Matinee

Joseph Dante Jr. was born on November 28, 1946 in Morristown, New Jersey, and raised in the nearby borough of Parisippany. His parents were professional golf players and his father wrote some books on the instructions of playing golf some of which included Four Magic Moves to Winning Golf, and Stop that Slice. After a bout with polio that nearly crippled him at age 7, he slowly recovered and decided to take up drawing rather than athletics as his parents did.

Dante studied at the Philadelphia College of Art after graduating from high school. As a teenager, he contributed to Castle of Frankenstein and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines with various drawings, and upon graduation from he College of Art, he became a film critic for the Film Buletin newspaper for which he later became the managing editor. With a friend, named Jon Davidson, Dante cut together a series of movie clips and film trailers and edited them into his first short film which was titled The Movie Orgy (1968) which was shown on college campuses.

In 1974, Jon Davidson was the head of advertising for Roger Corman’s New World Productions and persuaded Dante to move to California to work for them as an editor for various movie trailers and films. In 1976, Roger Corman allowed Dante, to direct his very first feature film with New World staffer Alan Arkush which was titled Hollywood Boulevard (1976), a low-budget feature filmed in black-and-white in just 10 days on a $50,000 budget, in which Date and Arkush inserted stock footage from other Corman-produced films. Hoping to get the jump on the success of the Steven Spielberg film Jaws, Corman commissioned Dante to direct Piranha (1978) around the same time Jaws II was being made. Working with a budget of $660,000 and with a script by John Sayles, Dante had his first serious problems with the filming which included last-minute cast changes, underwater cameras that kept breaking down, union woes, and unusable second unit footage. But the finished film was a miracle of low-budget exploitation filmmaking and has become a cult favorite.

Date worked as a second unit director for Rock and Roll High School (1979), and was then offered by producer Mike Finnell to direct The Howling (1981). With another script by John Sayles and with a budget of over $1 million, the movie about California werewolves proved to be another box-office hit, highlighted by state-of-the-art special effects by Rob Bottin. After directing two out of six episodes for the short-lived comic TV series "Police Squad! (1982), Dante found himself working alongside Steven Spielberg, John Landis and Australian director George Miller for the anthology movie The Twilight Zone, The Movie (1983) in which Dante directed the third segment, a remake of a 1961 original Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”, which allowed him to draw the script from his love of cartoons which played a major part in the segment.

Steven Spielberg then hired him to to work as director for the Chris Columbus script of Gremlens (1984) which was another box-office success. Dante then directed Explorers (1985) which starred Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as suburban kids seeking alien life. But the Paramount distributors rushed the film before Dante was finished editing it and the studio’s lackluster effort to advertise it led him to become disillusioned with the movie industry.

He directed some episodes for the Sci-Fi series “Amazing Stories” before directing his next Science Fiction feature which was Innerspace (1987) a take on the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, but was another box office failure.

After directing five episode for the series “Eerie, Indiana”, Dante returned to the big-screen with the the well-received Matinee (1993), an affectionate period satire set in 1962 against the background of the Cold War and starring John Goodman as a film director, inspired by gimmick filmmaker William Castle. Dante spent the next several years working for television and re-making several movies such as Runaway Daughters (1994) and directed a satire on politics with The Second Civil War (1997).

Dante’s next two films, Toy Soldiers (1998), and Loony Toons: Back in Action (2004) were not well received by critics. He was recruited by Mick Garris to direct an episode of the anthology series “Masters of Horror” (2005) with the episode “Homecoming” which was played as another angry social commentary and pitch-black political satire on the USA policies. —IMDb