Filmmaker Ted Kotcheff Has Died

Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff has died at the age of 94. He reportedly died from heart failure in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico after leading a quite interesting life.

He leaves behind some varied films like “Weekend at Bernie’s,” the original Rambo film “First Blood,” the famed Canadian film “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” and the iconic Australian New Wave movie “Wake in Fright”.

Kotcheff got his start as the youngest director on the staff of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before going to the UK and producing the popular “Armchair Theatre” anthology drama.

This included the famous live broadcast episode in which a character was to die of a heart attack, only for the actor playing him to suddenly die of one himself just minutes before airing – leaving the remaining actors having to improvise a chunk of the broadcast. He quickly built up a TV and West End stage resume before jumping to features with 1962’s “Tahiti Tahiti,” the drama “Life at the Top” and a telemovie remake of “The Desperate Hours”.

He really broke through with 1971’s Australian horror film “Wake in Fright,” also known as “Outback” in some territories, which released to much critical acclaim and was nominated at Cannes. Though a commercial flop at the time, it’s now considered one of the most seminal Australian New Wave and Ozploitation movies ever made.

The movie, in which a young schoolteacher who descends into his own sunburnt hell in an outback town, also became known as the most famous Australian “lost film” as the master negative went missing for years. It was ultimately rescued by editor Anthony Buckley and restored for video in 2009.

He returned to the UK where he won a British Academy TV award for his work on the telemovie “Edna, the Inebriate Woman”. Then returned home to Canada to direct a Richard Dreyfuss-led film adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” with the movie winning the Golden Bear at Berlinale in 1974. It been ranked twice in the Top 10 Canadian films of all time list made every decade by the Toronto International Film Festival.

He then tried Hollywood first with comedies like “Fun with Dick and Jane,” “Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe” and the sports film “North Dallas Forty”. He had his biggest success in 1982 with “First Blood,” a critically acclaimed adaptation of the David Morrell novel which became the first film in the now famed “Rambo” franchise (Kotcheff deliberately had no involvement in the sequels).

He followed that with the more mixed-reviewed Gene Hackman film “Uncommon Valor”, the Kathleen Turner-led comedy “Switching Channels,” and the Kurt Russell-led romantic drama “Winter People”.

In 1989 came the surprise hit with the dead body comedy “Weekend at Bernie’s,” which overcame mixed reviews to double its budget and managed to get a sequel. In the 1990s he shifted to television with series like “Red Shoe Diaries” and “Casualty”.

His big TV success in the U.S. was with Dick Wolf on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” where he was key to casting Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay, and served as an executive producer throughout its first thirteen seasons.

He was even barred from entering the U.S. for years due to brief association with a left-wing book club in the early 1950s that led to him being jailed and banished. Additionally, a musician accidentally set a U.S. flag on fire during a 1968 fundraiser he was directing at Royal Albert Hall – American authorities weren’t happy with that one either.

Amongst his many stories are a young Peter Weir was allowed to shadow Kotcheff during production of “Wake in Fright,” while he claims Michelangelo Antonioni asked for him for editing tips in regards to his then not finished film “Blow-Up”. Kotcheff says in his 2017 autobiography that Antonioni used almost all of them.

Kotcheff’s wife, Sylvia Kay, died in 2019 at 82. A documentary about the man titled “The Apprenticeship of Ted Kotcheff” is in the works.

Source: THR

The post Filmmaker Ted Kotcheff Has Died appeared first on Dark Horizons.