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1-9 of 9
- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Amir Shervan, was born Amir Hosein Ghaffar in Tehran, Iran on May 24, 1929. In the U.S. he is mostly known for directing the movies Hollywood cop and Samurai Cop but was better known in Iran for his directing, writing and acting in numerous films.
Shervan studied theater in Pasadena California in the 1940s and returned to Iran to begin his career in film. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution all movies were subject to review by the Iranian government and many of them banned due to their content while others were "purified" or altered to suit the growing anti-western and pro-Islamic sentiment. This caused a pause in his film career starting in 1980 and ending with his move to the United States where he settled in California to begin his work on Hollywood Cop. He apparently received a social security number in Alabama but it is unclear how long he was there or for what purpose.
On the set Shervan used improvisational acting and dialog often, in part due to this technique having cultural roots and later due to English being his second language. He often worked with actors/directors/writers in Iran who were never educated in film making, many of which had never graduated high school. His Iranian audience of the 1950s to 1980 was therefore accustomed to a much lower standard than the average U.S. viewer of the late 1980s. This combination of circumstances made for a large degree of accidental humor and bloopers as perceived by his new viewer base and also led to his post-mortem success as a cult-classic b-movie director. Ironically, Shervan was one of the more polished and educated filmmakers of his time in Iran and was respected as such.
He died on November 1, 2006 at age 77 soon before his rise in popularity in the U.S. as a b-movie director. He is survived by a son named Ben Shervan.- Actor
- Soundtrack
- Writer
Arch Hall Jr. was born on December 2, 1943 in Van Nuys, the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California, the only child of actor, writer and producer Arch Hall Sr. He began his career as a teen film actor and musician, appearing in a number of early 1960s films that were all produced by his father. Most of Hall Jr.'s films featured his particular musical abilities, a teenager's tenor voice and guitar riffs played with swamp blues inflection. Hall was also the front man for the rock n' roll combo Arch Hall Jr. and the Archers. The band, formed with high school friend Alan O'Day (who later wrote No. 1 pop hits in the 1970s) played in a number of Sunset Strip clubs such as the Whisky-a-Go-Go and Pandora's Box.
For the most part, Hall appeared in six feature films in the 1960s. The films produced by the Halls and their associates, which at one point included cult director Ray Dennis Steckler, are considered B-movies. Hall's roles ranged from a dune buggy-driving teenager to a rock n' roll singing spy wearing a white dinner jacket. His first film was that of being the leader of a teenage gang of car thieves in the 1961 independent film The Choppers (1961). His second role was Eegah (1962) as the lead protagonist, which has won him the most recognition, due in part to the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 featuring the movie in a 1993 episode, and the late night comedy horror series Elvira's Movie Macabre.
His third role was that of playing a young musician named Bud Eagle who tries to make a living and deal with the corruption of the music business in Los Angeles in Wild Guitar (1962). In The Sadist (1963), Hall portrayed a psychopathic killer, named Charlie Tibbs, who terrorizes a trio of helpless people in a remote auto junkyard in the desolate Antelope Valley area of California which also netted him some praise for his performance which was loosely based on teenage spree killer Charles Starkweather.
In the comedy spoof The Nasty Rabbit (aka: Spies-a-Go-Go) (1964), Hall played Britt Hunter, a secret government agent trying to locate a Russian spy trying to use a rabbit to unleash a deadly virus at a remote Dude Ranch. In the western Deadwood '76 (1965) Hall played a drifter named Billy May who is mistaken for outlaw Billy the Kid which leads to some drastic consequences.
After appearing in his last film, Hall quit his acting career and became an airline pilot (his father had flown with the Army Air Force during the Second World War). In 1967, he went to work as a pilot for the cargo carrier Flying Tiger Airlines as an apprentice co-pilot on the L-1049H, and eventually became a captain flying the Boeing 747. In 1989, Flying Tiger was purchased by FedEx and Hall flew the DC-10 until he retired in 2003. He also flew airplanes for a private company with businesses in the U.S. and Japan.
Hall wrote the novel Apsara Jet, which was published in 2001 under the pen name Nicolas Merriweather (a name often used by his father). The book draws on Hall's knowledge of both commercial airlines and Southeast Asia in telling the story of a Vietnam War vet who gets involved in the illegal drug trade.
A career-spanning 51-page interview with Hall appears in the book Earth vs. the Sci-Fi Filmmakers (McFarland & Co., 2005) by Tom Weaver. Hall's anthology, Wild Guitar, was released on Norton Records. The anthology, with liner notes and biography, collects the original '60s output of Arch Hall Jr. and the Archers, much of which was unreleased at the time.- Additional Crew
- Actor
- Sound Department
B. Wayne Keeton was a mystery character his entire life that few people knew about. Very little information exists on his personal life aside that he was born as Robert Wayne Keeton in rural Louisiana. He grew up in extreme poverty and was raised by his mother and grandmother after being abandoned by his father. He received little formal education and once claimed that his older 17-year-old brother killed himself on Christmas day when Keeton was age 13. When Keeton was age 15 or 16, he came out as a homosexual to his family who supposedly reacted by throwing him out of their house and onto the street.
Keeton then drifted around the Deep South and made a living as a hustler, pickpocket, thief and con artist. For a time in the late 1970s he lived in Houston, Texas, and was a regular at Mary's--a well-known leather dive hangout for gay men--before migrating west to Los Angeles, where he worked at odd jobs which included a restaurant waiter, cashier, construction worker, LA Metro bus driver, taxi driver, etc.
At one point in 1985, Keeton met exploitation film director and playwright Andy Milligan while Keeton was working as a dishwasher in a seedy eatery in the San Fernando Valley. Milligan recruited him as a crew member and actor for his new film company, Troupe West. Keeton moved in with Milligan and the two soon became lovers. Keeton had a bit part as a drug dealer killed in Milligan's film Monstrosity (1987) He would also work on the set manning the slate, the sound recorder, and even buy food for the cast and crew.
Keeton was also said to have continued his hustling lifestyle during the time he was with Milligan. He received a disability check from the state for $650 a month for an injury he suffered while working at a construction site in the early 1980s, and would spend it all in three or four days on alcohol, drugs, cigarettes or a combination of all three. He continued to drift in and out of jail on minor offenses from drunk and disorderly, to solicitation, to possession of narcotics. Sometimes Milligan bailed him out of jail and sometimes he didn't, but every time Keeton would come back to him.
Keeton was diagnosed with AIDS sometime in 1988, as he was seen taking a bus to and from a Los Angeles hospital during the filming of Milligan's last film, Surgikill (1989). In December of that year he traveled to his hometown in Louisiana for Christmas to meet and say goodbye to what family he had living there. He returned a few days after New Years Day in 1989, claiming that his illness made him a pariah and no one in his family wanted to be near him. Although he was nearly illiterate his whole life, he turned to his Baptist roots and began attending church as well as trying to read the Bible. He was said to have purchased stuffed toy animals during his final months as he traveled to the hospital for treatment.
B. Wayne Keeton died on June 20, 1989 at an AIDS treatment hospital in Los Angeles.- Brendan Broms is a graduate of the L.A.C.C. Theatre Academy and the Jupiter Theatre Apprentice Program. He studied improvisation for the theatre with Avery Schreiber for over ten years. Brendan has appeared in many theatrical productions in the Los Angeles area including "Zombie Attack!" and "Pot Mom" at the Cast Theatre with French Stewart and "Kabbalah: Scary Jewish Stories" directed by Stuart Gordon. Brendan made his professional debut in Lionel Richie's "Hello" video.
- Producer
- Director
- Additional Crew
Dwain Esper was probably the most obscure of the 'Hollywood hack' filmmakers of the 1930s alongside Victor Adamson, Robert J. Horner and others whom directed low-budget Westerns feature films and serials. Esper's film career was focused on softcore exploitation features which have a hard, merciless edge and a serial killer pathology. His films are too sick and mean-spirited to be guiltless kitsch and too weird to enjoy just for laughs.
Born in Washington state in October 1893, Esper's pre-cinematic background, unsurprisingly, was in the tawdry underbelly of the early 20th century carnival circuit as a barker. But after receiving a film lab as part of a settlement, he had the same revelation that later would dawn on the owners of burlesque theaters as "nudie cutie" loops: talent could balk, show up late, or ask for more money, but a film runs uncomplainingly every time it's reeled up. With dollar signs dancing in their eyes, Esper and his wife, Hildegarde Stadie, moved to Los Angeles, California and immediately plunged feet first into the underground world of exploitation film making in Hollywood.
Operating in a gray netherworld as divorced from the mainstream studio system as the underground film scene of the 1960s would later be, exploitation films back in the 1930s were pure sleaze masquerading as "education films" for an imperiled great unwashed that had a right to know about the sex menace, or the drug menace, or the white slave trade, or whatever invisible horror lurked at the perimeter of their domestic tranquility. Films like Reefer Madness (1936) (which Esper produced) played in grind-house theaters or at fly-by-night tent screenings, operating just outside the all-grasping influence of the Hays Code. It was this governing body of Hollywood censorship that prohibited film depiction of narcotic abuse, scantily dressed women, and explicit mention of sex-related indelicacies like syphilis or childbirth that were the exploitation film's stock in trade. Esper, like other exploitation directors, didn't care whether audiences left his films more enlightened about polarizing issues of the day.
Esper's first feature film which he personally produced and directed was Narcotic (1933) which is a loosely fictionalized recount of Hildegarde Esper's uncle's descent into drug addiction is a sterling example of the incomprehensible hallmarks of Esper's style: stertorous dialogue, soundtrack music that stops and starts in sudden jumps, abrupt cutaways to barely relevant stock footage (usually of some atrocity) and a narrative so spotty you're convinced several reels went missing on the way to the projection booth.
His next feature film, Maniac (1934) is a criminally perverse, very loose adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Black Cat" involving grave robbing, murder, impersonation, human psychosis, animal mutilation, along with brief snipes of topless female nudity.
Esper continued directing and exhibiting films until the late 1940s, even picking up films like Tod Browning's cult classic Freaks (1932) for reissue on the exploitation circuit after it bombed at the box office. One of his last films was a sleazy 1948 documentary titled 'Hitler's Strange Love Life' which was re-titled 'Conform or Die'. Esper also personally traveled across the country to finance and promote his own films. People who worked with Esper used to describe him as "one of the greatest con men" they ever encountered. He would routinely swindle friends and enemies alike for a quick and easy dollar and then invite them over to his house for dinner to charm them into not suing him. His films often played in out-of-the way movie houses either from Catholic conservative New England states to Mob-controlled Chicago where no other exploitation films had ever been shown to the public. He ran afoul of the law numerous times for obscenity charges, but was never tried or convicted because of either using his charisma charm or just plain sheer luck.
While his drug hysteria films like Marihuana became popular stoner midnight movie fare in the 1960s, little is known about his later years. He sold his studio and production company to the Sonney family in 1948 and then retired from film making for good having already become quite wealthy from the profits earned from his films and lived the rest of his life out of the spotlight. He died on October 18, 1982 at a hospital in San Diego following complications after surgery at age 89. But opuses like 'Maniac' and 'Narcotic' are, with a little sleuthing, still easy to obtain, thanks to an ironic twist of copyright law: every film created by Dwain Esper, the guy who went into movie making just to make a buck, is now in the royalty-free public domain.- Pouri Baneai was born Seddigheh Banayi in Arak, Iran on October 11, 1940. She lived there for four years before she and her parents moved to Tehran. She had seven sisters and one brother.
She acted in more than 85 Iranian feature films between 1965 and 1979. During her years of acting before the Iranian revolution, she cooperated with famous Iranian directors such as Mehdi Reisfirooz, Samuel Khachikian, Masoud Kimiai, Farrokh Ghaffari, and Fereidoun Goleh. Her most memorable performances are in Iranian new wave films such as Masoud Kimiai's Qeysar in 1969 and in Fereydun Gole's The Mandrake.
Her first feature film was The Foreign Bride, directed by Nosratollah Vahdat. Pouri didn't have any academic education in acting and because Vahdat was one of her distant relatives, he suggested her to act in his film. In 1967 she co-starred with Behrouz Vosoughi, a famous Iranian actor at the time. They had many co-operations and in 1970 they acted in Qeysar, known as one of the major films and a symbol of Iranian new wave. She also co-starred with other Iran Cinema superstars of the time such as Mohammad Ali Fardin, Naser Malek Motiee, Manouchehr Vosugh, Iraj Ghaderi, Ali Nasirian, and Parviz Sayyad. Most of the Farsi-language Iranian movies were dubbed in those days and famous actors and actresses had specific dubbers. Zhaleh Kazemi was Pouri Banayi's dubber. Some of her films like The Mandrake and The Falconet in addition to Qeysar and Ghazal are considered as milestones in her performances before the 1979 revolution which put a partial end to this type of Iranian cinema.
She also acted in some foreign-produced English-language films such as Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident (1978) directed by Leslie H. Martinson in which she co-starred with Peter Graves and Curd Jurgens. In another film directed by Fereydun Gole, named The Moon and a Murmur (1977), she co-starred with John Ireland and Mickey Rooney. Jean Negulesco choose her and Behrouz Vosoughi to play the roles of a couple in his last film The Invincible Six (1970). Jun'ya Sato, the Japanese director chose her for the lead actress in his 1973 adaptation of the manga, Golgo 13.
Most Iranian actors and actresses fled Iran after the 1979 revolution, because they had acted in sexy films before the revolution. Pouri Banayi chose to stay behind, but she was soon imprisoned in the Evin Detention House for over one year. She was released late in 1980, but never acted in cinema again despite that she was never technically banned from acting in films.
She was engaged to Behrouz Vosughi, but they didn't officially get married. One of Pouri's sisters is Aki Banayi (Akram Banayi) who is is a singer and presently lives in Los Angles. - Additional Crew
Rodger B. Smith was born in Columbus, Ohio on July 12, 1925. He earned a bachelor degree in business administration at the University of Michigan in 1947, and his MBA at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1953. He served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946.
Smith began his career at GM (General Motors) in 1949 as an accounting clerk, and had become the company's treasurer by 1970, and vice president the following year. In 1974, Smith was elected executive vice president in charge of the financial, public relations, and government relations staffs. He ascended to chairman of GM in 1981.
When Smith took over GM, it was reeling from its first annual loss since the early 1920s. Its reputation had been tarnished by civil and personal injury lawsuits, persistent quality problems with its manufactured vehicles, bad labor relations, public protests over the installation of Chevrolet engines in Oldsmobiles, and by a poorly designed diesel engine. GM was also losing its market share to foreign automakers for the first time.
Deciding that GM needed to completely change its structure and culture in order to remain competitive into the future, Smith instituted several initiatives that included forming strategic joint ventures with Japanese and South Korean automakers, launching the Saturn division, investing heavily in technological automation and robotics, and attempting to rid the company of its risk-averse bureaucracy. However, Smith's far-reaching goals proved too ambitious and overwhelming to be implemented effectively in the face of the company's resilient corporate culture and bureaucracy. Despite Smith's vision for a new and better GM corporation, he was unable to successfully integrate GM's major acquisitions, several of which also failed to tackle the root causes of GM's fundamental problems.
Smith began the reorganization of GM that would define his chairmanship with the 1981 creation of the worldwide Truck and Bus Group, consolidating the design, manufacture, sales and service of all trucks, buses and vans under one umbrella. The year 1982 saw the creation of the Truck and Bus Manufacturing Division, which combined all truck manufacturing and assembly operations from their former divisions, but still a separate bureaucracy from that of the Truck and Bus Group.
In 1982, Smith negotiated contract concessions with the United Auto Workers and cut planned raises for white-collar workers. After unveiling a more generous bonus program for top executives that provoked an angry response from the union, Smith was forced to back-pedal. Relations with the UAW, management, and stockholders remained strained. Profits improved in 1983 and Smith began unveiling his vision for reorganization, diversification, and "re-industrialization." As as result, many of the auto-making factories in the USA began to close down starting with the Los Angeles South Gate assembly plant that same year.
Smith took on the massive GM bureaucracy with disastrous results. A sea change in how GM would market and build cars in the future, the 1984 reorganization was intended to streamline the process and create greater efficiencies; the reverse actually occurred. Combining the nameplate divisions, Fisher Body, and GM Assembly into two groups, C-P-C (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Canada) to build small cars and B-O-C (Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac) to build large cars, the effort was subsequently criticized for creating chaos within the company. Longstanding informal relationships that greased the wheels of GM were severed, seemingly overnight, leading to confusion and slipping new product programs. The reorganization virtually stopped GM in its tracks for 18 months, and never really worked as intended, with the CPC division building Cadillacs and BOC building Pontiacs. The reorganization added costs and created more layers of bureaucracy when the new groups added management, marketing and engineering staff, duplicating existing staff at both the corporate and division levels. Almost ten years elapsed before the 1984 reorganization was unwound and all car groups were combined into one division.
Smith's major new car program prior to the 1984 reorganization, GM10 (also known as W-body), has been called "The biggest catastrophe in American industrial history." Beginning in 1982, and costing $7 billion, the plan was to replace all mid-size cars produced by Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick. The plan was huge in scope, calling for seven plants that would each assemble 250,000 of the cars, or 21% of the total U.S. car market. It was badly executed from the start, but the 1984 reorganization wrought havoc on the program and it never recovered. By 1989, the year before the last of the GM10s were launched, GM was losing $2,000 on every one of the cars it produced.
A defining theme of Smith's tenure was his vision to modernize GM using advanced technology. Some have suggested he was ahead of his time in attempting to create a 21st-century organization in a company not ready for the technology. "Lights out" factories were envisioned, where the only employees were those supervising the robots and computers. This was obviously viewed negatively by the unions, and further strained relations. Over the decade of the 1980s, GM spent upwards of $90 billion attempting to remake itself, including a 1981 joint venture with the Japanese robot manufacturer, Fujitsu-Fanuc. With the resulting venture, GMF Robotics, GM became the largest manufacturer of robots in the world. Unfortunately, the experience failed to meet with Smith's vision, with the new robots famously painting each other instead of the cars, or robots welding doors shut. Ultimately, some robotic systems and automation installed in several plants were removed shortly after their installation. The astonishing sums expended were widely viewed as money wasted.
Responding to a 1986 report on 3-year capital expenditures projected at almost $35 billion, VP of finance F. Alan Smith (no relation) opined that the sum could be spent on purchasing both Toyota and Nissan resulting in a bump in market share overnight and openly questioned whether the proposed capital expenditures would pay the same dividends; they did not. By the time Smith retired, GM had evolved from the lowest cost producer in Detroit to its highest cost producer, due in part to the drive to acquire advanced technology that never paid dividends in efficiency.
In 1984, Smith oversaw General Motors' acquisition of Electronic Data Systems from its founder Ross Perot for $2.55 billion, serving two purposes. First was the opportunity to modernize and automate GM to fulfill Smith's goals; second, it was an effort to broaden out of its manufacturing base and into technology and services. As a result of the EDS acquisition, Perot became GM's largest single shareholder, joined its board of directors, and immediately became a source of friction to Smith and a vocal and public critic of Smith and GM's management. In 1986 Smith and the board orchestrated a $743 million buyout of Perot's GM stock at a substantial premium over the market value of the shares. Perot accepted the buyout, but publicly denounced the expenditure as outrageous at a time GM was closing plants and laying off workers. He announced that he would put the money in escrow to give the automaker a chance to reconsider, but never actually sequestered the funds.
The structure of the deal was unusual in that EDS would be owned by GM, but Smith promised it would allow Perot autonomy to run the company. In addition, the stock of EDS became a special 'Class E' GM stock, which was separate from normal GM stock, an arrangement which almost got GM kicked off the NYSE. Perot eventually agreed to the deal, because, as Lee puts it, he was sold on the idea of saving millions of American jobs by helping GM fight off Japanese competition.
The relationship between Smith, Perot, and the EDS executives ruptured openly in September 1985, during a meeting in Dallas that brought the EDS executive compensation issue to a head. Smith was reluctant to accept the EDS plan, substituting a plan of his own. What ensued was one of the most vitriolic corporate battles of the 1980s, with Perot and Smith publicly exchanging barbs using the media, which delightedly splashed the story over every business publication in the U.S. Perot notoriously lashed out at Smith in a 1988 exclusive to Fortune Magazine, saying: "My question is: Why haven't we unleashed their potential? The answer is: the General Motors system. It's like a blanket of fog that keeps these people from doing what they know needs to be done. I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is... nothing. You figure, the snake hasn't bitten anybody yet, so you just let him crawl around on the factory floor. We need to build an environment where the first guy who sees the snake kills it."
His tenure at GM ended one year after the release of the popular underground documentary film Roger & Me (1989), where many displaced GM workers called for Smith's retirement. Smith voluntarily resigned as chairman of GM in 1990 and afterwords retired from business altogether. He later toured the new Saturn facility in Tennessee, which he brought to fruition, in 1991.
Smith's tenure is commonly viewed as a failure, as GM's share in the US stock market fell from 46% to 35%, and it took on considerable debt causing it to lapse close to bankruptcy in the early 1990s. As a result, CNBC has called Smith one of the "Worst American CEOs of All Time", stating: "Smith had the right idea, but lacked the intuition to understand how his rip-up-the-carpet redo would affect the delicate web of informal communication that GM relied upon."
Roger B. Smith died in his sleep on November 29, 2007 after a short illness at age 82. A specific cause of death has never been released.- Writer
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Sergio Sollima was born on April 27, 1921 in Rome, Italy. Like many of his colleagues, he began his career as a film critic before gaining entry into the movie industry as a screenwriter. After authorizing a number of book volumes on film history, Sollima used his contacts to began his career as a script writer and assistant director.
His early writing career includes penning a number of scripts for Italian-produced "sword-and-sandal" fantasy sagas like Ursus (1961) (The Mighty Ursus), Goliath contro i giganti (1961) (Goliath Against the Giants), and I dieci gladiatori (1963) (The Ten Gladiators). Working on pepla, Sollima also did double duty as both a writer and assistant director, working for various film directors such as Gianfraco Parolini and Domenico Paolella, filming action scenes as an 2nd unit director. This provided Sollima with invaluable experience and he was soon able to move into the director's chair with ease.
Although best known as a director of a few Spaghetti Westerns or Italo-Westerns alongside two other 'Sergio' directors whom include Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, Sollima excelled at a number of different genres. After testing waters with the short film La Donne for the comedy L'amore difficile (1962) (Of Wayward Love), Sollima helmed a trio of spy films designed to capitalize on the popularity of the British produced James Bond film series. Sollima wrote the scripts to the first two films, Agente 3S3: Passaporto per l'inferno (1965) (Agent 3S3: Passport to Hell), and Agente 3S3, massacro al sole (1966) (Agent 3S3: Massacre in the Sun) on the condition that he would direct them personally. The films were shot back to back with Sollima credited under the pseudonym 'Simon Sterling'.
Sollima's third spy film, Requiem per un agente segreto (1966) was a far out more ambitious project that is seen as a re-working of the James Bond films. Here, Sollima peels away from the suave and sophisticated exterior of Bond by portraying the Italian spy Bingo (played by Stewart Granger) as a cold and sadistic thug.
The following year, Sollima made what some Spaghetti Western fans would say as one of the best Italo Western films ever which was La resa dei conti (1966) (The Big Gundown) which the director sought to transcend the traditional limits of the genre by capitalizing on the political aspects of the story. The central clash of the story is that a falsely accused Mexican peasant (played by Tomas Milian) and a corrupt businessman (played by Walter Barnes) was much broader in implication which Sollima compared to either an American solider to a Viet Cong, or a British Army officer against an African native youth. He also took a shot with comparing to the Sergio Leone westerns that audiences with sympathize better with Milian's character than a "cold and remote superhero like Clint Eastwood."
After the international success of The Big Gundown, Sollima made another Western which was Faccia a faccia (1967) (Face to Face), which Sollima claims it to be his personal favorite. Sollima claims that Face to Face was born from the idea that people change from good to bad or bad to good when they find themselves in exceptional circumstances where the role reversal of a bandit to a schoolteacher and vice versa.
Sollima's final Western was Corri uomo corri (1968) (Run Man Run) which was an indirect sequel to The Big Gundown in which featured Tomas Milian returning to his role as Cuchillo. Although entertaining and action packed, Run Man Run did not match the popularity of the first film and was never released internationally outside Italy. Its limited success motivated Sollima to explore different genres and his next picture was Città violenta (1970) transported the themes and concerns of his Westerns to an urban contemporary setting in Milan, Italy. Released as Violent City in the USA, the film featured Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland and Telly Savalas in a complex and serpentine story of betrayal and brutal vengeance. Despite its commercial success, Sollima had at this point grown tired of staging elaborate action scenes and in 1972 he directed the low-key, psychological mystery Il diavolo nel cervello (1972) (A Devil in the Brain). Sollima clashed with his producers who wanted to market the film as a fast-paced giallo and he later blamed the pictures misleading advertising for its disappointing box office returns.
Sollima returned to directing crime thrillers (poliziotteschi) with Revolver (1973) which starred Oliver Reed and Fabio Testi. Transporting the basic premise and character of The Big Showdown to a modern urban setting, Sollima also added a darker spin to the classic story of corruption and betrayal. The final film, with its uncompromisingly grim finale, is Sollima's most highly politicized work to date.
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sollima worked almost exclusively for television, finding success with a mini-series of feature films which included "Sandokan" (1976), a desert adventure series based on a series of pulp fiction novels by Emilio Salgari. He briefly returned to the big screen with directing a feature film of the Sandokan series and then directed the action thriller Berlin '39 (1993). His latest TV film series "Il figlio di Sandokan" (1998) (Son of Sandokan) never aired, after which at age 77, Sollima retired from film making.
Sergio Sollima died on July 1, 2015 at his home in Rome, Italy at age 94 of undisclosed causes.- Zheng Cao was born to parents Mao Yuan Cao and Xiao Jiao Huang in Shanghai, China. Her sister Dan Cao, four years her senior, is her only sibling. As an undergraduate, she attended Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In 1988, Cao moved to the United States to attend American University in Washington, D.C. to study English and sing. She then began attending Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In July 1990, she began performing as a mezzo-soprano at the Chinese Community Church in Washington DC. In 1993, Cao earned a Master's degree from the Curtis Institute of Music.
In 1994, Cao was accepted to the Merola Opera Program, a San Francisco training program at the San Francisco Opera Center for opera singers, coaches, and stage directors. There, Cao sang the role of Dorabella in the Italian-language opera buffa Cosi fan tuttle.
She was subsequently chosen to be an Adler Fellow for the San Francisco Opera. While in the two-year performance-oriented residency for promising young artists, Cao debuted in the role of Nicklausse in the opera fantastique The Tales of Hoffmann when she covered for an ailing Susan Quittmeyer.
In 1998, Cao performed in Beethoven's 9th Symphony at the Nagano Winter Olympics as a soloist for an opening ceremony concert conducted by conductor Seiji Ozawa. She subsequently appeared with Ozawa as Marguerite in Berlioz's La damnation de Faust at the Saito Kinen Festival, as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, in A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and for the Ozawa's farewell concert singing Beethoven's Choral Fantasy in Tanglewood Music Center.
Returning to the San Francisco Opera stage many times, Cao performed roles including Suzuki, Cherubino, Idamante in Idomeneo and Siebel in Faust. She sang the role of Suzuki at Le Grand Theatre de Geneve, Washington Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, and San Diego Opera. She later returned to San Diego Opera to sing the role of Siébel and appeared at Michigan Opera Theatre, Kentucky Opera, and Washington Opera as Rosina in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia.
At the Los Angeles Opera, she appeared as Penelope in Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria by Monteverdi and Zerlina in Don Giovanni, a role she also sang at Opera Pacific. She made her debut at Opera Pacific as Nicklausse. At Houston Grand Opera she debuted in Janacek's Kata Kabanova singing Varvara, and later returned to sing Cherubino.
Cao performed on the concert stage with the Philadelphia Orchestra where she sang Mozart's Requiem. She sang Handel's Messiah with both the National Symphony Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic. She performed Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn with the San Francisco Symphony, and Das Lied von der Erde with the Sacramento Symphony and China Philharmonic and on a tour of the Canary Islands. Composer Jake Heggie wrote a number of songs for her, and she performed and recorded many of his compositions.
To celebrate the Beijing Summer Olympics 2008, Cao toured some former Summer Olympics cities as one of China's cultural ambassadors to give a series of concerts with the China Philharmonic. The tour was cut short by the Sichuan earthquake in Western China, but not before she had performed for and met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.
Cao performed the world premiere of two opera roles, Magali in Salsipuedes by Daniel Catán and Ruth Young Kamen in Stewart Wallace's The Bonesetter's Daughter, the latter with a libretto by Amy Tan based on her book of the same name. The role of Ruth was created for Cao, and the opera had its world premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2008.
While at Curtis in Philadelphia, Cao also performed on a cruise ship, where she first met actor Troy Donahue in the early 1990s while he worked as an acting teacher. After Cao received her master's degree from Curtis, she and Donahue moved to Santa Monica, California and became a couple. Donahue traveled with Cao to cities where she performed when he was not away doing personal appearances on cruises and at film festivals or acting in Hollywood. They became engaged in 1999 and remained together until his death in September 2001 from a heart attack at the age of 65. Cao then moved back to San Francisco.
In April 2009 Cao, a non-smoker, was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer which resulted in brain, liver and bone metastases. She was initially treated successfully with radiation therapy for bone tumors and Gamma Knife radiation therapy for several brain lesions as reported on ABC News's "Good Morning America".
Shortly after her diagnosis of lung cancer in 2009, she met Dr. David Larson, a radiation oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco and at Washington Hospital in Fremont, California, where he treated her with Gamma Knife radiation therapy for several brain tumors. Their doctor-patient relationship turned to friendship and later to a romantic relationship, and they were married in December 2010 in San Francisco. Throughout her four-year battle with lung cancer, Cao was treated three more times for brain lesions, twice with Gamma Knife radiation therapy and once with whole brain radiation therapy.
The chemotherapy Cao received shrunk Cao's lung and liver tumors by over 50% in the first three months. This allowed her to continue to perform on the opera stage, singing with Pittsburgh Opera and Vancouver Opera. After 16 months the drug stopped working, and Cao began a series of both common chemotherapy and clinical trials.
The results of these treatments were mixed, and Cao's last public performance was in 2011 with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra where she sang Nathaniel Stookey's Into the Bright Lights with words by her close friend and mentor, mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade.
Zheng Cao died from complications from lung cancer at her home in San Francisco on February 21, 2013 at age 46.