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- Director
- Editorial Department
- Actor
Hal Ashby was born the fourth and youngest child in a Mormon household, in Ogden, Utah, to Eileen Ireta (Hetzler) and James Thomas Ashby, on September 2, 1929. His father was a dairy farmer. After a rough childhood that included the divorce of his parents, his father's suicide, his dropping out of high school, getting married and divorced all before he was 19, he decided to leave Utah for California. A Californian employment office found him a printing press job at Universal Studios. Within a few years, he was an assistant film editor at various other studios. One of his pals while at MGM was a young messenger named Jack Nicholson. He moved up to being a full fledged editor on The Loved One (1965) and started editing the films of director Norman Jewison.
A highlight of his film editing career was winning an Oscar for the landmark In the Heat of the Night (1967). Itching to become a director, Jewison gave him a script he was too busy to work on called The Landlord (1970). It became Ashby's first film as a director. From there he delivered a series of well-acted, intelligent human scaled dramas that included The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), Bound for Glory (1976), Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979). Great reviews and Oscar nominations became common on Ashby films.
Ashby was always a maverick and a contrary person and success proved difficult for Ashby to handle. He became unreliable due to his dependence on drugs and a reclusive lifestyle. He actually collapsed while making The Rolling Stones concert film Let's Spend the Night Together (1982) in Arizona. Although he recovered, he was never the same after that. He began taking too much time in post production on his films and actually had a couple of his later projects taken away from him to be edited by others. He tried to straighten himself out, but in the 1980s, he was considered by many to be unemployable. Just when he felt he was turning a corner in his life, he developed cancer that spread to his liver and colon. He died on December 27, 1988. Actor Sean Penn dedicated his first film as a director, The Indian Runner (1991) to Ashby and John Cassavetes, even though Penn was never directed by either one. Because he did not have a set visual style, many mistake this for no style at all. His career is not discussed as often as the careers of some of his contemporaries.# Morrer Mil Vezes (1986)
# Muito Além do Jardim (1979)
# Amargo Regresso (1978)
# Esta Terra é Minha Terra (1976)
# Shampoo (1975)
# Ensina-me a Viver (1971)
# Amor sem Barreiras (1970)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Hal Hartley is an American filmmaker, writer, director, producer, and composer who has made twelve feature films since 1988. Popularly associated with the American independent filmmaking scene of the early nineties, he went on to write and direct such films as No Such Thing (2001) for United Artists and Fay Grim (2006) for HD Net Films. Hartley has won numerous awards at Cannes and Sundance, and has had his work shown in retrospectives around the world. He has also written and staged theatre, most notably his play Soon (1998) and the world premiere of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's opera La Commedia (2008). He maintains his own production company, Possible Films, in New York City.
Hartley established himself as a noted and prolific filmmaker in the first decade of his career, making many films very quickly: The Unbelievable Truth (Nominated, 1990 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize), Trust (Winner, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival), Surviving Desire (1991), Simple Men (Official Selection, 1992 Cannes Film Festival), Amateur (Official Selection, 1994 Cannes Director's Fortnight; Winner, 1994 Tokyo International Film Festival Young Filmmakers Award), Flirt (1995), and Henry Fool (Winner, 1998 Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay).
In 1998 Hartley shot his first digital video feature, an eschatological comedy called The Book of Life. He continued with a monster movie, No Such Thing (Official Selection, 2001 Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard), and a futuristic dystopia, The Girl from Monday (Winner, 2005 Sitges International Film Festival "Premi Noves Visions" Award). In 2004 he moved to Berlin, where he made Henry Fool's sequel, Fay Grim (Official Selection, 2006 Toronto International Film Festival; Winner, 2006 RiverRun International Film Festival Audience Choice Award). The distribution for his most recent release, Meanwhile (2012), was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Hartley has made dozens of short films, many of which are available in anthology form as Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004 (2004) and PF2 (2010). There have been retrospectives of his work in the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Korea, Argentina, and Poland. He is an alumnus of the American Academy in Berlin. He was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the Republic of France in 1996, and taught filmmaking at Harvard University from 2001 to 2004.
Hartley was born on November 3, 1959 to Eileen (nee Flynn) and Harold Hartley. He grew up in Lindenhurst, Long Island, in a working class suburb an hour from New York City with two older brothers and a younger sister. He graduated from Lindenhurst High School in 1977 and enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he took a formative elective in Super 8 filmmaking. He returned home after the 1977-1978 academic year to earn more money for schooling, eventually matriculating at the State University of New York at Purchase Film School in September 1980. He graduated in May 1984, and after a year of various production assistant jobs, settled into a position at a commercial production company where his boss helped finance his first feature, The Unbelievable Truth (1989).# Fay Grim (2006)
# Beatrice e o Monstro (2001)
# As Confissões de Henry Fool (1997)
# Flerte (1995)- Producer
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Hal Roach was born in 1892 in Elmira, New York. After working as a mule skinner, wrangler and gold prospector, among other things, he wound up in Hollywood and began picking up jobs as an extra in comedies, where he met comedian Harold Lloyd in 1913 in San Diego. By all accounts, including his own, he was a terrible actor, but he saw a future in the movie business and in Harold Lloyd. Roach came into a small inheritance and began producing, directing and writing a series of short film comedies, under the banner of Phun Philms (soon changed to Rolin, which lasted until 1922), starring Lloyd in early 1915. Initially these were abysmal, but with tremendous effort, the quality improved enough to be nominally financed and distributed by Pathe, which purchased Roach's product by the exposed foot of film. The Roach/Lloyd team morphed through two characters. The first, nominally tagged as "Will E. Work", proved hopeless; the second, "Lonesome Luke," an unabashed imitation of Charles Chaplin, proved more successful with each new release. Lloyd's increasing dissatisfaction with the Chaplin clone character irritated Roach to no end, and the two men engaged in a series of battles, walkouts and reconciliations. Ultimately Lloyd abandoned the character completely in 1917, creating his now-famous "Glasses" character, which met with even greater box-office success, much to the relief of Roach and Pathe. This new character hit a nerve with the post-war public as both the antithesis and complement to Chaplin, capturing the can-do optimism of the age. This enabled Roach to renegotiate the deal with Pathe and start his own production company, putting his little studio on a firm financial foundation. Hal Roach Productions became a unique entity in Hollywood. It operated as a sort of paternalistic boutique studio, releasing a surprising number of wildly popular shorts series and a handful of features. Quality was seldom compromised and his employees were treated as his most valuable asset.
Roach's relationship with his biggest earner was increasingly acrimonious after 1920 (among other things, Lloyd would bristle at Roach's demands to appear at the studio daily regardless of his production schedule). After achieving enormous success with features (interestingly, his only real feature flop of the 1930s was with General Spanky (1936), a very poorly conceived vehicle for the property), Lloyd had achieved superstar status by the standards of "The Roaring Twenties" and wanted his independence. The two men severed ties, with Roach retaining re-issue rights for Lloyd's shorts for the remainder of the decade. While both men built their careers together, it was Lloyd who first recognized his need for creative freedom, no longer needing Roach's financial support. This realization irked Roach, and from this point forward he found it difficult, if not impossible, to offer unadulterated praise for his former friend and star (while Lloyd himself was far more generous in his later praise of Roach, he, too, could be critical, if more accurate, in his recollections). Lloyd went on to much greater financial success at Paramount.
Despite facing the prospect of losing his biggest earner, Roach was already preoccupied with building his kiddie comedy series, Our Gang, which became an immediate hit with the public. By the time he turned 25 in 1917, Roach was wealthy and increasingly spending time away from his studio. He traveled extensively across Europe. By the early 1920s he had eclipsed Mack Sennett as the "King of Comedy" and created many of the most memorable comic series of all time. These included the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, Edgar Kennedy, 'Snub' Pollard and especially the long-running Our Gang series (AKA "The Little Rascals" in TV distribution). Pathe, which distributed his films, shut down its U.S. operations after its domestic representative, Paul Brunet, returned to France in 1927. But Roach was able to secure an even better deal with MGM (his key competitor, Mack Sennett, was also distributed by Pathe, but he was unable to land a deal, ultimately declaring bankruptcy in 1933). For the next eleven years Roach shored up MGM's bottom line, although the deal was probably more beneficial to Roach. In the mid-'30s Roach became inexplicably enamored of 'Benito Mussolini', and sought to secure a business alliance with the fascist dictator's recently completed film complex, Cinecitta. After Roach asked for (and received) assurances from Mussolini that Italy wasn't about to seek sanctions against the Jews, the two men formed RAM ("Roach And Mussolini") Productions, a move that appalled the powers at MGM parent company, Leow's Inc. These events coincided with Roach selling off "Our Gang" to MGM and committing himself solely to feature film production. In September 1937, Il Duce's son, Vittorio Mussolini, visited Hollywood and Roach's studio threw a lavish party celebrating his 21st birthday. Soon afterward the Italian government took on an increasingly anti-Semitic stance and, in retribution, Leow's chairman Nicholas Schenck canceled his distribution deal. Roach signed an adequate deal with United Artists in May 1938 and redeemed his previous record of feature misfires with a string of big hits: Topper (1937) (and its lesser sequels), the prestigious Of Mice and Men (1939) and, most significantly, One Million B.C. (1940), which became the most profitable movie of the year. Despite the nearly unanimous condemnation by his industry peers, Roach stubbornly refused to re-examine his attitudes over his dealings with Mussolini, even in the aftermath of World War II (he proudly displayed an autographed portrait of the dictator in his home up until his death). His tried-and-true formula for success was tested by audience demands for longer feature-length productions, and by the early 1940s he was forced to try his hand at making low-budget, full-length screwball comedies, musicals and dramas, although he still kept turning out extended two-reel-plus comedies, which he tagged as "streamliners"; they failed to catch on with post-war audiences. By the 1950s he was producing mainly for television (My Little Margie (1952), Blondie (1957) and The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna (1956), for example). His willingness to delve into TV production flew in the face of most of the major Hollywood studios of the day. He made a stab at retirement but his son, Hal Roach Jr., proved an inept businessman and drove the studio to the brink of bankruptcy by 1959. Roach returned and focused on facilities leasing and managing the TV rights of his film catalog.
In 1983 his company developed the first successful digital colorization process. Roach then became a producer for many TV series on the Disney Channel, and his company still produces most of their films and videos. He died peacefully just shy of his 101st birthday, telling stories right up until the end.# Um Ocidental Oriental (1920)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
What do the classic films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959) have in common? Aside from their displays of great craftsmanship, the answer is director Howard Hawks, one of the most celebrated of American filmmakers, who ironically, was little celebrated by his peers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during his career.
Although John Ford--his friend, contemporary and the director arguably closest to him in terms of his talent and output--told him that it was he, and not Ford, who should have won the 1941 Best Director Academy Award (for Sergeant York (1941)), the great Hawks never won an Oscar in competition and was nominated for Best Director only that one time, despite making some of the best films in the Hollywood canon. The Academy eventually made up for the oversight in 1974 by voting him an honorary Academy Award, in the midst of a two-decade-long critical revival that has gone on for yet another two decades. To many cineastes, Hawks is one of the faces of American film and would be carved on any film pantheon's Mt. Rushmore honoring America's greatest directors, beside his friend Ford and Orson Welles (the other great director who Ford beat out for the 1941 Oscar). It took the French "Cahiers du Cinema" critics to teach America to appreciate one of its own masters, and it was to the Academy's credit that it recognized the great Hawks in his lifetime.
Hawks' career spanned the freewheeling days of the original independents in the 1910s, through the studio system in Hollywood from the silent era through the talkies, lasting into the early 1970s with the death of the studios and the emergence of the director as auteur, the latter a phenomenon that Hawks himself directly influenced. He was the most versatile of American directors, and before his late career critical revival he earned himself a reputation as a first-rate craftsman and consummate Hollywood professional who just happened, in a medium that is an industrial process, to have made some great movies. Recognition as an influential artist would come later, but it would come to him before his death.
He was born Howard Winchester Hawks in Goshen, Indiana, on Decoration Day, May 30, 1896, the first child of Franklin Winchester Hawks and his wife, the former Helen Brown Howard. The day of his birth the local sheriff killed a brawler at the town saloon; the young Hawks was not born on the wild side of town, though, but with the proverbial silver spoon firmly clenched in his young mouth. His wealthy father was a member of Goshen's most prominent family, owners of the Goshen Milling Co. and many other businesses, and his maternal grandfather was one of Wisconsin's leading industrialists. His father's family had arrived in America in 1630, while his mother's father, C.W. Howard, who was born in Maine in 1845 to parents who emigrated to the U.S. from the Isle of Man, made his fortune in the paper industry with his Howard Paper Co. Ironically, almost a half-year after Howard's birth, the first motion picture was shown in Goshen, just before Christmas on December 10, 1896. Billed as "the scientific wonder of the world," the movie played to a sold-out crowd at the Irwin Theater. However, it disappointed the audience, and attendance fell off at subsequent showings. The interest of the boy raised a Presbyterian would not be piqued again until his family moved to southern California.
Before that move came to pass, though, the Hawks family relocated from Goshen to Neenah, Wisconsin, when Howard's father was appointed secretary/treasurer of the Howard Paper Co. in 1898. Howard grew up a coddled and spoiled child in Goshen, but in Neenah he was treated like a young prince. His maternal grandfather C.W. lavished his grandson with expensive toys. C.W. had been an indulgent father, encouraging the independence and adventurousness of his two daughters, Helen and Bernice, who were the first girls in Neenah to drive automobiles. Bernice even went for an airplane ride (the two sisters, Hawks' mother and aunt, likely were the first models for what became known as "the Hawksian women" when he became a director). Brother Kenneth Hawks was born in 1898, and was looked after by young Howard. However, Howard resented the birth of the family's next son, William B. Hawks, in 1902, and offered to sell him to a family friend for ten cents. A sister, Grace, followed William. Childbirth took a heavy toll on Howard's mother, and she never quite recovered after delivering her fifth child, Helen, in 1906. In order to aid her recovery, the family moved to the more salubrious climate of Pasadena, California, northeast of Los Angeles, for the winter of 1906-07. The family returned to Wisconsin for the summers, but by 1910 they permanently resettled in California, as grandfather C.W. himself took to wintering in Pasadena. He eventually sold his paper company and retired. He continued to indulge his grandson Howard, though, buying him whatever he fancied, including a race car when the lad was barely old enough to drive legally. C.W. also arranged for Howard to take flying lessons so he could qualify for a pilot's license, an example followed by Kenneth.
The young Howard Hawks grew accustomed to getting what he wanted and believed his grandfather when C.W. told him he was the best and that he could do anything. Howard also likely inherited C.W.'s propensity for telling whopping lies with a straight face, a trait that has bedeviled many film historians ever since. C.W. also was involved in amateur theatrics and Howard's mother Helen was interested in music, though no one in the Hawks-Howard family ever was involved in the arts until Howard went to work in the film industry.
Hawks was sent to Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, for his education, and upon graduation attended Cornell University, where he majored in mechanical engineering. In both his personal and professional lives Hawks was a risk-taker and enjoyed racing airplanes and automobiles, two sports that he first indulged in his teens with his grandfather's blessing.
The Los Angeles area quickly evolved into the center of the American film industry when studios began relocating their production facilities from the New York City area to southern California in the middle of the 1910s. During one summer vacation while Howard was matriculating at Cornell, a friend got him a job as a prop man at Famous Players-Lasky (later to become Paramount Pictures), and he quickly rose trough the ranks. Hawks recalled, "It all started with Douglas Fairbanks, who was off on location for some picture and phoned in to say they wanted a modern set. There was only one art director . . . and he was away on another location. I said, 'Well, I can build a modern set.' I'd had a few years of architectural training at school. So I did, and Fairbanks was pleased with it. We became friends, and that was really the start."
During other summer vacations from Cornell, Hawks continued to work in the movies. One story Hawks tells is that the director of a Mary Pickford film Hawks was working on, A Little Princess (1917), became too inebriated to continue working, so Hawks volunteered to direct a few scenes himself. However, it's not known whether his offer was taken up, or whether this was just one more of his tall tales. During World War I Hawks served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps and later joined the Army Air Corps, serving in France. After the Armistice he indulged in his love of risk, working as an aviator and a professional racing car driver. Drawing on his engineering experience, Hawks designed racing cars, and one of his cars won the Indianapolis 500. These early war and work experiences proved invaluable to the future filmmaker.
He eventually decided on a career in Hollywood and was employed in a variety of production jobs, including assistant director, casting director, script supervisor, editor and producer. He and his brother Kenneth shot aerial footage for motion pictures, but Kenneth tragically was killed during a crash while filming. Howard was hired as a screenwriter by Paramount in 1922 and was tasked with writing 40 story lines for new films in 60 days. He bought the rights for works by such established authors as Joseph Conrad and worked, mostly uncredited, on the scripts for approximately 60 films. Hawks wanted to direct, but Paramount refused to indulge his ambition. A Fox executive did, however, and Hawks directed his first film, The Road to Glory (1926) in 1926, also doubling as the screenwriter.
Hawks made a name for himself by directing eight silent films in the 1920s, His facility for language helped him to thrive with the dawn of talking pictures, and he really established himself with his first talkie in 1930, the classic World War I aviation drama The Dawn Patrol (1930). His arrival as a major director, however, was marked by 1932's controversial and highly popular gangster picture Scarface (1932), a thinly disguised bio of Chicago gangster Al Capone, which was made for producer Howard Hughes. His first great movie, it catapulted him into the front rank of directors and remained Hawks' favorite film. Unnder the aegis of the eccentric multi-millionaire Hughes, it was the only movie he ever made in which he did not have to deal with studio meddling. It leavened its ultra-violence with comedy in a potent brew that has often been imitated by other directors.
Though always involved in the development of the scripts of his films, Hawks was lucky to have worked with some of the best writers in the business, including his friend and fellow aviator William Faulkner. Screenwriters he collaborated with on his films included Leigh Brackett, Ben Hecht, John Huston and Billy Wilder. Hawks often recycled story lines from previous films, such as when he jettisoned the shooting script on El Dorado (1966) during production and reworked the film-in-progress into a remake of Rio Bravo (1959).
The success of his films was partly rooted in his using first-rate writers. Hawks viewed a good writer as a sort of insurance policy, saying, "I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture." Though he won himself a reputation as one of Hollywood's supreme storytellers, he came to the conclusion that the story was not what made a good film. After making and then remaking the confusing The Big Sleep (1946) (1945 and 1946) from a Raymond Chandler detective novel, Hawks came to believe that a good film consisted of at least three good scenes and no bad ones--at least not a scene that could irritate and alienate the audience. He said, "As long as you make good scenes you have a good picture--it doesn't matter if it isn't much of a story."
It was Hawks' directorial skills, his ability to ensure that the audience was not aware of the twice-told nature of his films, through his engendering of a high-octane, heady energy that made his films move and made them classics at best and extremely enjoyable entertainments at their "worst." Hawks' genius as a director also manifested itself in his direction of his actors, his molding of their line-readings going a long way toward making his films outstanding. The dialog in his films often was delivered at a staccato pace, and characters' lines frequently overlapped, a Hawks trademark. The spontaneous feeling of his films and the naturalness of the interrelationships between characters were enhanced by his habit of encouraging his actors to improvise. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock, Hawks saw his lead actors as collaborators and encouraged them to be part of the creative process. He had an excellent eye for talent, and was responsible for giving the first major breaks to a roster of stars, including Paul Muni, Carole Lombard (his cousin), Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift and James Caan. It was Hawks, and not John Ford, who turned John Wayne into a superstar, with Red River (1948) (shot in 1946, but not released until 1948). He proceeded to give Wayne some of his best roles in the cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), in which Payne played a broad range of diverse characters.
During the 1930s Hawks moved from hit to hit, becoming one of the most respected directors in the business. As his fame waxed, Hawks' image replaced the older, jodhpurs-and-megaphone image of the Hollywood director epitomized by Cecil B. DeMille. The new paradigm of the Hollywood director in the public eye was, like Hawks himself, tall and silver-haired, a Hemingwayesque man of action who was a thorough professional and did not fail his muse or falter in his mastery of the medium while on the job. The image of Hawks as the ultimate Hollywood professional persists to this day in Hollywood, and he continues to be a major influence on many of today's filmmakers. Among the directors influenced by Hawks are Robert Altman, who used Hawksian overlapping dialog and improvisation in M*A*S*H (1970) and other films. Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote a book about Hawks, essentially remade Bringing Up Baby (1938) as What's Up, Doc? (1972). Brian De Palma remade "Scarface" (Scarface (1983)). Other directors directly indebted to Hawks are John Carpenter and Walter Hill.
Hawks was unique and uniquely modern in that, despite experiencing his career peak in an era dominated by studios and the producer system in which most directors were simply hired hands brought in to shoot a picture, he also served as a producer and developed the scripts for his films. He was determined to remain independent and refused to attach himself to a studio, or to a particular genre, for an extended period of time. His work ethic allowed him to fit in with the production paradigms of the studio system, and he eventually worked for all eight of the major studios. He proved himself to be, in effect, an independent filmmaker, and thus was a model for other director-writer-producers who would arise with the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s and 1960s and the rise of the director as auteur in the early 1970s. Hawks did it first, though, in an environment that ruined or compromised many another filmmaker.
Hawks was not interested in creating a didactic cinema but simply wanted to tell, give the public, a good story in a well-crafted, entertaining picture. Like Ernest Hemingway, Hawks did have a philosophy of life, but the characters in his films were never intended to be role models. Hawks' protagonists are not necessarily moral people but tend to play fair, according to a personal or professional code. A Hawks film typically focuses on a tightly bound group of professionals, often isolated from society at large, who must work together as a team if they are to survive, let alone triumph. His movies emphasize such traits as loyalty and self-respect. Air Force (1943), one of the finest propaganda films to emerge from World War II, is such a picture, in which a unit bonds aboard a B-17 bomber and the group is more than the sum of the individuals.
Aside from his interest in elucidating human relationships, Hawks' main theme is Hemingwayesque: the execution of one's job or duty to the best of one's ability in the face of overwhelming odds that would make an average person balk. The main characters in a Hawks film typically are people who take their jobs with the utmost seriousness, as their self-respect is rooted in their work. Though often outsiders or loners, Hawksian characters work within a system, albeit a relatively closed system, in which they can ultimately triumph by being loyal to their personal and professional codes. That thematic paradigm has been seen by some critics and cinema historians as being a metaphor for the film industry itself, and of Hawks' place within it.
In a sense, Hawks' oeuvre can be boiled down to two categories: the action-adventure films and the comedies. In his action-adventure movies, such as Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the male protagonist, played by Cary Grant (a favorite actor of his who frequently starred in his films between 1947 and 1950), is both a hero and the top dog in his social group. In the comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), the male protagonist (again played by Grant) is no hero but rather a victim of women and society. Women have only a tangential role in Hawks' action films, whereas they are the dominant figures in his comedies. In the action-adventure films society at large often is far away and the male professionals exist in an almost hermetically sealed world, whereas in the comedies are rooted in society and its mores. Men are constantly humiliated in the comedies, or are subject to role reversals (the man as the romantically hunted prey in "Baby," or the even more dramatic role reversal, including Cary Grant in drag, in I Was a Male War Bride (1949)). In the action-adventure films in which women are marginalized, they are forced to undergo elaborate courting rituals to attract their man, who they cannot get until they prove themselves as tough as men. There is an undercurrent of homo-eroticism to the Hawks action films, and Hawks himself termed his A Girl in Every Port (1928) "a love story between two men." This homo-erotic leitmotif is most prominent in The Big Sky (1952).
By the time he made "Rio Bravo," over 30 years since he first directed a film, Hawks not only was consciously moving towards parody but was in the process of revising his "closed circle of professionals" credo toward the belief that, by the time of its loose remake, "El Dorado" in 1966, he was stressing the superiority of family loyalties to any professional ethic. In "Rio Bravo" the motley group inside the jailhouse eventually forms into a family in which the stoical code of conduct of previous Hawksian groups is replaced by something akin to a family bond. The new "family" celebrates its unity with the final shootout, which is a virtual fireworks display due to the use of dynamite to overcome the villains who threaten the family's survival. The affection of the group members for each other is best summed up in the scene where the great character actor Walter Brennan, playing Wayne's deputy Stumpy, facetiously tells Wayne that he'll have tears in his eyes until he gets back to the jailhouse. The ability to razz Wayne is indicative of the bond between the two men.
The sprawl of Hawks' oeuvre over multiple genres, and their existence as high-energy examples of film as its purest, emphasizing action rather than reflection, led serious critics before the 1970s to discount Hawks as a director. They generally ignored the themes that run through his body of work, such the dynamics of the group, male friendship, professionalism, and women as a threat to the independence of men. Granted, the cinematic world limned by Hawks was limited when compared to that of John Ford, the poet of the American screen, which was richer and more complex. However, Hawks' straightforward style that emphasized human relationships undoubtedly yielded one of the greatest crops of outstanding motion pictures that can be attributed to one director. Hawks' movies not only span a wide variety of genres, but frequently rank with the best in those genres, whether the war film ("The Dawn Patrol"), gangster film ("Scarface"), the screwball comedy (His Girl Friday (1940)), the action-adventure movie ("Only Angels Have Wings"), the noir (The Big Sleep (1946)), the Western ("Red River") and "Rio Bravo"), the musical-comedy (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)) and the historical epic (Land of the Pharaohs (1955)). He even had a hand in creating one of the classic science-fiction films, The Thing from Another World (1951), which was produced by Hawks but directed by Christian Nyby, who had edited multiple Hawks films and who, in his sole directorial effort, essentially created a Hawks film (though rumors have long circulated that Hawks actually directed the film rather than Nyby, that has been discounted by such cast members as Kenneth Tobey and James Arness, who have both stated unequivocally that it was Nyby alone who directed the picture).
Though Howard Hawks created some of the most memorable moments in the history of American film a half-century ago, serious critics generally eschewed his work, as they did not believe there was a controlling intelligence behind them. Seen as the consummate professional director in the industrial process that was the studio film, serious critics believed that the great moments of Hawks' films were simply accidents that accrued from working in Hollywood with other professionals. In his 1948 book "The Film Till Now," Richard Griffin summed this feeling up with "Hawks is a very good all rounder."
Serious critics at the time attributed the mantle of "artist" to a director only when they could discern artistic aspirations, a personal visual style, or serious thematic intent. Hawks seemed to them an unambitious director who, unlike D.W. Griffith or the early Cecil B. DeMille, had not made a major contribution to American film, and was not responsible for any major cinematic innovations. He lacked the personal touch of a Charles Chaplin, a Hitchcock or a Welles, did not have the painterly sensibility of a John Ford and had never matured into the master craftsman who tackled heavy themes like the failure of the American dream or racism, like George Stevens. Hawks was seen as a commercial Hollywood director who was good enough to turn out first-rate entertainments in a wide variety of genre films in a time in which genre films such as the melodrama, the war picture and the gangster picture were treated with a lack of respect.
One of the central ideas behind the modernist novel that dominated the first half of the 20th-century artistic consciousness (when the novel and the novelist were still considered the ultimate arbiters of culture in the Anglo-American world) was that the author should begin something new with each book, rather than repeating him-/herself as the 19th century novelists had done. This paradigm can be seen most spectacularly in the work of James Joyce. Of course, it is easy to see this thrust for "something new" in the works of D.W. Griffith and C.B. DeMille, the fathers of the narrative film, working as they were in a new medium. In the post-studio era, a Stanley Kubrick (through Barry Lyndon (1975), at least) and Lars von Trier can be seen as embarking on revolutionary breaks with their past. Howard Hawks was not like this, and, in fact, the latter Hawks constantly recycled not just themes but plots (so that his last great film, "Rio Bravo," essentially was remade as "El Dorado (1966)" and Rio Lobo (1970)). He did not fit the "modernist" paradigm of an artist.
The critical perception of Hawks began to change when the auteur theory--the idea that one intelligence was responsible for the creation of superior films regardless of their designation as "commercial" or "art house"--began to influence American movie criticism. Commenting on Hawks' facility to make films in a wide variety of genres, critic Andrew Sarris, who introduced the auteur theory to American movie criticism, said of Hawks, "For a major director, there are no minor genres." A Hawks genre picture is rooted in the conventions and audience expectations typical of the Hollywood genre. The Hawks genre picture does not radically challenge, undermine or overthrow either the conventions of the genre or the audience expectations of the genre film, but expands it the genre by revivifying it with new energy. As Robert Altman said about his own McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), he fully played on the conventions and audience expectations of the Western genre and, in fact, did nothing to challenge them as he was relying on the audience being lulled into a comfort zone by the genre. What Altman wanted to do was to indulge his own artistry by painting at and filling in the edges of his canvas. Thus, Altman needed the audience's complicity through the genre conventions to accomplish this.
As a genre director, Hawks used his audience's comfort with the genre to expound his philosophy on male bonding and male-female relationships. His movies have a great deal of energy, invested in them by the master craftsman, which made them into great popular entertainments. That Hawks was a commercial filmmaker who was also a first-rate craftsman was not the sum total of his achievement as a director, but was the means by which he communicated with his audience.
While many during his life-time would not have called Hawks an artist, Robin Wood compared Hawks to William Shakespeare and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, both of whom created popular entertainments that could also appeal to elites. According to Wood, "The originality of their works lay not in the evolution of a completely new language, but in the artist's use and development of an already existing one; hence, there was common ground from the outset between artist and audience, and 'entertainment' could happen spontaneously without the intervention of a lengthy period of assimilation."
The great French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who began his cinema career as a critic, wrote about Hawks, "The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game . . . Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular 'Rio Bravo'. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all the others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all that he holds most dear into a well-worn subject."
A decade before Godard's insight on Hawks, in the early 1950s, the French-language critics who wrote for the cinema journal "Cahiers du Cinema" (many of whom would go on to become directors themselves) elevated Howard Hawks into the pantheon of great directors (the appreciation of Hawks in France, according to Cinématheque Francaise founder Henri Langlois, began with the French release of "Only Angels Have Wings." The Swiss Éric Rohmer, who would one day become a great director himself, in a 1952 review of Hawks' "The Big Sky" declared, "If one does not love the films of Howard Hawks, one cannot love cinema." Rohmer was joined in his enthusiasm for Hawks by such fellow French cineastes as Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. The Cahiers critics claimed that a handful of commercial Hollywood directors like Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock had created films as artful and fulfilling as the masterpieces of the art cinema. André Bazin gave these critics the moniker "Hitchcocko-Hawksians".
Rivette wrote in his 1953 essay, "The Genius of Howard Hawks," that "each shot has a functional beauty, like a neck or an ankle. The smooth, orderly succession of shots has a rhythm like the pulsing of blood, and the whole film is like a beautiful body, kept alive by deep, resilient breathing." Hawks, however, considered himself an entertainer, not an "artist." His definition of a good director was simply "someone who doesn't annoy you." He was never considered an artist until the French New Wave critics crowned him one, as serious critics had ignored his oeuvre. He found the adulation amusing, and once told his admirers, "You guys know my films better than I do."
Commenting on this phenomenon, Sarris' wife Molly Haskell said, "Critics will spend hours with divining rods over the obviously hermetic mindscape of [Ingmar Bergman], [Michelangelo Antonioni], etc., giving them the benefit of every passing doubt. But they will scorn similar excursions into the genuinely cryptic, richer, and more organic terrain of home-grown talents."
Hawks' visual aesthetic eschews formalism, trick photography or narrative gimmicks. There are no flashbacks or ellipses in his films, and his pictures are usually framed as eye-level medium shots. The films themselves are precisely structured, so much so that Langlois compared Hawks to the great modernist architect Walter Gropius. Hawks strikes one as an Intuitive, unselfconscious filmmaker.
Hawks' definition of a good director was "someone who doesn't annoy you." When Hawks was awarded his lifetime achievement Academy Award, the citation referred to the director as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures, taken as a whole, represent one of the most consistent, vivid, and varied bodies of work in world cinema." It is a fitting epitaph for one of the greatest directors in the history of American, and world cinema.# El Dorado (1966)
# Hatari! (1962)
# Os Homens Preferem as Loiras (1953)
# O Inventor da Mocidade (1952)
# Rio Vermelho (1948)
# Uma Aventura na Martinica (1944)
# Sargento York (1941)
# Levada da Breca (1938)- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Hans Weingartner was born on 2 November 1977 in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg, Austria. He is a director and writer, known for The Edukators (2004), Das weiße Rauschen (2001) and 303 (2018).# A Cabana (2011)
# Edukators (2004)- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Beginning his film career as a screenwriter, Henri-Georges Clouzot switched over to directing and in 1943 had the distinction of having his film The Raven (1943) banned by both the German forces occupying France and the Free French forces fighting them, but for different reasons. He shot to international fame with The Wages of Fear (1953) and consolidated that success with Diabolique (1955), but continuous ill health caused large gaps in his output, and several projects had to be abandoned (though one, Hell (1994), was subsequently filmed by Claude Chabrol). His films are typically relentless suspense thrillers, similar to Alfred Hitchcock's but with far less light relief.# As Diabolicas (1955)- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Art Department
Henry Hathaway, son of a stage actress and manager, started his career as a child actor in westerns directed by Allan Dwan. His movie career was interrupted by World War I. After his discharge he briefly tried a career in finance but returned to Hollywood to work as an assistant director under such directors as Frank Lloyd, Paul Bern, Josef von Sternberg and Victor Fleming, whom Hathaway credited for his eventual success. In 1932 he directed his first picture, Heritage of the Desert (1932), a western. His approach has been described as uncomplicated and straightforward, while at the same time noted for their striking visual effects and unusual locations. He had a reputation as being difficult on actors, but stars such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe benefited under his direction. Although Hathaway was a highly successful and reliable director working within the Hollywood studio system, his work has received little attention from critics.# O Parceiro do Diabo (1971)
# Aeroporto (1970)
# Pôquer de Sangue (1968)
# Bravura Indômita (1969)
# Poquer de Sangue (1968)
# Servidão Humana (1964)
# Príncipe Valente (1954)
# Envolto nas Sombras (1946)
# A Casa da Rua 92 (1945)
# O Filho dos Deuses (1940)
# Heróis Esquecidos (1939)- Actor
- Director
- Producer
For more than three decades, Henry King was the most versatile and reliable (not to mention hard-working) contract director on the 20th Century-Fox lot. His tenure lasted from 1930 to 1961, spanning most of Hollywood's "golden" era. King was renowned as a specialist in literary adaptations (A Bell for Adano (1945), The Sun Also Rises (1957)) and for his nostalgic depictions of rural or small-town America (Margie (1946)). Much of his work was characterized by an uncomplicated approach and a vivid visual style rather than cinematic tricks or technical individuality. For the most part it was his meticulous attention to detail, and his reliance on superior plots and good acting, that got the job done. King was, above all, an astute judge of talent. He introduced Ronald Colman to American audiences in The White Sister (1923), drawing a mustache on the actor's clean-shaven face with a retouching pencil--the real thing later becoming a Colman trademark. King discovered Gary Cooper and cast him in a leading dramatic role in his outdoor western The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), over the initial objections of producer Samuel Goldwyn who thought Coop was just another "damn cowboy". Goldwyn quickly changed his mind after seeing the rushes. Other King discoveries included the lovely Jean Peters (in Captain from Castile (1947)) and Tyrone Power, whom he actively promoted to the point of badgering studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck to star him in Lloyd's of London (1936). Power subsequently became one of Fox's most popular stars.
All in all, not bad for a guy who had left school at 15 to work for the Norfolk & Western Railroad. After enduring the machine shops for a few years, King found more suitable employment as an apprentice actor with the touring Empire Stock Company, where he often performed song-and-dance routines in blackface. During his travels he befriended comedy actress Pearl White. While accompanying her on a visit to the Lubin film studio in Philadelphia in 1913, he was somehow talked into trying out as an actor. Before long King found himself cast as assorted western villains in scores of one-reelers. Moving to California the following year, he graduated to romantic leads in full-length feature films with the Balboa Amusement Company, often co-starring opposite popular child actress Marie Osborne. King's directing career began in 1915 and gathered momentum after he joined The American Film Manufacturing Company, and, subsequently, Thomas H. Ince. His first success was the army comedy 23 1/2 Hours' Leave (1919). By 1921 King fronted his own production company, Inspiration Pictures, releasing through First National. The rustic southern drama Tol'able David (1921) was his next critically acclaimed picture, but not until joining Goldwyn at United Artists (1925-30) did he manage to turn out a consistent string of hits, including The White Sister (1923) and Romola (1924)--both shot on location in Italy--and the archetypal tearjerker Stella Dallas (1925). For King, the transition to sound pictures was a mere formality.
In 1930 King qualified for his pilot's license and began busily scouting locations from the air, earning him the sobriquet "The Flying Director". When not airborne or on the golf course (his other passion), he demonstrated his amazing versatility with box-office hits across a wide variety of genres: striking and colorful swashbucklers (The Black Swan (1942)); romantic or religious melodramas--their sentimentality well-tempered so they never seemed maudlin--such as (The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)); epics (In Old Chicago (1938), with its splendid recreation of the 1871 great fire, the entire enterprise filmed at a staggering cost of $1.8 million); popular musicals (Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), Carousel (1956)); psychological war drama (Twelve O'Clock High (1949)); and uncompromisingly tough, offbeat westerns (The Gunfighter (1950) and the underrated The Bravados (1958)). The latter three all starred King's preferred leading actor, Gregory Peck. Peck was also on hand for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), reputedly Ernest Hemingway's favorite among all his filmed adaptations. Of course, King also had his occasional failures. Topping that list was Zanuck's pet project, the biopic Wilson (1944). Overly serious to the point of being dour, its pacifist message was lost to an audience in the middle of a world war. King's other notable dud, near the end of his career, was Beloved Infidel (1959). Badly miscast, the film chronicling the affair between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham was played out, inaccurately, as a genteel and overly glossy romance.
Though nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Director, King failed to snag the coveted trophy. However, he did win a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America in 1956. More importantly, perhaps, he seems to have enjoyed his work, stating in a 1978 interview, "I've had more fun directing pictures than most people have playing games" (New York Times, July 1 1982).# O Velho e o Mar (1958)
# E Agora Brilha o Sol (1957)
# Suplício de uma Saudade (1955)
# Almas em Chamas (1949)
# A Canção de Bernadette (1943)- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Henry Koster was born Herman Kosterlitz in Berlin, Germany, on May 1, 1905. His maternal grandfather was a famous operatic tenor Julius Salomon (who died of tuberculosis in the 1880s). His father was a salesman of ladies unmentionables who left the family while Henry was at a young age, leaving him to support the family. He still managed to finish gymnasium (high school) in Berlin while working as a short-story writer and cartoonist. He was introduced to movies in 1910 when his uncle Richard opened a movie theater in Berlin and his mother went there every day to play the piano to accompany the films. Henry went with her--day care being nonexistent then--and had to sit for a couple of hours a day staring at the movie screen.
He achieved success as a short-story writer at age 17, resulting in his being hired by a Berlin movie company as a scenarist. He became an assistant to director Curtis Bernhardt. Bernhardt fell sick one day and asked Henry to direct (this was around 1931 or 1932). He had directed two films in Berlin for Aafa when Adolf Hitler came to power. He was in the midst of directing The Private Secretary Gets Married (1933) at that point, and having already been the victim of anti-Semitism, he knew he had to leave Germany, and soon. Any doubts he entertained about leaving were erased when, at a bank on his lunch hour one day, a Nazi SA officer insulted him; Henry hit the Nazi so hard he knocked him out. He proceeded to go directly to the railroad station and took a train for France. Upon arriving in France he was rehired by Bernhardt (who had left earlier). Eventually Henry went to Budapest and met and married Kató Király (1934). It was there he met producer Joe Pasternak, who represented Universal Pictures in Europe, and directed four films for him.
In 1936 he was signed to a contract with Universal and brought to Hollywood with Pasternak, several other refugees and his wife. At first he had some troubles at the studio (he didn't speak English), but eventually convinced Universal to let him make Three Smart Girls (1936) with Deanna Durbin and coached Durbin, who was 14 years old. The picture was a huge success and pulled Universal from the verge of bankruptcy. His second film, One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) with Durbin and Leopold Stokowski, put Universal, Durbin, Pasternak and himself on top. He went on to do numerous musicals and family comedies during the late 1930s and early 1940s, many with Betty Grable, Durbin and other musical stars of the era. He stayed at Universal until 1941, then worked for MGM, and around 1948 moved over to 20th Century-Fox. He was nominated for an Academy Award for The Bishop's Wife (1947).
In 1950 he directed what was his biggest success to date--the James Stewart comedy Harvey (1950), but, although many in the industry thought it would be nominated for Best Picture, it wasn't. He directed the first American film in which Richard Burton appeared, My Cousin Rachel (1952), then was assigned by Fox to direct its first CinemaScope picture, The Robe (1953), also with Burton, which was a tremendous success. He directed a few more costume dramas, such as Désirée (1954) with Marlon Brando, then went back to family comedies and musicals, such as Flower Drum Song (1961) for Universal. After he finished The Singing Nun (1966) he retired from the film business to Leisure Village, Camarillo, CA, to indulge his lifelong interest in painting. He did a series of portraits of the movie stars with whom he worked.# A Rainha Tirana (1955)
# Eu Te Matarei, Querida! (1952)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
The old Etonian, after National Service in the British Army, wanted to get into films but found the doors were closed to him, so he worked on commercials for about 20 years. David Putnam gave him a chance to direct Chariots of Fire which was a hit, and he never looked back.
He met his second wife, actress Maryam d'Abo, when she came to see him about wanting to play the leading role of Jane in his film Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). They reconnected 15 years later at a dinner party. They wed four years later in 2003.# Greystoke - A Lenda de Tarzan (1984)- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Harry d'Arrast's entry into the movie industry was somewhat unusual--he was wounded while serving in the French army during WW I, and while recuperating in a military hospital met French-born American film director George Fitzmaurice, who invited him to come to Hollywood after he had recovered. He did so, and got work as a researcher and technical adviser on several films, including Charles Chaplin's A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923), then became Chaplin's assistant on The Gold Rush (1925). He made his directorial debut in 1927 and directed seven films until he left Hollywood in 1933. Although his output was sparse, his films were universally acclaimed for their wit, sophistication, beautiful photography and smooth pacing. D'Arrast often found himself in conflict with his producers, however, for his refusal to cut corners and speed up production, and in 1933 departed Hollywood for Europe. He made one film in Spain, then returned to his home in France. He spent the rest of his life at his family estate outside of Monte Carlo, and made his living at the roulette tables in the Monte Carlo casino.# Asas (1927)- Writer
- Director
- Additional Crew
Partly due to the uneven quality of his work, Henri Decoin remained an overlooked director. Born in 1890, he was a sports correspondent, a novelist, Gallone's assistant, and a screenwriter, As a director, some of his films noirs are simply stellar and deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those of Clouzot and Duvivier.
His first efforts (from 1933 to 1941) were often vehicles for Danielle Darrieux, one of the greatest stars of the French cinema. They married in 1935 and divorced in 1941. "Le Domino Vert" (1935) was a melodramatic detective story. In both "Abus De Confiance" and "Battements De Coeur", Darrieux played an orphan. The Cinderella syndrome was much better applied on "Premier Rendez-Vous" which made the actress the young girls' idol. "Premier Rendez-Vous" was more of the same, but was another fine comedy of the occupation days. However, in 1938, in "Retour A l'Aube" elements of thriller burst into what was a charming dreamlike tale; this was the key to Decoin's future as he would make his way through the forties.
1942 inaugurated the era of Decoin's films noirs: "Les Inconnus Dans La Maison" from Simenon was the story (imitated many times afterward) of an alcoholic lawyer who redeems himself, a renaissance with a masterful Raimu. "L'Homme De Londres" (Simenon again, later remade by Bela Tarr) depicted a working man's dilemma in the gloomy atmosphere of a harbor. "La Fille Du Diable" (1945) and "Non Coupable" (1947) were the cream of Decoin's work: both Andrée Clément and Michel Simon reached peaks of cynicism and the atmosphere of those films was so black, so desperate, that the viewer needed a breath of fresh air after watching them. With its four (or maybe five) suicides, its spoofs on marriage and religion, "Les Amants Du Pont Saint-Jean" was still Decoin's finest hour. "Les Amoureux Sont Seuls Au Monde" was more romantic, but a romantic tragedy: this time,another suicide might have seemed too much for the producers who reportedly asked for a happy end (today, only the sad ending is screened). "Entre Onze Heures Et Minuit" had a brilliant beginning (people, leaving a movie theater, complain about the implausibility of these dead ringers films, they actually meet three doubles who make them shiver), but the rest of the movie was uneven mainly because highly talented Jouvet and Madeleine Robinson were not able to make up for a weak supporting cast.
The fifties were as uneven as ever. On the plus side: "La Verite Sur Bébé Donge" (1951) from Simenon saw Darrieux's return in her ex-husband's world: all dressed in black (and beautiful), like a death angel, she visited her dying husband (Gabin) with a pallid face in a white room. Darrieux was also featured in "Bonnes A Tuer" (1954), a stifling thriller in which Larry (Michel Auclair) gathered the four women of his life, with a view of killing one of the them, but which one? "Dortoir Des Grandes", in a girls boarding school, showed teenagers playing very strange games at night. "Razzia Sur La Chnouff", dealing with drugs, opted for a quasi-documentary style.
The rest is less successful: his thrillers became more and more disappointing ("Le Feu Aux Poudres", " Tous Peuvent Me Tuer", "Pourquoi Viens-Tu Si Tard?"). But the unfairly neglected "Malefices" (1961) from Boileau-Narcejac, a story of black magic and Amour Fou on an island sometimes inaccessible, nearly matched his best thrillers' level. Juliette Greco's beauty and mystery added to a deadly charm.
His "resistance" efforts, both episodes of "La Chatte", seem obsolete today and are remembered only for Françoise Arnoul who turned a questioning at the Gestapo into an erotic extravaganza. Historic dramas "L"Affaire Des Poisons" and "Le Masque De Fer" were looked upon as failures, particularly Dumas's famous story. His swansong "Nick Carter Va Tout Casser" (1964) was a vehicle for Eddie Constantine and paled into insignificance next to his finest thrillers.
He died in 1969; his son Didier Decoin became a famous writer.# Noites de Casablanca (1963)- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Harald Zwart was born in Leiden, Netherlands, and his family moved to Norway where he grew up. He made his first film when he was 8 years and was active with Super8 and stop motion animation for years. He was accepted into the highly acclaimed Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam, NL, where he spent 4 years, specializing in Directing, Script and Editing. Harald's exam film "Garbriel's Surprise" (about a young man who was given a second chance by Gabriel to correct the wrong), was screened on all Scandinavian TV stations and Harald was quickly headhunted into doing commercials in Norway. He met his wife and partner Veslemoey Ruud Zwart and they've worked together since. She started managing his deals and started the company Zwart Arbeid A/S
After a few years of producing and directing award winning commercials all over Europe, they did their first feature, "Commander Hamilton" [tt0119249/], and then they got "the call" from Hollywood where were invited to have lunch with Steven Spielberg. He had seen the commercials and was impressed by the concise story telling and humor. Shortly after the couple moved permanently to Los Angeles where Veslemoey started Motion Blur. A commercial film production company where they continued to make ads for the world wide market.
Their first feature was "One Night At McCool's" with Michael Douglas producing, starring Liv Tyler, John Goodman, Matt Dillon, Paul Reiser, Reba McIntyre and more.
Since then they have continued producing under the Zwart Arbeid banner, and opened Motion Blur films and commercials in Norway where they have steadfast produced films, TV shows and commercials. Harald travels all over the world to direct commercials for all the markets, and in the US he's most known for the Capital One Commercials with the Vikings. He's most known for the movies The Karate Kid with Will Smith and Overbrook/SONY producing, and "The 12th Man" which they produced under their own company Zwart Arbeid with Nordisk Film distributing.
Their latest Norwegian Movie "Lange Flate Ballær" went straight to #1 and is the highest grossing Norwegian movie so far in 2022.