. (1984) and Arsène Lupin (1971).Le avventure di Cappuccetto a pois (1969)- Writer
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
André Cayatte (b.1909 in Carcassonne, Aude, France) was a lawyer turned novelist and journalist, then screenwriter in 1938, after which he became a film director in 1942. He was known in France from the 1940s to the 1970s for uncompromising films examining the complex ethical and political dimensions of crime and justice in the French judicial system. He saw film as a stimulus for reform, advocating social concerns, and in this way was much a seminal forerunner to Costa-Gavras. Cayatte wrote or co-wrote the scripts for all of his films (his collaborators often including Charles Spaak). He was largely considered the 'Sidney Lumet of France'. Highlights of his career: "The Lovers of Verona" (1949), with dialogue by poet Jacques Prévert, is considered by many to be Cayatte's towering achievement, a first international success, a story loosely based on William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet". His film "Justice is Done" (1950) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was one of the first films to deal with the moral acceptability of euthanasia. "We Are All Murderers" was one of the first strong indictments against the death penalty; it focused on a bleak vision of prisoners who were waiting to be executed and received a special award at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival. "Piège Pour Cendrillon" (1965) (remade in the UK as "The Cinderella Trap") was a tense thriller based on a Sebastien Japrisot novel. In 1967 "Les Risques Du Métier" starring famed Belgian singer Jacques Brel dealt with the tragedy of a school teacher,accused of abusing his pupils. "Mourir D'Aimer" (1971) was based on the real life Gabrielle Russier affair and in an highly emotional manner depicted the forbidden love of a teacher for one of her students. The film would introduce actress Annie Girardot, who was to become a French star and his favorite actress. "Il N'y A Pas De Fumée Sans Feu" and "La Raison D'Etat" were both political thrillers. "A Chacun Son Enfer" was in particular a highly disturbing and provocative criminal thriller, focusing on the unbearable suffering of the mother (Annie Girardot) of a kidnapped daughter, and is considered Cayatte 's most terrifying work. "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1958) was one of the forerunners of movies dealing with the consequences of plastic surgery, namely the emotional and psychological repercussions on the relationship between a husband and a wife. The film, starring Michelle Morgan, was later remade by Barbara Streisand as "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1996). Cayatte published six novels before entering the film industry. The opus of his French work, in particular his socially conscious films, can be summed up as a sincere moral plea for a more humane form of justice in the face of rigid and difficult systems of laws and regulations. He exclusively worked for TV in the eighties; he died in 1989 in Paris, France, age 80.Au bonheur des dames (1943)- Director
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Gilles Grangier was born on 5 May 1911 in Paris, France. He was a director and writer, known for Archimède, le clochard (1959), Train d'enfer (1965) and The Night Affair (1958). He was married to Lucie Bourdillon. He died on 27 April 1996 in Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France.La cuisine au beurre (1963)- Director
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- Composer
Lazare Iglesis was born on 21 March 1920 in Cahors, Lot, France. He was a director and writer, known for L'Alphoméga (1973), Les mercredis de la vie (1992) and Une enquête de l'inspecteur ... (1954). He was married to Madeleine Monnier and Nadine Fosse. He died on 27 July 2012 in Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, France.Les dames à la licorne (1982)- Actor
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- Director
Gérard Oury was born on 29 April 1919 in Paris, France. He was an actor and writer, known for The Sucker (1965), The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973) and Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! (1966). He was married to Jacqueline Roman. He died on 19 July 2006 in Saint-Tropez, Var, France.Le corniaud (1963)- Director
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- Additional Crew
Born in Shanghai and Cambridge-educated, Terence Young began in the industry as a scriptwriter. In the 1940s he worked on a variety of subjects, including the hugely popular wartime romance Suicide Squadron (1941), set to Richard Addinsell's rousing "Warsaw Concerto". His original story was devised while listening to a concert in an army training camp. As it turned out, Young was soon after involved in the war himself, as a member of the Guards.
By the end of the decade Young had graduated to directing. He made his debut with the psychological melodrama Corridor of Mirrors (1948), starring Eric Portman as a reclusive art collector obsessed with reincarnation and murder. During the following decade Young helmed a number of international co-productions, which featured imported stars from Hollywood (Alan Ladd in Paratrooper (1953); Olivia de Havilland in That Lady (1955); Victor Mature in Safari (1956), Zarak (1956) and Tank Force (1958)). These films were made by Warwick, an independent production company created jointly by Irwin Allen and future James Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli, and released through Columbia. Production values were often quite high, though scripts were of variable quality. "Safari", for instance, looked great, shot in Technicolor and CinemaScope on location in Africa, which partly compensated for the trite storyline.
Having acquired the rights to all available James Bond novels from Ian Fleming, producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli secured the necessary funding ($1,250,000) from United Artists and hired Young to direct the initial Bond entry, Dr. No (1962). That film's success got him re-hired to direct two subsequent Bond films, From Russia with Love (1963) (Young's own personal favorite) and Thunderball (1965). Young had acquired a solid reputation as a master of action subjects, and all three films move at a cracking pace. Exotic locales provide the background for a seamless mix of technical wizardry, sex, violence and tongue-in-cheek (sometimes campy) dialogue. Unfortunately, these films also marked the high point of Young's career, though he did direct another eerily effective psychological thriller, Wait Until Dark (1967), much in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock.
Among a brace of forgettable European co-productions, only two other films stand out: the bawdy, highly entertaining all-star period comedy The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965) and an intriguing expose of the inner workings--and dark beginnings--of the Cosa Nostra (based on an actual informant's testimony), entitled The Valachi Papers (1972). After that, Young's output became more patchy and his later career suffered as a result of two disastrous projects: first, the Korean War epic Inchon (1981), with Laurence Olivier badly miscast as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The enterprise was reputedly financed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's organization--aka the "Moonies"--to the tune of $40 million. Film critic Vincent Canby in the New York Times (September 17, 1982) referred to the picture as "hysterical" and "foolish", "the most expensive B-movie ever made". The second flop, a financially troubled production, was the predictably plotted spy thriller The Jigsaw Man (1983). Completed in 1982, the film was held back and not released until two years later. Young directed just one more film after that and left the industry in 1988. However, according to his daughter, he was working on a documentary in Cannes at the time of his death in September 1994. Though he went on record in 1966, asserting that he had grown rather tired of the Bond franchise, it is, nonetheless, that for which we will ultimately remember him.Dr. No (1962)- Triple Cross (1966)
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Although his name is often linked to that of the "movie brat" generation (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different than theirs. His strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was 18. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries--Robert Bresson, Yasujirô Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, "Transcendental Style in Film") rather than Saturday-morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackpot when he and his brother, Leonard Schrader (a Japanese expert), were paid the then-record sum of $325,000, thus establishing his reputation as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters, which was consolidated when Martin Scorsese filmed Schrader's script Taxi Driver (1976), written in the early 1970s during a bout of drinking and depression. The success of the film allowed Schrader to start directing his own films, which have been notable for their willingness to take stylistic and thematic risks while still working squarely within the Hollywood system. The most original of his films (which he and many others regard as his best) was the Japanese co-production Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).American Gigolo (1980)- Director
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Peter Tewksbury was born on 21 March 1923 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Father Knows Best (1954), It's a Man's World (1962) and My Three Sons (1960). He was married to Ann Schuyler and Kathleen Jean Willoughby. He died on 20 February 2003 in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA.The Trouble with Girls (1969)- Writer
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- Additional Crew
James L. Brooks was born on 9 May 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Broadcast News (1987), As Good as It Gets (1997) and Terms of Endearment (1983). He was previously married to Holly Holmberg Brooks and Marianne Catherine Morrissey.Terms of Endearment (1983)- Director
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- Music Department
Born Lester Anthony Minnelli in Chicago on February 28 1903, his father Vincent was a musical conductor of the Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater. Wanting to pursue an artistic career, Minelli worked in the costume department of the Chicago Theater, then on Broadway during the depression as a set designer and costumer, adopting a Latinized version of his father's first name when he was hired as an art-director by Radio City Music Hall. The fall of 1935 saw his directorial debut for a Franz Schubert revue, At Home Abroad. The show was the first of three, in the best Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. spirit, before receiving Arthur Freed's offer to work at MGM. This was his second try at Hollywood -- a short unsuccessful contract at Paramount led nowhere. He stayed at MGM for the next 26 years. After working on numerous Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vehicles, usually directed by Busby Berkeley, Arthur Freed gave him his first directorial assignment on Cabin in the Sky (1943), a risky screen project with an all-black cast. This was followed by the ambitious period piece Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) whose star Judy Garland he married in 1945. Employing first-class MGM technicians, Minnelli went on directing musicals -- The Band Wagon (1953) - as well as melodramas -- Some Came Running (1958) - and urban comedies like Designing Woman (1957), occasionally even working on two films simultaneously. Minnelli is one of the few directors for whom Technicolor seems to have been invented. Many of his films included in every one of his movies features a dream sequence.Home from the Hill (1960)- Director
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Staffan Julén was born in 1957. He is a director and writer, known for Inughuit - folket vid jordens navel (1985), The Prize of the Pole (2006) and My Heart of Darkness (2010).Inughuit - folket vid jordens navel (1985)- Director
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- Editor
Ylva Julén was born in 1954. She is a director and writer, known for Inughuit - folket vid jordens navel (1985), Livsstråk (1989) and Dvorak - Den fantastiske (1995).Inughuit - folket vid jordens navel (1985)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Michael Firth is known for Off the Edge (1976), The Leading Edge (1987) and Heart of the Stag (1984).Heart of the Stag (1984)- Director
- Editor
- Writer
Marc Huraux was born in 1954 in Paris, France. He is a director and editor, known for Check the Changes (1990), Bird Now (1988) and Ali Farka Touré - Le miel n'est jamais bon dans une seule bouche (2002).Bird Now (1988)- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Giuseppe De Santis was born on 11 February 1917 in Fondi, Lazio, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Tragic Hunt (1947), Giorni d'amore (1954) and Bitter Rice (1949). He was married to Gordana Miletic. He died on 16 May 1997 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Riso amaro (1949)- Director
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Richard firmly established his credentials with such epics as The Vikings (1958) , 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Barabbas (1961) and also proved to be a master of intimate drama with Compulsion (1959) , which won Cannes Festival awards for the male stars. He won an Academy Award for one of his earliest films - a documentary Design for Death (1947) . In 1947 the rapidly rising director met Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman who hired him for their first film together So This Is New York (1948) , One of his most memorable accomplishments 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) which grossed well over $25 million since it's release in 1953.So This Is New York (1948)- The New Centurions (1972)
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Joins Toei Doga as animator in 1981. After doing several TV series, was promoted to assistant director with "Dr. Slump" in 1982. Debuted as film director with "Dragon Ball: Secret of Dragon God" in 1986 (he directed the two first films of the series). From 1989 also directed the TV series and first films of its sequel, "Dragon Ball Z".Dragon Ball: Doragon bôru (1986)- Director
- Additional Crew
After moving to California in the 1930s, Jerry Hopper worked as an editor at Paramount Studios.
During World War II he joined the Army and worked as a combat photographer where he was awarded a Purple Heart.
After the war, Hopper returned to Hollywood where he graduated to directing. After working prolifically in film during the Fifties, Hopper switched to television where he went on to direct over 600 episodes before effectively retiring in the early 1970s.The Missouri Traveler (1958)- Writer
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Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Roslyn, New York. His father was a journalist and encouraged him to write and to type. Michael gave up studying English at Harvard University, having become disillusioned with the teaching standards--the final straw came when he submitted an essay by George Orwell that was given a "B-." After giving up English and spending a year in Europe, Michael returned to Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Havard Medical School to train as a doctor. Several times, he was persuaded not to quit the course but did so after qualifying in 1969.
During his medical-student days, he wrote novels secretly mainly under the pseudonym of John Lange in reference to his almost 6ft 9 height. (Lange in German means long) One novel, "A Case of Need," written under the pseudonym Jeffery Hudson, (Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous 17th century dwarf) contained references to people at Harvard Medical School, but he couldn't hide his identity when the novel won an award that had to be collected in person. After giving up medicine, Michael moved to Hollywood, California, in the early 1970s and began directing movies based on his books, his first big break being Westworld (1973).Runaway (1984)- Director
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Luigi Capuano was born on 13 July 1904 in Naples, Campania, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Suor Maria (1955), Rondini in volo (1949) and Cuore di mamma (1954). He died on 20 October 1979 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.La rossa (1955)- La vendetta di Ursus (1961)
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- Camera and Electrical Department
Arthur Crabtree (1900-1975) was born in Shipley, Yorkshire where he gave up a safe job with a local firm of engineers to become a clapper boy at Elstree Studios. He had always been interested in photography and at the age of 29 he took a calculated risk, which paid off, when sound hit the British studios .From being a lowly clapper boy he rose to become an assistant to a young and up coming director called Alfred Hitchcock learning all he could. Ten years later he moved to Gainsborough Studios where he became a cameraman and then a lighting director working on such films as Kipps (1940) ,The Man in Grey (1943), and Fanny by Gaslight (1944). After that he was noticed by Maurice Ostrer who promoted him to director for Madonna of the Seven Moons' This milestone in British film history had a cast that included Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger and caused great queues at cinemas when it was screened in 1945, Subsequent films by Arthur included Lilli Marlene and Hindle Wakes. His last film was Horrors of the Black Museum in 1959 after which he retiredCaravan (1946)- Writer
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Gian Paolo Callegari was born on 7 March 1909 in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Mystery of the Black Jungle (1954), Gladiator of Rome (1962) and Agente Sigma 3 - Missione Goldwather (1967). He died in 1982.Ponzio Pilato (1962)- Additional Crew
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Irving Rapper was one of the last surviving directors from the "Golden Age of Hollywood," passing away on Dec. 20, 1999, at the age of 101, four weeks shy of his 102nd birthday. Rapper is best remembered for the films he made with Bette Davis, including the classics Now, Voyager (1942) and The Corn Is Green (1945). He also directed the first film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie (1950), and the Rapper-helmed The Brave One (1956) won screenwriter Robert Rich an Oscar (Rich actually was blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, one of The Hollywood Ten, who did not receive his Oscar for almost 20 years). Rapper continued directing well into the 1970s.
Born in London on January 16, 1898, he emigrated to the United States and became an actor and stage director on Broadway while studying at New York University. In the mid-'30s, he journeyed westward to Hollywood, hired as an assistant director and dialog coach at Warner Bros., where he proved invaluable translating--and mediating--for non-native-English-speaking directors; by the early 1940s, he had metamorphosed into the hottest director on the Warner Bros. lot.
Hired as a "dialog director" (a position created by the film studios in the late 1920s with the advent of sound) by Warners in 1935, he practiced that craft until 1941, when he was promoted to director. While the position of dialog director no longer exists, in the first decades of the talkies dialog directors worked with the actors on their line readings and interpretation of individual scenes. The position was particularly critical when the director was a foreigner who didn't understand English very well.
Rapper initially worked with Gernan émigré William Dieterle on The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Juarez (1939). While Dieterle was focused on the technical aspects of filmmaking, such as the lighting of the sets and the camera angles, Rapper concentrated on the actors' performances. He also served as a dialog director for Hungarian émigré Michael Curtiz, for whom he translated (and who, according to Rapper, spoke English more poorly the longer he was in Hollywood) and French-born Anatole Litvak. In that position, Rapper forged strong bonds with certain actors, who came to depend on him.
Bette Davis and Rapper formed a bond that included the free solicitation of advice. He counseled Davis to ask to have William Keighley, who was originally assigned to direct her in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), replaced by Curtiz. Davis was to be in heavy makeup, and Rapper knew that Curtiz, a perfectionist, would be the right man to capture the visuals in the costume drama. Ironically, Rapper did not get to be the dialog director on the film, as he was assigned to a troubled picture helmed by Litvak. Without him on the set of "Elizabeth and Essex" to run interference, Davis and Curtiz--both strong-willed perfectionists---fought furiously.
Rapper resisted being assigned as a director of "B" films because he knew that once you were assigned to that unit you were stuck there and would never get a chance to graduate to "A" pictures. Rapper bided his time until he was offered a "programmer," Shining Victory (1941), by studio head Jack L. Warner. Shot without stars, the inspirational movie was a modest success and Warners assigned him to another "inspirational" picture, about a minister, One Foot in Heaven (1941). The minister was played by Oscar-winner Fredric March, then widely considered the best American actor since John Barrymore (who had by now turned into a parody of himself). March's talent was matched only by Paul Muni and the Great Profile's brother Lionel Barrymore. March was enthusiastic about the character and has long considered it one of his favorite roles. The film's success solidified Rapper's filmmaking career, which was further bolstered by his next picture The Gay Sisters (1942), starring the great Barbara Stanwyck, who lobbied for the role.
The next picture he directed was destined to become a classic. "Now, Voyager" (1942) was "the picture that made me," Rapper said in a 1981 interview. Politics played a role in his nabbing the choice assignment with only three directorial credits under his belt. Hal B. Wallis, a Warners producer with his own unit, intended to cast Irene Dunne in the picture, but Rapper leaked Wallis' plans to his close friend Bette Davis, who demanded the part from Jack L. Warner. The front office gave in to her demands, and she reciprocated Rapper's favor by asking for him as her director.
Rapper knew that casting Davis' co-stars was important if the picture was to work. He defied Wallis' choice of May Whitty as the mother of Davis' character, stumping for Gladys Cooper, whom Wallis claimed he had never heard of. Cooper received an Oscar nomination in the role. Paul Henreid got his first big break from Rapper, who tested him and then got approval to cast him (although the role made Henreid's career, he later humiliated Rapper at Davis' gala American Film Institute tribute in 1977, where he mocked the director and took credit for the famous scene where he lights two cigarettes at once and hands one to Davis. According to Rapper, Henreid had always wanted to be a successful director, and this engendered a personal enmity in him towards the director who "discovered him").
In addition to Davis and Henreid, Rapper attributed the film's success to lighting cameraman Sol Polito and versatile character actor Claude Rains, who played the psychoanalyst and thus the third side of the love triangle anchored by Davis and Henreid. Rapper felt that after the picture ends, Davis' character eventually will marry her psychoanalyst.
Rapper reteamed with Davis for the highly successful "The Corn Is Green" (1945), a story set in Wales but shot entirely--even the outdoor scenes--on Warners' sound stages. Rapper said that for her role as the Welsh schoolteacher, Davis tried very hard to not use the mannerisms that had made her famous. Rapper believes that John Dall, who played the schoolboy and whom he discovered, did not have a major career and became typecast as a villain because he was androgynous, and the public mood and cinema censorship of the time would not allow such an actor to be a star.
Rapper reportedly broke with Warners over Rhapsody in Blue (1945), a biography of George Gershwin. He felt that the script, which was approved by the Gershwin family which initially controlled the project, was wrong in that it made Gerswhin a character infatuated with two fictional women, while the real Gershwin was likely only really enthused about his music. Jack Warner, whose studio had never employed Gershwin and thus was an odd choice for the Gershwin family to entrust with his life story, fought the director over his choice of John Garfield to play the composer. Rapper believed that the casting of the film was all-important and its success ultimately was compromised by the casting of the bland Robert Alda at Warner's insistence. Jack Warner would not cast Garfield, as he was seeking leverage in the actor's upcoming contract negotiations. He also vetoed Rapper's second choice of Cary Grant on the grounds that no one would accept Grant as a composer (Warner subsequently took Rapper's insight to heart and cast Grant as Cole Porter in Night and Day (1946)). Although he looked like Gershwin, Alda "had a blah personality," Rapper told an interviewer in 1981. The film was showcased at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, but ultimately it was a failure. Some movie historians believe that Rapper's disenchantment over the failure of the film caused him to eventually break with Warner Bros.
He made Deception (1946) with Davis, which reunited her with "Now, Voyager" co-stars Rains and Henreid. Rapper claims that the movie was compromised when Davis--who was convinced that Rains' performance was stealing the picture from her--went behind Rapper's back and got Jack Warner to change the script so that she could shoot Rains' character in the finale. Rapper believed that the new ending weakened the picture. He also felt that his next picture The Voice of the Turtle (1947), an adaptation of the huge Broadway hit, was compromised by the casting of Ronald Reagan as the leading man. Despite Reagan's trying to beef his part up by inventing bits of business, Rapper believes that Eve Arden stole the film from him and his co-star, Eleanor Parker.
Rapper claimed in 1981 that he left Warners and became a freelancer due to the bad advice of his agent, who told him " . . . the movie business was booming and I could have my pick of assignments." Unfortunately, neither Rapper nor his agent forecast the downturn in the industry caused by the advent of television and the US Justice Department's order that the film studios divest themselves of their theater chains. The industry went into an economic tailspin, and Rapper's career suffered.
His first post-Warners gig was at Columbia Pictures, directing Anna Lucasta (1949). Originally a story of an African-American girl looking for acceptance from society, studio boss Harry Cohn had the girl and her family's ethnic identity changed to Polish, with narrative results that were, in Rapper's words, "pretty bizarre." Rapper wanted future Oscar-winner Susan Hayward for the girl, but Columbia cast Paulette Goddard in order to fulfill a one-picture commitment she had to the studio. Goddard got the role because she had threatened to sue Columbia if the studio didn't fulfill her contract. Rapper said that Goddard was "hopeless in drama. She couldn't match any bits of business and her reading of lines was wooden." Cast in the role of a teenager, Goddard "claimed she was 34 but the records showed it was more like 44." Thus are debacles made.
Rapper returned to Warner Bros. to helm The Glass Menagerie (1950), the first movie adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, because producer Charles Feldman requested him. Just off her Oscar win for Johnny Belinda (1948), the 36-year-old Jane Wyman was cast as the 20-something Laura to boost box-office returns. Tallulah Bankhead was hired to play Amanda Wingfield, but her drunkenness on the set on the second day of shooting led Jack Warner to fire her. Refusing to cast Miriam Hopkins "because of past differences," Warner "positively screamed when I mentioned Bette Davis." Ruth Chatterton was considered, and Ethel Barrymore, who wanted the part, was rejected as being too old. Finally, said Rapper, "that left Gertrude Lawrence, who had little camera experience and was so very jittery she'd cry every time a take was spoiled."
Commenting on the film three decades later, Rapper said, "I still like Kirk Douglas as the gentleman caller and Arthur Kennedy as Tom." The movie, considered one of the least successful adaptations of Williams' work, is barely remembered today and suffers from a bowdlerization of the original play. Williams hated the film as, against his wishes, the script implies a totally different, more upbeat ending than his play.
Of his later films, Rapper felt that they suffered, as he "missed the studio set-up." He claimed "The Brave One" (1956) as his best movie. Marjorie Morningstar (1958) was his last success at the box office, and his career tailed off in the 1960s, although he continued to direct until the end of the 1970s.
He attributed the failure of The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970) to "casting a beautiful boy [John Hansen] rather than a girl" to play Jorgensen, who rocketed to fame in the 1950s after a sex change. "That, after all, was Christine's story. She always believed she was a woman trapped inside a man's body." Born Again (1978), based on a memoir of a convicted Watergate co-conspirator who was on President Richard Nixon's staff, was a failure, as Rapper "was prevented from dramatizing the crimes of Charles Colson, only the redemption--and that made for boredom."
"Born Again" turned out to be Rapper's last film, as he reneged on his commitment to direct Sextette (1977), an exploitation film based on the joke of the elderly Mae West taking a (far younger) husband, her sixth. Rapper backed out, as he didn't have the heart for it: "Mae West was too frail-looking. She'd put her hands on her hips but there were no hips; she had faded away. However, I helped her with her line readings. So, you see, I was back to where I started--as a dialog director!"
Irving Rapper's goal late in life was to live in three separate centuries. He died on Dec. 20, 1999, aged 101, a little less than two weeks shy of fulfilling that wish.Ponzio Pilato (1962)- Producer
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Herbert Wilcox was born on 19 April 1890 in West Norwood, London, England, UK. He was a producer and director, known for Victoria the Great (1937), Spring in Park Lane (1948) and The Loves of Robert Burns (1930). He was married to Anna Neagle, Maud Violet Bower and Dorothy Brown. He died on 15 May 1977 in London, England, UK.The Heart of a Man (1959)- Director
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Maurice Cloche was born on 17 June 1907 in Commercy, Meuse, France. He was a director and writer, known for L'invité de la onzième heure (1945), Monsieur Vincent (1947) and La cage aux filles (1949). He died on 20 March 1990 in Bordeaux, Gironde, France.Peppino e Violetta (1951)- Director
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Domenico Paolella was born on 15 October 1915 in Foggia, Puglia, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Hercules Against the Barbarians (1964), Rebel Gladiators (1962) and Operation Atlantis (1965). He died on 7 October 2002 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Madri pericolose (1960)- Alex Young is known for Naked Video (1986).Naked Video (1986)
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Mario Mattoli was born on 30 November 1898 in Tolentino, Marche, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Abbandono (1940), La damigella di Bard (1936) and Schoolgirl Diary (1941). He was married to Mity Mignone. He died on 26 February 1980 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.La damigella di Bard (1938)- Actor
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Folco Lulli was born on 3 July 1912 in Florence, Tuscany, Italy. He was an actor and producer, known for The Organizer (1963), The Wages of Fear (1953) and The Tartars (1961). He died on 23 May 1970 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Gente d'onore (1967)- Giuseppe Veggezzi was born on 3 December 1929 in Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. Giuseppe is a director, known for Challenge the Devil (1963).Katarsis (1963)
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Brian De Palma is one of the well-known directors who spear-headed the new movement in Hollywood during the 1970s. He is known for his many films that go from violent pictures, to Hitchcock-like thrillers. Born on September 11, 1940, De Palma was born in Newark, New Jersey in an Italian-American family. Originally entering university as a physics student, De Palma became attracted to films after seeing such classics as Citizen Kane (1941). Enrolling in Sarah Lawrence College, he found lasting influences from such varied teachers as Alfred Hitchcock and Andy Warhol.
At first, his films comprised of such black-and-white films as To Bridge This Gap (1969). He then discovered a young actor whose fame would influence Hollywood forever. In 1968, De Palma made the comedic film Greetings (1968) starring Robert De Niro in his first ever credited film role. The two followed up immediately with the films The Wedding Party (1969) and Hi, Mom! (1970).
After making such small-budget thrillers such as Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976), De Palma was offered the chance to direct a film based on Stephen King's classic novel "Carrie". The story deals with a tormented teenage girl who finds she has the power of telekinesis. The film starred Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie and John Travolta, and was for De Palma, a chance to try out the split screen technique for which he would later become famous.
Carrie (1976) was a massive success, and earned the two lead females (Laurie and Spacek) Oscar nominations. The film was praised by most critics, and De Palma's reputation was now permanently secured. He followed up this success with the horror film The Fury (1978), the comedic film Home Movies (1979) (both these films featured Kirk Douglas), the crime thriller Dressed to Kill (1980) starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson, and another crime thriller entitled Blow Out (1981) starring John Travolta.
His next major success was the controversial, ultra-violent film Scarface (1983). Written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino, the film concerned Cuban immigrant Tony Montana's rise to power in the United States through the drug trade. While being a critical failure, the film was a major success commercially.
Moving on from Scarface (1983), De Palma made two more movies before landing another one of his now-classics: The Untouchables (1987), starring old friend Robert De Niro in the role of Chicago gangster Al Capone. Also starring in the film were Kevin Costner as the man who commits himself to bring Capone down, and Sean Connery, an old policeman who helps Costner's character to form a group known as the Untouchables. The film was one of De Palma's most successful films, earning Connery an Oscar, and gave Ennio Morricone a nomination for Best Score.
After The Untouchables (1987), De Palma made the Vietnam film Casualties of War (1989) starring Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn. The film focuses on a new soldier who is helpless to stop his dominating sergeant from kidnapping a Vietnamese girl with the help of the coerced members of the platoon. The film did reasonably well at the box office, but it was his next film that truly displayed the way he could make a hit and a disaster within a short time. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) starred a number of well-known actors such as Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, however it was still a commercial flop and earned him two Razzie nominations.
But the roller coaster success that De Palma had gotten so far did not let him down. He made the horror film Raising Cain (1992), and the criminal drama Carlito's Way (1993) starring Al Pacino and Sean Penn. The latter film is about a former criminal just released from prison that is trying to avoid his past and move on. It was in the year 1996 that brought one of his most well-known movies. This was the suspense-filled Mission: Impossible (1996) starring Tom Cruise and Jon Voight.
Following up this film was the interesting but unsuccessful film Snake Eyes (1998) starring Nicolas Cage as a detective who finds himself in the middle of a murder scene at a boxing ring. De Palma continued on with the visually astounding but equally unsuccessful film Mission to Mars (2000) which earned him another Razzie nomination. He met failure again with the crime thriller Femme Fatale (2002), the murder conspiracy The Black Dahlia (2006), and the controversial film Redacted (2007) which deals with individual stories from the war in Iraq.
Brian De Palma may be down for the moment, but if his box office history has taught us anything, it is that he always returns with a major success that is remembered for years and years afterwards.Dressed to Kill (1980)- Director
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David Miller was born on 28 November 1909 in Paterson, New Jersey, USA. He was a director and writer, known for The Story of Esther Costello (1957), Twist of Fate (1954) and Flying Tigers (1942). He was married to Frances Raeburn. He died on 14 April 1992 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Executive Action (1973)- Director
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Camillo Mastrocinque was born on 11 May 1901 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for I mariti (Tempesta d'anime) (1941), Don Pasquale (1940) and Lost in the Dark (1947). He died on 23 April 1969 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Gli eroi del doppio gioco (1962)- Director
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Bill Norton was born on 13 August 1943 in Los Angeles County, California, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), Tour of Duty (1987) and Cisco Pike (1971). He was previously married to Rosanna Norton.More American Graffiti (1979)- Director
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- Actor
Milos Forman was born Jan Tomas Forman in Caslav, Czechoslovakia, to Anna (Svabova), who ran a summer hotel, and Rudolf Forman, a professor. During World War II, his parents were taken away by the Nazis, after being accused of participating in the underground resistance. His father died in Mittelbau-Dora, a sub camp of Buchenwald, and his mother died in Auschwitz, at which Milos became an orphan very early on. He studied screen-writing at the Prague Film Academy (F.A.M.U.). In his Czechoslovakian films, Black Peter (1964), Loves of a Blonde (1965), and The Firemen's Ball (1967), he created his own style of comedy. During the invasion of his country by the troops of the Warsaw pact in the summer of 1968, to stop the Prague spring, he left Europe for the United States. In spite of difficulties, he filmed Taking Off (1971) there and achieved his fame later with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) adapted from the novel of Ken Kesey, which won five Oscars, including one for best direction. Other important films of Milos Forman were the musical Hair (1979) and his biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus (1984), which won eight Oscars.Amadeus (1984)- Director
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Miguel M. Delgado was born on 1 April 1904 in Mexico, Distrito Federal, Mexico. He was a director and writer, known for Los tres mosqueteros (1942), El señor fotógrafo (1953) and Cantando nace el amor (1954). He was married to Shirley Miller Eckenroth, Ofelia González Hernández and Josefina Velez. He died on 2 January 1994 in Mexico, Distrito Federal, Mexico.El padrecito (1964)- Writer
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Alfredo Giannetti was born on 16 April 1924 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Divorce Italian Style (1961), Day by Day, Desperately (1961) and The Facts of Murder (1959). He died on 30 July 1995 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.La ragazza in prestito (1964)- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Sergio Grieco was born on 13 January 1917 in Codevigo, Veneto, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Il sergente Klems (1971), Beast with a Gun (1977) and Il figlio del circo (1963). He was married to Susan Terry. He died on 30 March 1982 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Tua per la vita (1955)- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Flavio Calzavara was born on 21 February 1900 in Istrana, Veneto, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Don Buonaparte (1941), Rigoletto e la sua tragedia (1956) and 10 canzoni d'amore da salvare (1962). He died on 10 March 1981 in Treviso, Veneto, Italy.Carmela (1942)- Director
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Richard Quine was born on 12 November 1920 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He was a director and writer, known for The Mickey Rooney Show (1954), The Cockeyed Miracle (1946) and Strangers When We Meet (1960). He was married to Diana Balfour, Fran Jeffries, Barbara Bushman and Susan Peters. He died on 10 June 1989 in Los Angeles, California, USA.How to Murder Your Wife (1965)- Director
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Screenwriter and director Maurice Tourneur was born Maurice Thomas in the Parisian suburb of Belleville on February 2, 1873, the son of a jewelry merchant. He was trained and employed as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator as a young man. After serving in a French artillery unit in northern Africa, he became an assistant to sculptor Auguste Rodin and later to muralist Amélie Puvis de Chavanne before deciding to change his life along with the changing century and make a new life in the theater.
Tourneur's younger siblings were part of the theatrical establishment--his sister was an actress and his brother a theater manager--so it was not as preposterous a shift in avocation as it might seem. After haunting the theaters of Paris, paying for cheap seats to soak up as much theater as he could, Tourneur became an actor in 1900 with a small troupe on the outskirts of Paris. His salary was 90 francs a month, the equivalent of about $15. Now a professional, he took the stage name "Maurice Tourneur". After learning the stage ropes, he joined the company of the great tragedienne Rejane for a South American tour. He later was a member of stage director Andre Antoine's company.
He married Fernande Petit in 1904, and they had a son, Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977), who would, like his father, become a film director of note. Maurice eventually worked as an actor and set designer for the Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris. In 1911, after having acted in and directed over 400 stage productions, he left the theater for the film industry, following his friend Emile Chautard into the new medium. Starting as an assistant to Chautard, Tourneur had visual arts experience surpassed by few in the nascent "7th Art," the cinema. After working as an assistant director at Societe Francaise des Films et Cinematographes Éclair, he was quickly promoted to director and made films with leading French stars. The subject of his first French silent films was often a gamin or orphan seeking love and shelter.
He had a good command of English from touring in the UK as an actor, and in 1914 the film company Éclair, intent on expanding its US market share, transferred Tourneur to America to manage its studio at Fort Lee, NJ, after a March 17, 1914, fire destroyed the main studio building and the company's negatives. Éclair American Co. went into business in Fort Lee, America's first "Hollywood", in 1911 with a studio designed by Éclair's French architects that incorporated the most modern theories of movie studio design. The studio complex consisted of glass-covered shooting stages with administrative offices, a development laboratory, workshops, scenery storage facilities and dressing rooms. Éclair American signed a distribution deal with the new New Jersey-based Universal Film Manufacturing Co. of Carl Laemmle, whose future production chief, Irving Thalberg, would later clash with Tourneur at MGM. Éclair American mostly produced shorts, but increasingly moved into feature production, keeping in line with the general evolution of the industry, and since Tourneur had experience in directing features, it was only natural that the company hired him.
In 1915 Tourneur moved over to World Film, also headquartered in Ft. Lee. World had been established the year before to import foreign-made features, which dominated American screens until the middle of the 1910s, and to distribute the movies of the newly established feature-film companies associated with producer Lewis J. Selznick, David O. Selznick's father. In a familiar pattern of that time, Selznick created Equitable Pictures and signed Vitagraph star Clara Kimball Young to his company. Selznick then merged with Shubert Pictures--Shubert Theatrical Co.'s movie production company--and Peerless Pictures, the movie production company created by motion picture raw-film-stock magnate Jules Brulatour.
World Pictures, now under Selznick's control, released movies produced by Equitable, Peerless, Shubert Pictures and other independent companies. Movie production was centered at the Peerless Studio in Ft. Lee, built in 1914, and at the Paragon Studio, built in 1916. Gradually World began to dominate the companies whose movies it distributed. Tourneur was the best filmmaker on the lot, whose other employees included Josef von Sternberg (who worked as a film cutter) and Frances Marion, the future Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Tourneur quickly rose to become a major director in the American movie industry, proving to be one of the more innovative pioneers in the development of the narrative film. Adept at using the latest technology to give his pictures a greater visual appeal, he earned critical acclaim and popular success. Tourneur was credited with bringing "stylization" to the American screen through his mastery of set design and lighting. His primary concern, however, was story: "Show the people anything, but show them something," he declared in a May 1920 interview with "Motion Picture Magazine". "This can be either funny or dramatic, but there must be something."
Tourneur opposed the new star system because he felt that a good story could not be told through one character; he also believed that the ideal of the "gleaming personality" of the star promulgated by motion pictures was false, a perversion of life as it actually is lived. Tourneur was more interested in developing a means to convey psychological effects than emphasizing physical action. In this he was opposed to the then-dominant pre-Konstantin Stanislavski acting theories, rooted in the theater, that held that dialogue must be accompanied by an appropriate physical gesture of the hands to underscore the feeling being conveyed by the actor in a scene. Physical action itself, the theory went, conveyed psychological meaning and emotion. It was said that film was born as a form of entertainment for the illiterate masses, and this style constituted a "universal language" that the talkies not only made obsolete, but absurd (one example of this style is the placement of the left-hand on the right forearm, a gesture that can be seen in silent films and was carried on by Harry Carey in his sound films. This was an elocutory gesture that signified fortitude, and would be understood by the silent film audience). Tourneur believed that this telegraphic shorthand needed to be replaced. The new Soviet cinema would show the way towards a greater psychological realism with the development of montage.
Tourneur's film production unit had coalesced by 1915, and included Clarence Brown, the future six-time Oscar-nominated director who served as his assistant director and editor; director of photography John van den Broek and art director Ben Carré. The Tourneur unit produced a series of popular movies that successfully utilized both the new language of film--including close-ups and parallel action--and new technology, such as tracking shots and special effects. While Tourneur's work spanned many genres, a leitmotif in his oeuvre was the romantic skullduggery women were the victim of, or sometimes the perpetrator of, in the pursuit of love and happiness. Today we'd call the women victims of sexual harassment; in the 1910s, underhanded or unscrupulous predatory behavior was generally considered part of the exigencies of love, though Tourneur saw through the obfuscating facade. Reportedly, among directors, only the pictures of D.W. Griffith and Thomas H. Ince were more popular than the films of Maurice Tourneur. In an interview published in the July 3, 1915, issue of "The New York Clipper", Tourneur expressed the opinion that Griffith was supreme among movie directors. He also believed that the motion picture was the most significant development for education since the invention of the printing press. Still, he was obsessed with story--he stated that "nearly everything worthwhile in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem." Tourneur believed that the cinema needed to develop a new kind of author, a writer who would more naturalistically portray human nature and move the movies away from the simplistic Manichean machinations of plot towards a portrayal of human motivations and interactions that more closely caught the true balance of good and bad in human beings. He stated that "nearly everything worth while in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem."
The Tourneur oeuvre consistently displayed first-rate visuals that compensated for some of the dramatic weaknesses of the early narrative film, hampered as it was by dialogue constrained by the limitations of intertitles, and by a certain overwrought telegraphic performance style closer to elocution than what we now appreciate as acting. In many early films the narrative can be unintelligible to a modern audience, due to a lack of intertitles, as this style was expected to, and did, convey information to the contemporary audience, an audience more experienced with pantomime due to the need of performers and filmmakers to reach an audience that spoke a babble of languages. However, the demands of movies for this kind of signaling hampered its development as a mature medium of artistic expression. When Tourneur tried to bring the sophistication of Henrik Ibsen to the screen with A Doll's House (1918), it proved an aesthetic and box-office failure. As one critic noted, the felicities of Ibsen's drama could only be conveyed by language itself and the modulations of the human voice, not by stage business.
In the July 1918 edition of "Photoplay Magazine", Tourneur stated his contrary credo: "There is an odious fallacy that a great many people still believe, in regard to the moving picture. It is almost as widespread as that the cinema is in its infancy [Tourneur dated the invention of the motion picture to Eadweard Muybridge's experiments with multiple-exposure photography in 1878]. By that I mean the belief that we must give the public what it wants. To me, that is absurd. As absurd as if the fashion dictators should attempt to suit women's wishes in costumes. In reality, the opposite is the case, is it not?" Tourneur believed that the filmmaker's taste and preferences were essential to the creation of a motion picture, just as in the legitimate theater, the craft and art the director and actors applied to a written play infused it with life and meaning. The play was not the thing, Tourneur stated; one can always sit at home and read a play. It is the staging of the play that creates meaning, and it is the director's control over the photoplay that makes it an art rather than just a piece of commerce.
Tourneur rebelled against the prevalent attitude in the movie industry that the audience would automatically reject more poetic works. He believed that what was then called The Great War had infused the mass audience with a certain spirituality. Tourneur had faith that the audience would accept higher-quality, more intellectual works, and that the mass-market lowest-common-denominator paradigm of the film industry was false. However, he could make exceptions to his opposition to pandering to the audience; in an earlier interview published in the May 18, 1918, edition of "Exhibitors Trade Review", he believed that filmmakers had a patriotic duty to soothe the anxieties of the wartime audience.
"It is part of our duty as purveyors of entertainment to the great majority, to see to it that the public gets wholesome, optimistic and, if possible, amusing entertainment. It is up to the screen to sustain the spirits of the nation. Let us keep away from the morbid and gruesome and throw the tremendous power of the photoplay into the civilized world's war for democracy." But of course, this was parcel to his opinion that the motion picture had a great didactic function, and could be used to educate an audience (a generation later Tourneur would be confronted with the anxieties of quite a different audience, that of Occupied France).
"Directing motion pictures is merely capturing life," Tourneur stated in a piece he wrote on the art of directing for "Variety" (December 27, 1918). A director, as auteur, was born, not made. A movie director could not be trained, as a successful director had been born with the instincts to create a photoplay (a contemporary term Tourneur despised and urged the industry to jettison in favor of something new and more accurate to describe the motion picture). "Directing a picture presupposes the possession of dramatic instinct and artistic perception in the man entrusted with the transfer to the screen of the play of an author," he wrote.
The photoplay had developed into quite a different form from the staged play of the legitimate theater, and thus a different set of narrative tools was required to make a successful movie. The director had to work within the limits of movies, which were short in length, thus limiting his options for both creating and presenting drama. A director had to be an expert in finding, and using, some detail, that in the short period of time allowed him, would elucidate the characters, the conflicts, and themes of his film. Thus, the director had to be a great observer of human nature and character in order to master his medium.
Optimistic about the future, and relishing the opportunity to define the new medium, Tourneur created his own production company in 1918. He felt that American silent film actors were superior to their European counterparts. He believed that "America's Sweetheart," Mary Pickford, the Toronto native whom he directed in two hit films in 1917, was the world's best screen actress. He also touted stage actress Elsie Ferguson, his Nora Helmer, as a brilliant artist; they made four films together in 1917 and 1918. For her part Ferguson, who hated movies and had to be coaxed into them by generous offers from Paramount-Artcraft head Jesse L. Lasky, said that Tourneur was her favorite director, and that she was lucky to have had him direct her first film.
Tourneur became increasingly antagonistic to the star system that was becoming more important to the industry, and he resisted studio efforts to rein in directors (and their profligate spending) by the imposition of the central production system, in which formerly dominant directors had to answer to producers over aesthetic choices as well as budgets. At this point in his career his success at the box office gave him leeway to push the frontiers of his art. In addition to making popular movies, Tourneur became one of the most respected directors in America, but he experienced some trouble when he began to become more aesthetically enthusiastic.
Tourneur's heavily stylized The Blue Bird (1918), which featured unusual sets and costumes, was a precursor of the expressionist German cinema, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) (the Rejane company had put on the first production of "L'oisueau bleu" in 1911, the year its author, Maurice Maeterlinck, won the Nobel Prize and Tourneur left the legitimate stage for the soundstage. In 1924 Tourneur wrote an article about the superiority of film to the theater. "[M]otion pictures have reached greater artistic heights than the stage and will continue on--years in advance of the stage," he wrote). Another heavily stylized film, Prunella (1918), was as critically acclaimed as "The Blue Bird," but both failed at the box office, as the movie industry was not as able to support artistic visions as was the theater. Due to these economic considerations, Tourneur went back to a naturalistic style.
Tourneur scorned what he called "machine-made" commercial pictures, but he had to acknowledge the tyranny of the box-office. He believed that the failure of "Prunella" was the result of its rejection by provincial exhibitors, who did not believe their audiences would go for such "high-brow" fare. Lacking an advertising budget and marketing monies that would enable it to be showcased with a first-rate orchestral accompaniment, the picture failed, cold-bloodedly murdered by the philistine exhibitors. Tourneur believed that Griffith's hit Broken Blossoms (1919) would have failed, too, if he had not been backed by advertising and marketing muscle. He also believed that Cecil B. DeMille's Male and Female (1919), his adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play "The Admirable Crichton," would have flopped it he hadn't vulgarized it. He also scored Griffith for giving in to the exigencies of the marketplace by pandering to the audience and turning his back on art.
It was around this time that he gave up on his idea that movies should be used to educate the masses. In an interview published in November 1920, Tourneur told Truman B. Handy of "Motion Picture" that the forte of film was amusement: "I do not believe in using the screen as a way of teaching; we have the pulpit and the college. It may be a means of propaganda, but I do not intend to use it as such. Never!" His faith would be sorely tested under the Nazis 20 years later.
"I would rather starve and make good pictures," he wrote in 1920, "if I knew they were going to be shown, but to starve and make pictures which are thrown in the ashcan is above anybody's strength. As long as the public taste will oblige us to make what is very justly called machine-made stories, we can only bow and give them what they want."
Story, again, was essential if one was to subvert the exhibitors' and distributors' expectations of the box office and create something better than the "machine-made" moving picture. Tourneur had an affinity for literary adaptations, and his career collection of adaptations included Joseph Conrad's Victory (1919), Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1920), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and R.D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1922). He would later make a French version of Ben Jonson's play Volpone (1941).
By 1922 he came to the opinion that the future of the American film industry lay in Hollywood, not New York, though not without regret. In a February 1922 "Photoplay" article weighing the merits of California versus New York as a production locale, Tourneur came out in favor of California, since artistry was no longer a part of the moviemaking equation. To be intellectually stimulated and remain artistically fresh, New York would be the preferable production center, Tourneur declared. New York, like London, Paris and Vienna, stimulated the filmmaker toward developing fresh ideas and more ambitious projects. However, "[f]rom the material standpoint of facilities, costs, climate and the like there is no comparison; Los Angeles is vastly superior."
The next year he shot The Christian (1923), an adaptation of Hall Caine's novel, in Hollywood for Samuel Goldwyn, but within a few years he decided not to share his future with that of the West Coast. Though he apparently had no problems with the mercurial Goldwyn (who would bedevil William Wyler a decade later), the American movie industry had evolved into a business of which he disapproved. It was in Hollywood, under such men as Irving Thalberg, Darryl F. Zanuck and Hal B. Wallis, that the central producer and production chief became the dominant force in the film industry from the mid-'20s through the early 1950s. Hollywood became a place where directors were often pulled off one picture in the middle of a shoot to shoot scenes in another picture, shuffled around like the hired hands that they had become in the increasingly centralized industry.
Tourneur denounced the industry's reliance on realism in a February 4, 1923, interview with "The New York Telegraph" in a plea for a more artistic, impressionistic approach to making motion pictures. He felt that film finally had had succeeded in being able to convey psychological effects, and had even surpassed the stage in that respect, as it could use picture and montage to quickly convey a mental state that it would take "countless words" to put over in the theater. Tourneur believed that due to the literalness of the camera lens, which did not have the mediating eye of the visual artist, the movies had been too focused on action. However, film could be made into a plastic art that was manipulated by the director to bring out "the psychology of the drama--the mental action of the characters."
He elaborated: "The screen is a better medium than the dramatic stage for getting over psychological effects. We can drive ideas across. For instance, what better way is there to express corruption than to show a close-up of the check with which a man has bribed . . . The Goldwyn company agreed with me that you can get more to the spectators by showing a banging shutter, by indicating the howling of the wind, or the shrieking of a woman, than by numberless words. Motion pictures, first of all, should be impressionistic."
Later that year, in the July 1st edition of the same newspaper, Tourneur declared that the great motion pictures would be produced by the next generation, now that the pioneers had developed a new mode of expression. He stated his belief that the director, and not the producer, should be fully responsible for a motion picture production. "To relieve him of any of these responsibilities and to compel him to confine his efforts to adapting himself to the ideas of a half-dozen 'experts' will strike at the very foundation of successful pictures." He predicted that the meddling of producers would doom motion pictures' popularity with the mass audience as it would result in inferior movies that the movie-goers would reject.
It was just the type of interference that Tourneur warned about in 1923 that led to his quitting the American film industry. The last film he directed in the US was The Mysterious Island (1929), which he abandoned soon after the commencement of principal photography. Tourneur would not work under MGM's assigned production supervisor, so he quit the picture and repatriated himself to his native France in 1926, to make movies there and in Germany.
Tourneur was not welcomed back to France, since he was viewed as a draft dodger by many in a country in which 11% of the population had been killed or wounded in The Great War (Charles Chaplin had been similarly criticized by British hawks). During a visit to his homeland in 1921, some French journalists demanded that Tourneur not be allowed to return to the US. Jean-Louis Crozet of the periodical "Comoedia" denounced Tourneur for having spent 1914-18 in America, and thus avoiding military service in World War I, which claimed the lives of approximately 1.4 million French soldiers. Crozet accused the director of cowardice for having emigrated to America to "[save] his life, while so many of his compatriots lost theirs."
Tourneur made his second movie in Germany after leaving the US, The Ship of Lost Men (1929) ("Ship of Lost Men"), which starred Marlene Dietrich in one of her first important roles. His son Jacques--who would go on to become an important director in the US in the 1940s--served as Tourneur's assistant and editor on the film. Jacques would continue to assist his father on his shoots until the mid-'30s.
Divorced from his first wife in 1923, Maurice married actress Louise Lagrange (1898-1979), whom he met while shooting L'homme mystérieux (1933). During the Nazi occupation of France (1940-44) times were tough for French filmmakers who wouldn't collaborate with the Germans, and things were no different for Tourneur, the man who vowed in 1920 that he would never make propaganda films. Even the "sitzkrieg", or Phony War, period of September 1, 1939, to May 9, 1940, disrupted the cinema as actors and craftsmen were called up for military service. Tourneur's shooting of "Volpone" was interrupted, and did not resume production until March 23, 1940, less than two months before the Nazi invasion of May 10th. On June 22nd the brief Battle of France came to an end when World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain asked the Germans for an armistice. Part of the peace accord mandated the partition of France, with the northern part to remain under German domination and the capital of the new government, headed by Petain, to be in Vichy. Vichy France, as the collaborationist government was known, also was to obey Germany in matters of cultural and racial policy.
On November 2, 1940, new regulations for the French movie industry were issued. All movie professionals were required to carry an identity card, except for Jews, who were not allowed one. At the end of the year 'Jean Renoir' (I)' emigrated to the US and was given a contract by 20th Century-Fox. The great actor Jean Gabin also made it to America and a contract with Universal, appearing in his first American film, Moontide (1942), opposite Ida Lupino in 1942.
French movie theaters were required to show Nazi propaganda movies, in accordance with Germany's policies towards all occupied countries. In 1940 Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan turned Lion Feuchtwanger's novel "Jew Suss" into a vicious anti-Semitic German-language film, the notorious Jud Süß (1940), the climax of which justifies pogroms against the Jewish people. When the film was released in Paris on February 14, 1941, the reaction of the French audience was very positive. On June 30 of that year the great French filmmaker Abel Gance was arraigned before the head of the French movie industry for the "crime" of being Jewish, and was required to prove his Aryan origins. He fled to Spain, not returning from exile until late 1945.
In September 1941 German censorship was enforced over French movies, and on the last day of the year, the Propaganda Division issued six new statutes, one of which banned Jews from the movie industry. The power to "green-light" French movies was reserved for the German High Command, and a new studio was created, Continental Productions, which was a subsidiary of Germany's state-owned UFA, headed by the German Alfred Greven and financed by French capital. The company, a.k.a. Continental Films, became the most important French movie production company during the Occupation.
By January 1942 film receipts were up by 68% over the previous year. A month later Jews and foreigners were forbidden from working in the film industry under a pseudonym, and on October 15th all American and English films were banned in France. French cartoons began to become popular early that year, possibly a sign of escapism, or of the indigenous industry's desire not to make propaganda for the enemy, and of the audience's desire not to be exposed to it. In 1943, fearing an Allied invasion from England, the Germans banned the filming of movies on the French coast. On January 15, 1944, reacting to the release of Vautrin the Thief (1943), the newspaper "Le Pilori" denounced beloved French character actor Michel Simon as a Jew, and wrote, "The cinema has condemned us to seeing the base, disgusting, revolting face that Michel Simon gives to 'Vautrin'." However, the mood in France, as the Allied invasion grew more imminent, began to change.
The Committee for the Liberation of the Cinema was an active element of the Maquis, which was the name given to the Resistance, publishing an underground newspaper, "L'Ecran francais". The Committee organized resistance within the film industry controlled by the Nazis and their collaborators, and coordinated insurrections and the "liberation" of many filmmaking facilities during the time of the Allied invasion of France, which began on June 6th. On July 18, 1944, "L'Ecran francais" published an article "Toward a Cinema with Clean Hands", declaring that collaborators with the Germans would not be tolerated in the liberated French film industry (in 1946 actor Robert Le Vigan was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor, and all his belongings were confiscated, for openly collaborating with the Germans and broadcasting anti-Semitic propaganda on the radio. The French made a distinction between those who had to cooperate with the Germans due to economic considerations and those who intellectually cooperated with the Nazis and propagated their ideology).
Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944, three days after film curator and cinema buff Henri Langlois held the first showing of Gone with the Wind (1939) in Paris at his Cinematheque française. The movie theaters of Paris had not yet been opened, but that didn't stop Langlois; at that point, his regular exhibition of movies had been suspended for a year. Marcel Carné's classic Children of Paradise (1945), shot during the Occupation, had its gala premiere on March 9, 1945. It originally had been scheduled to be shot at the Victorine studios in Nice in mid-August 1943, but the production was interrupted when the company was ordered back to Paris after the Allied invasion of Sicily. On April 14, 1945, all the theaters and entertainment venues in Paris were shut for the day to pay respect to the late US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died two days earlier.
During the Occupation the Germans had encouraged French filmmakers to maintain their high production standards in order to create more effective propaganda and to create superior product to soothe the anxieties of French movie-goers. However, those who were less cooperative had to get along with less. While Tourneur continued to direct under the Occupation, he was forced to use the ends of reels of raw film stock to shoot his pictures.
Maurice Tourneur is a character in Bertrand Tavernier's 2002 film about the French film industry under Vichy, Safe Conduct (2002) ("Safe Conduct"), the title of which refers both to the after-curfew pass filmmakers were issued due to the odd shooting hours of the film industry and also to the movie business' laissez-faire atmosphere during the occupation, which included hiding and utilizing Jewish film professionals who, of course, could not be credited. The film's story deals with French screenwriter Jean Aurenche, a rogue who did not want to work for the Nazis, and Jean Devaivre, an assistant director involved with the Resistance. Tavernier was inspired to make his three-hour epic by the experiences of his father René Tavernier, an editor and screenwriter confronted with the same dilemma as Jean Aurenche, characterized by his son as, "[W]hat can you write in a period of such censorship under a regime you despise?"
Tavernier believes that Americans can understand the dilemma if they equate French filmmakers during the Nazi occupation with American filmmakers under McCarthyism. Of the question, "'[H]ow can you work for a German company without compromising yourself?' It's very simple. I say to the American critic, just replace the German element with Senator McCarthy [Red-baiting Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy] and everything will be clear!"
The great paradox of the French film industry under the Occupation, which thrived despite the wartime shortages and terror directed by the Nazis towards the French population, is that French filmmakers working for the German-financed and -controlled Continental, the most powerful studio in France, maintained a good deal of independence. Unlike newspapers and book publishing and radio broadcasting, which were tightly controlled, the Germans allowed French filmmakers more latitude in order to create entertaining movies to distract the French populace. Thus, many French filmmakers were able to incorporate allegories and parables alluding to the Occupation. According to Tavernier, of the approximately 30 feature films made at Continental between 1940 and 1944, most have a kind of integrity that belies their ostensible ends as Nazi and Pétainist propaganda. "That's the first act of resistance," he claims.
Aurenche and René Tavernier hated Vichy and the indigenous intellectual collaborators with the regime, and Aurenche allegedly used coding in his Continental screenplays to defy the Nazis (director Martin Scorsese, citing the American directors of the 1940s and 1950s, calls this process "smuggling," introducing themes on the sly beneath the ken of studio owners and censors). Bernard Tavernier believes it was the directors, and not the screenwriters, who should be blamed for the sins of the Vichy cinema and the postwar, pre-Nouvelle vague bourgeois cinema, although that statement seems to indicate some kind of counter-Oedipal complex. His argument about McCarthyism smacks of a relevance that many Americans might find dismaying, as the French screenwriters of Vichy he lionizes were defying a foreign power, whereas many of the American screenwriters initially persecuted by McCarthyism were secret members of the Communist Party, accused of putting in coded messages for a foreign power with which the United States was locked in a Cold War.
Actually, the real nexus of the two groups' experiences can be summed up by the dilemma that Robert Sklar, in his book "Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies," posits as a struggle "over issues that had agitated American culture ever since movies first appeared: Whom makes the product? Who runs the show? Who decides what the show should say?" It was a battle Tourneur joined in America, and then quit in 1926 when the machine-made movie philistines won the war.
Maurice Tourneur and other cine-artists in America, wanting a more artistic, expressionistic type of film that would offer something beyond the simple lowest-common-denominator cultural dualities of good and evil that the money-men insisted was all that the box office could bear, had to resort to "smuggling" in their own themes, their own bits of telling detail that would illuminate the psychological motivations of characters and audience alike. Vichy France and McCarthyite America were no different in kind (if not degree) in that the money-men, the producers, had always constrained the creative people, who resulted to subterfuges to make the films they wanted, whether in Paris or Hollywood. Even Sergei Eisenstein, the great Soviet filmmaker, survived the terrors of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union only to have his soul crushed again and again by a tyranny that makes the regimes of the classic Hollywood mogul much lamented by the creative talent laughable in comparison.
In Vichy France a filmmaker could be tortured or shot for not hewing to the Nazi line; while it is true that many an uncooperative leftist wound up in jail for defying the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, the damage for those who did not defy but did not cooperate was mostly limited to the loss of high-paying jobs and the psychological torment of being abandoned by friends and losing one's career. However, the challenge to both Vichy screenwriter and Hollywood screenwriter in what Lillian Hellman called the "Scoundrel Time" was the same: If one could not compromise, if one could not tailor one's beliefs to fit the fashion of the times, one could not work. So, in this sense, there is a similarity as suggested by Tavernier, but like many paradoxes of Anglo-French relations, Tavernier's argument doesn't completely add up; it does, however, help elucidate the tough spot and paradoxical milieu that movie-makers like Maurice Tourneur found themselves in. The Devaivre character, in Tavernier's film, has to take over directing a movie from Tourneur when the director goes into shock upon hearing that his wife has been taken prisoner by the Germans.
In 1942 Maurice Tourneur directed his first French horror film, a genre in which his son Jacques thrived in the US during the war. Carnival of Sinners (1943) (released as "Carnival of Sinners" in the US and "The Devil's Hand" in the UK) is an adaptation of Gérard de Nerval's 1832 short story "La main enchantée" ("The Enchanted Hand"). The film is about a failed artist's pact with the Devil, a Faustian dilemma that would have resonated with audiences in Occupied France. The artist, Roland, buys the severed though-still-alive left hand of a man, a grisly talisman owned by the Devil himself, from the restaurateur Mélisse, who informs Roland that in the future, he can only sell off the charm at a loss.
Under the threat of eternal damnation, Roland seals his Faust-pact, with the proviso from the Devil that Roland can return the charm--at a price. The catch is, the longer he keeps the charm, the higher the price is, as it doubles each day. Tourneur cast a frail and harmless-looking actor as his Mephistopheles, a man who looks like a small-town bailiff and effectively doubles as a Vichy civil servant. Despite the unprepossessing look of the Devil, Tourneur created a sense of fear by emphasizing the consequences of the Faust-pact rather than the Devil's power. Tourneur had become a master of psychological filmmaking.
Roland becomes a great success, but at the cost of his individual identity as the charm makes him a different person. In a meeting with previous "owners" of the hand, Roland discovers that he is the last in a succession of men who took advantage of the charm, which links him to a history that ostensibly is not his own, but in fact is. The hand binds him to the first owner, a monk who refused to use his artistic talents for the glory of god, and it is under the monk's name, Maximus Léo, that Roland creates the art that ensures his fame and fortune, with the caveat that the expression of the hand is not his own.
He is done in by the vanity and greed of his mistress, when she purloins money from his safe to buy herself a luxury, money that he intended to use to payoff the Devil. He no longer will be able to buy his way out of the Faust-pact, and save his soul. At the end of the story, he is the one who now owns the hand and must pay the debt for all the previous owners who attempted to profit from it. Although he resents his fate, he must bear the responsibility for his collaboration with the Devil, and for the collaborations of the others who came before him. (Vichy government propaganda held that the French people brought on the Occupation themselves to make them accept it as their just desserts.)
Despite the travails of Occupied France and the German-dominated industry, Tourneur managed to create a classic psychological horror film. If Martin Scorsese and Tavernier's theme of smuggling is correct, then "La Main du diable" and other horror films made during the Occupation used the genre to smuggle unacceptable themes past the censors. French films made during the Occupation never directly refer to the military and political situation, but they do convey the anxiety and paranoia, indeed, the horror and fear of losing one's soul via collaboration, felt by the Occupied French.
In the July 3, 1915. "New York Clipper" interview, it was reported that "M. Tourneur's ambition is to produce strong and appealing detective stories. He believes they interest the greatest number of people." Tourneur's movie-making career continued until 1949, when he lost a leg in a car accident. His interests were painting in oils and watercolors and reading. After his forced retirement from the cinema due to his disability, he occupied himself by translating English-language detective novels into French.
Maurice Tourneur died on August 4, 1961, in Paris, and was interred in the City of Lights' Père Lachaise Cemetery. As a filmmaker, posterity has praised Tourneur for the subtlety and lingering moods of his movies, particularly those in the mystery and fantasy genres. He was one of the few American directors to create a new aesthetic, which exerted a strong influence on Josef von Sternberg. His use of rectangular compositions in Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) inspired Fritz Lang's The Spiders - Episode 1: The Golden Sea (1919), and may also have influenced the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu.
Hollywood director Clarence Brown, who graduated from the University of Tennessee at age 19 with a double degree in engineering, credited Tourneur with making him a filmmaker. Within a few months of being hired, he was editing Tourneur's films, and by 1917 he was shooting parts of Tourneur's films (uncredited) himself. He learned from his mentor the power of lighting and composition, although he developed a more sympathetic approach to directing actors than his teacher. Brown told cinema historian Kevin Brownlow, "Tourneur was my God. I owe him every thing I've got in the world. For me, he was the greatest man who ever lived. If it hadn't been for him, I'd still be fixing automobiles." Brownlow reported that Brown had tears in his eyes when he made this confession.
The United States Library of Congress' National Film Registry, established to help preserve American films deemed "culturally significant," has two Tourneur films on its list, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and The Last of the Mohicans (1920).Königsmark (1935)- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children in a bourgeois Franco-Swiss family. His father was a doctor who owned a private clinic, and his mother came from a preeminent family of Swiss bankers. During World War II Godard became a naturalized citizen of Switzerland and attended school in Nyons, Switzerland. His parents divorced in 1948, at which time he returned to Paris to attend the Lycée Rohmer. In 1949 he studied at the Sorbonne to prepare for a degree in ethnology. However, it was during this time that he began attending with François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer.
In 1950 Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, founded "Gazette du cinéma", which published five issues between May and November. He wrote a number of articles for the journal, often using the pseudonym "Hans Lucas". After Godard worked on and financed two films by Rivette and Rohmer, Godard's family cut off their financial support in 1951, and he resorted to a Bohemian lifestyle that included stealing food and money when necessary. In January 1952 he began writing film criticism for "Les cahiers du cinéma". Later that year he traveled to North and South America with his father and attempted to make his first film (of which only a tracking shot from a car was ever accomplished).
In 1953 he returned to Paris briefly before securing a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. With the money from the job, he made a short film in 1954 about the building of the dam called Operation Concrete (1958). Later that year his mother was killed in a motor scooter accident in Switzerland. In 1956 Godard began writing again for "Les cahiers du cinéma" as well as for the journal "Arts". In 1957 Godard worked as the press attache for "Artistes Associés", and made his first French film, All Boys Are Called Patrick (1959).
In 1958 he shot Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958), his homage to Jean Cocteau. Later that year he took unused footage of a flood in Paris shot by Truffaut and edited it into a film called A Story of Water (1961), which was an homage to Mack Sennett. In 1959 he worked with Truffaut on the weekly publication "Temps de Paris". Godard wrote a gossip column for the journal, but also spent much time writing scenarios for films and a body of critical writings which placed him firmly in the forefront of the "nouvelle vague" aesthetic, precursing the French New Wave.
It was also in that year Godard began work on Breathless (1960). In 1960 he married Anna Karina in Switzerland. In April and May he shot The Little Soldier (1963) in Geneva and was preparing the film for a fall release in Paris. However, French censors banned it due to its references to the Algerian war, and it was not shown until 1963. In March 1960 Breathless (1960) premiered in Paris. It was hugely successful both with the film critics and at the box office, and became a landmark film in the French New Wave with its references to American cinema, its jagged editing and overall romantic/cinephilia approach to filmmaking. The film propelled the popularity of male lead Jean-Paul Belmondo with European audiences.
In 1961 Godard shot A Woman Is a Woman (1961), his first film using color widescreen stock. Later that year he participated in the collective effort to remake the film The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), which was heralded as an important project in artistic collaboration. In 1962 Godard shot Vivre sa vie (1962) in Paris, his first commercial success since "Breathless". Later that year he shot a segment entitled "Le Nouveau Monde" for the collective film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), another important work in the history of collaborative multiple-authored art.
In 1963 Godard completed a film in homage to Jean Vigo entitled The Carabineers (1963), which was a resounding failure with the public and stirred furious controversy with film critics. Also that year he worked on a couple of collective films: The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers (1964) (from which Godard's sequence was later cut) and Six in Paris (1965). In 1964 Godard and his wife Anna Karina formed their own production company, Anouchka Films. They shot a film called A Married Woman (1964), which censors forced them to re-edit due to a topless sunbathing scene shot by Jacques Rozier. The censors also made Godard change the title to "Une femme marié" so as to not give the impression that this "scandalous" woman was the typical French wife. Later in the year, two French television programs were produced in devotion to Godard's work.
In the spring of 1965 Godard shot Alphaville (1965) in Paris; in the summer he shot Pierrot the Fool (1965) in Paris and the south of France. Shortly thereafter he and Anna Karina separated. Following their divorce, Godard shot Made in U.S.A (1966), "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966)", "L'amour en l'an 2000" (1966) (a sequel to "Alphaville" shot as a sketch for the collective film "L'amour travers les ages" (1966)).
In 1967 Godard shot The Chinese (1967) in Paris with Anne Wiazemsky, who was the granddaughter of French novelist François Mauriac. During the making of the film Godard and Wiazemsky were married in Paris. Later in the year he was prevented from traveling to North Vietnam for the shooting of a sequence for the collective film Far from Vietnam (1967). He instead shot the sequence in Paris, entitled "Camera-Oeil". Also during 1967 Godard participated (as the only Frenchman) on an Italian collective film called Love and Anger (1969).
In 1968 Godard was commissioned by French television to make Joy of Learning (1969). However, television producers were so outraged by the product Godard produced that they refused to show it. In May of that year Henri Langlois was fired by the head of the French Jean-Pierre Gorin to form the Dziga-Vertov group, infuriating Godard. He became increasingly concerned with socialist solutions to an idealist cinema, especially in providing the proletariat with the means of production and distribution. Along with other militantly political filmmakers in the Dziga-Vertov group, Godard published a series of 'Ciné-Tracts' outlining these viewpoints. In the summer of 1968 Godard traveled to New York City and Berkeley, California, to shoot the film "One American Movie", which was never completed. In September he made a trip to Canada to start another film called "Communication(s)", which also went unfinished, and then made a visit to Cuba before returning to France.
In 1969 Godard traveled to England, where he made the film See You at Mao (1970) for BBC Weekend Television, but the network later refused to show it. In the late spring he traveled with the Dziga-Vertov group to Prague to secretly shoot the film "Pravda". Later that year he shot Lotte in Italia (1971) ("Struggle for Italy") for Italian television. It was never shown, either.
In 1970 Godard traveled to Lebanon to shoot a film for the Palestinian Liberation Organization entitled "Jusque à la victoire" (1970) ("Until Victory"). Later that year he traveled to dozens of American universities trying to raise money for the film. In spite of his efforts, it was never released.À bout de souffle (1960)- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Otto Ludwig Preminger was born in Wiznitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary. His father was a prosecutor, and Otto originally intended to follow his father into a law career; however, he fell in love with the theater in his 20's and became one of the most imaginative stage producers and directors. He was only 24 when engaged by Max Reinhardt to take over his theatre where he produced all kids of plays. He directed his first film in 1931, and came to the US in 1936 to direct 'Libel' on the Broadway stage. He then moved to Hollywood where he signed with Fox becoming the first independent producer / director .He alternated between stage and film until the great success of Laura (1944) made him an A-list director in Hollyood.
For two decades after "Laura was released in 1944, Preminger ranked as one of the top directors in the world. His powers began to wane after Advise & Consent (1962), and by the end of the decade, he was considered washed-up. However, such was the potency of his craftsmanship that he continued to direct major motion pictures into the 1970s, with Rosebud (1975) getting scathing reviews. His last directorial effort was The Human Factor (1979), which won him respectful notices.
Otto Preminger died on April 23, 1986 in New York City from the effects of lung cancer and Alzheimer's disease. He was 80 years old.Exodus (1960)- Producer
- Director
- Additional Crew
Stanley Kramer was born on 29 September 1913 in Hell's Kitchen [now Clinton], Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and director, known for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and Inherit the Wind (1960). He was married to Karen Sharpe, Anne P. Kramer and Marilyn Erskine. He died on 19 February 2001 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.Oklahoma Crude (1973)- Director
- Writer
- Production Manager
Mario Sequi was born on 30 June 1913 in Monserrato, Sardinia, Italy. He is a director and writer, known for Cronaca di un delitto (1953), Incantesimo tragico (1951) and Altura (1954).La verginella (1975)- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, to Clinton Eastwood Sr., a bond salesman and later manufacturing executive for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, and Ruth Wood (née Margret Ruth Runner), a housewife turned IBM clerk. He grew up in nearby Piedmont. At school Clint took interest in music and mechanics, but was an otherwise bored student; this resulted in being held back a grade. In 1949, the year he is said to have graduated from high school, his parents and younger sister Jeanne moved to Seattle. Clint spent a couple years in the Pacific Northwest himself, operating log broncs in Springfield, Oregon, with summer gigs life-guarding in Renton, Washington. Returning to California in 1951, he did a two-year stint at Fort Ord Military Reservation and later enrolled at L.A. City College, but dropped out to pursue acting.
During the mid-1950s he landed uncredited bit parts in such B-films as Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) while digging swimming pools and driving a garbage truck to supplement his income. In 1958, he landed his first consequential acting role in the long-running TV show Rawhide (1959) with Eric Fleming. Although only a secondary player the first seven seasons, he was promoted to series star when Fleming departed--both literally and figuratively--in its final year, along the way becoming a recognizable face to television viewers around the country.
Eastwood's big-screen breakthrough came as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's trilogy of excellent spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The movies were shown exclusively in Italy during their respective copyright years with Enrico Maria Salerno providing the voice of Eastwood's character, finally getting American distribution in 1967-68. As the last film racked up respectable grosses, Eastwood, 37, rose from a barely registering actor to sought-after commodity in just a matter of months. Again a success was the late-blooming star's first U.S.-made western, Hang 'Em High (1968). He followed that up with the lead role in Coogan's Bluff (1968) (the loose inspiration for the TV series McCloud (1970)), before playing second fiddle to Richard Burton in the World War II epic Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Lee Marvin in the bizarre musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). In Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Kelly's Heroes (1970), Eastwood leaned in an experimental direction by combining tough-guy action with offbeat humor.
1971 proved to be his busiest year in film. He starred as a sleazy Union soldier in The Beguiled (1971) to critical acclaim, and made his directorial debut with the classic erotic thriller Play Misty for Me (1971). His role as the hard edge police inspector in Dirty Harry (1971), meanwhile, boosted him to cultural icon status and helped popularize the loose-cannon cop genre. Eastwood put out a steady stream of entertaining movies thereafter: the westerns Joe Kidd (1972), High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (his first of six onscreen collaborations with then live-in love Sondra Locke), the Dirty Harry sequels Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976), the action-packed road adventures Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Gauntlet (1977), and the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979). He branched out into the comedy genre in 1978 with Every Which Way But Loose (1978), which became the biggest hit of his career up to that time; taking inflation into account, it still is. In short, The Eiger Sanction (1975) notwithstanding, the 1970s were nonstop success for Eastwood.
Eastwood kicked off the 1980s with Any Which Way You Can (1980), the blockbuster sequel to Every Which Way but Loose. The fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), was the highest-grossing film of the franchise and spawned his trademark catchphrase: "Make my day." He also starred in Bronco Billy (1980), Firefox (1982), Tightrope (1984), City Heat (1984), Pale Rider (1985) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986), all of which were solid hits, with Honkytonk Man (1982) being his only commercial failure of the period. In 1988, he did his fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988). Although it was a success overall, it did not have the box office punch the previous films had. About this time, with outright bombs like Pink Cadillac (1989) and The Rookie (1990), it seemed Eastwood's star was declining as it never had before. He then started taking on low-key projects, directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie Parker that earned him a Golden Globe, and starring in and directing White Hunter Black Heart (1990), an uneven, loose biopic of John Huston (both films had a limited release).
Eastwood bounced back big time with his dark western Unforgiven (1992), which garnered the then 62-year-old his first ever Academy Award nomination (Best Actor), and an Oscar win for Best Director. Churning out a quick follow-up hit, he took on the secret service in In the Line of Fire (1993), then accepted second billing for the first time since 1970 in the interesting but poorly received A Perfect World (1993) with Kevin Costner. Next was a love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995), where Eastwood surprised audiences with a sensitive performance alongside none other than Meryl Streep. But it soon became apparent he was going backwards after his brief revival. Subsequent films were credible, but nothing really stuck out. Absolute Power (1997) and Space Cowboys (2000) did well enough, while True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002) were received badly, as was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), which he directed but didn't appear in.
Eastwood surprised again in the mid-2000s, returning to the top of the A-list with Million Dollar Baby (2004). Also starring Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, the hugely successful drama won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. He scored his second Best Actor nomination, too. His next starring vehicle, Gran Torino (2008), earned almost $30 million in its opening weekend and was his highest grosser unadjusted for inflation. 2012 saw him in a rare lighthearted movie, Trouble with the Curve (2012), as well as a reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company (2012).
Between acting jobs, he chalked up an impressive list of credits behind the camera. He directed Mystic River (2003) (in which Sean Penn and Tim Robbins gave Oscar-winning performances), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), Changeling (2008) (a vehicle for Angelina Jolie), Invictus (2009) (again with Freeman), Hereafter (2010), J. Edgar (2011), Jersey Boys (2014), American Sniper (2014) (2014's top box office champ), Sully (2016) (starring Tom Hanks as hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger) and The 15:17 to Paris (2018). Back on screens after a considerable absence, he played an unlikely drug courier in The Mule (2018), which reached the top of the box office with a nine-figure gross, then directed Richard Jewell (2019). At age 91, Eastwood made history as the oldest actor to star above the title in a movie with the release of Cry Macho (2021).
Away from the limelight, Eastwood has led an aberrant existence and is described by biographer Patrick McGilligan as a cunning manipulator of the media. His convoluted slew of partners and children are now somewhat factually acknowledged, but for the first three decades of his celebrity, his personal life was kept top secret, and several of his families were left out of the official narrative. The actor refuses to disclose his exact number of offspring even to this day. He had a longtime relationship with similarly abstruse co-star Locke (who died aged 74 in 2018, though for her entire public life she masqueraded about being younger), and has fathered at least eight children by at least six different women in an unending string of liaisons, many of which overlapped. He has been married only twice, however, with a mere three of his progeny coming from those unions.
His known children are: Laurie Murray (b. 1954), whose mother is unidentified; Kimber Eastwood (b. 1964) with stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis; Kyle Eastwood (b. 1968) and Alison Eastwood (b. 1972) with his first ex-wife, Margaret Neville Johnson; Scott Eastwood (b. 1986) and Kathryn Eastwood (b. 1988) with stewardess Jacelyn Reeves; Francesca Eastwood (b. 1993) with actress Frances Fisher; and Morgan Eastwood (b. 1996) with his second ex-wife, Dina Eastwood. The entire time that he lived with Locke she was legally married to sculptor Gordon Anderson.
Eastwood has real estate holdings in Bel-Air, La Quinta, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Cassel (in remote northern California), Idaho's Sun Valley and Kihei, Hawaii.Pale Rider- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Fritz Kiersch was born on 23 July 1951 in Alpine, Texas, USA. He is a director and writer, known for Children of the Corn (1984), Tuff Turf (1985) and Into the Sun (1991).Tuff Turf (1985)- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Pino Mercanti was born on 16 February 1911 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Nubi (1934), I cavalieri dalle maschere nere (I beati paoli) (1948) and The Underground (1970). He died on 3 September 1986 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.Ricordati di Napoli (1958)- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Yoram Gross is Australia's leading animation Producer and Director. Internationally acclaimed for his films and television series, Yoram has established a world-wide reputation for the adaptation of children's characters from books and films to animation that win the hearts of children worldwide. Yoram is known as a storyteller whose distinctive, non-violent films and series possess a contemporary charm that crosses all international barriers. Yoram has a rich personal history and uses the mediums of film and television to share his life experiences. Born in Kraków to a Jewish family, Yoram endured World War II under the Nazi regime. His family was on Oskar Schindler's infamous list, but chose to make their own risky escape, moving hiding places 72 times. Yoram looks back on these times as a valuable catalyst. He has a lot to say to children and every one of his films contains a message, including loyalty, peaceful resolve and good winning over evil. Yoram first entered the film industry in 1947 in Kraków, commencing his career as an assistant to Polish directors Cenkalski and Buczowski, as well as the Dutch director Yoris Ivens. In 1950, Yoram moved from Europe to Israel, where he worked as a newsreel and documentary cameraman. He then became an independent film producer and director and began winning prizes at film festivals all over the world. Yoram now holds more than 80 international awards for his various films. In 1968 together with his wife Sandra and their young family Yoram moved to Australia. There, Yoram continued to make experimental films and produced film clips for the popular weekly television music program 'Bandstand'. That same year, Yoram and Sandra established Yoram Gross Film Studios - initially working from home and eventually expanding the company into Australia's most prolific and well-known animation production house. Yoram's films and series have been enjoyed all over the world and his audience continues to grow from day to day. In 1995 he was awarded the prestigious Order of Australia for his outstanding achievements and for his contribution to the Australian film industry.Dot and the Bunny (1983)- Director
- Producer
- Editor
Michael Tuchner was born on 24 June 1932 in Berlin, Germany. Michael was a director and producer, known for Play for Today (1970), Whicker's World (1959) and Fear Is the Key (1972). Michael was married to Dina Eaton and Gillian Barton Cook. Michael died on 17 February 2017 in East Molesey, Surrey, England, UK.Desperate for Love (1989)- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Giorgio Capitani was born on 29 December 1927 in Paris, Île-de-France, France. He was a director and writer, known for Il maresciallo Rocca (1996), Mussolini's Daughter (2005) and Il piccolo vetraio (1955). He died on 25 March 2017 in Viterbo, Lazio, Italy.Piscatore 'e Pusilleco (1954)