The Savage Eye

Joseph Strick (July 6, 1923 – June 2, 2010) was an American director, producer and screenwriter.

Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Strick briefly attended UCLA before enrolling in the Army during World War II. In the Army, he served as a cameraman in the Army Air Forces.

In 1948, he and Irving Lerner produced Muscle Beach. For several years in the 1950s, Lerner, Strick, Ben Maddow, and Sidney Meyers worked part-time on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye (1959).

Strick was also a successful businessman, founding Electrosolids Corp (1956), Computron Corp. (1958), Physical Sciences Corp (1958), and Holosonics Corp. (1960) In 1977 he invented the usage of six-axis motion simulators as entertainment systems and applied it to new machines used now in Disney theme parks as “Star Tours.”

In the 1960s, during his first marriage, Strick commissioned what would be the only house designed by Oscar Niemeyer in North America. The marriage ended in divorce before construction was completed, though, and Strick never occupied the house, located on the edge of Santa Monica Canyon.

The Savage Eye won the BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award, and was hailed as part of an “American New Wave” alongside the work of Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes.In 1970, He won an Academy award for best documentary for his movie Interviews with My Lai Veterans. His most well-known ventures include a film adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses and also of his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as the movie Never Cry Wolf (1983).

In Britain he directed at the Royal Shakespeare Company (1964) and the National Theatre (2003).

Strick, who had primarily resided in Paris since the early 1970s, died in a Paris hospital of congestive heart failure. —Wikipedia