Visions of Eight

Forman grew up in a small town near Prague. Orphaned when his parents, a Jewish professor and a Protestant housewife, died in Nazi concentration camps, he was reared by two uncles and family friends. In the mid-1950s Forman studied at the film school of the University of Prague. Upon graduating he wrote two screenplays, the first of which, Nechte to na mn (“Leave It to Me”), was filmed in 1955 by noted Czech director Martin Fri. Forman in 1957 was himself an assistant director on the second of these screenplays, a situation comedy entitled Stenata (“The Puppies”).

Throughout the late 1950s and early ‘60s Forman acted as either writer or assistant director on other films. He directed his first major productions in 1963: Cerný Petr (Black Peter) and Konkurs (Talent Competition). These films had great success both domestically and on the international festival circuit, and Forman was hailed as a major talent of the Czech New Wave. His early films were characterized by their examination of working-class life and their enthusiasm for a socialist lifestyle. These elements are also evident in Lásky jedné plavovlásky (1965; Loves of a Blonde) and Hoí, má panenko (1967; _The Firemen’s Ball_), both of which explored social and moral issues with gentle satire. When Firemen’s Ball was banned in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of 1968, Forman immigrated to the United States.

His first American film, Taking Off (1971), was the last to incorporate his early themes. Although he clearly demonstrated his mastery of the craft of direction and showed a remarkable ability to work with actors, most of his American films are also bereft of the earlier social concerns that defined his Czech films. In 1975 he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an independent production that had been turned down by every major studio. It became only the second film in history to win Academy Awards in all the four major categories: best picture, best director, best actor (Jack Nicholson), and best actress (Louise Fletcher).

Forman followed this success with several adaptations, including one of the popular Broadway musical Hair (1979), an epic telling of E.L. Doctorow’s novel set in turn-of-the-century America, Ragtime (1981), and the screen version of the Peter Shaffer play Amadeus (1984). The last film, an exuberant celebration of the genius of Mozart, won the Oscar for best picture and earned Forman his second Oscar for directing.

With The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Forman returned to the theme of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—the misuse of power within a hopeless and comic bureaucracy. It garnered Academy Award nominations for best director and best actor. In 1999 he directed Man on the Moon, the life story of comedian Andy Kaufman. He followed that with Goya’s Ghosts (2006), about painter Francisco de Goya. With Jan Novák, Forman wrote Turnaround: A Memoir in 1994. –biography.com

Kon Ichikawa was considered one of the masters of the immediate postwar generation of Japanese filmmakers, a generation often overshadowed by the titanic presence of Akira Kurosawa. Unlike Kurosawa, Ichikawa imbued his films with a sense of irony that swings from the sardonic to the compassionate. Born in 1915 in southern Mie Prefecture, Ichikawa grew up a sickly child and spent much of his childhood drawing. Like Kurosawa, he aspired to be a painter. He also grew to be an enthusiastic movie fan, seeing most of the early samurai epics by Daisuke Ito and Masahiro Makino while marveling at Charles Chaplin films. Yet it was Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies series that proved to be a revelation for Ichikawa, as he realized that animation could combine his passions for art and for movies. After finishing technical school in Osaka in the 1930s, he got a job at the animation department of J.O. studios just as it was expanding from a rental film house to a full-fledged production company. As the Pacific War began, J.O merged with rival P.C.L to become studio giant Toho; Ichikawa was shifted from the dissolved animation department to become an assistant director. Ichikawa’s first feature-length film was Musume Dojoji (1946), a ghost story told through puppetry. Unfortunately, the U.S. occupation forces confiscated and subsequently lost the film, not because of its content but because Ichikawa failed to submit the script to censors before its release. Even after he reached the ranks of international renown, Ichikawa still considered this film his masterpiece.

Many of Ichikawa’s films were reworked from other sources. His closest collaborator during his creative peak in the 1950s and 1960s was his wife, screenwriter Natto Wada, who proved skilled at creating screenplays from literary sources, all bearing elements of Ichikawa’s signature irony. Together he and Wada adapted Toson Shimazaki’s Hakai into The Outcast (1962); Junichiro Tanizaki’s Kagi into Odd Obsession (1959); and Yukio Mishima’s The Golden Pavilion into Enjo (1958), about a stuttering acolyte who burns down Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion to protect its purity from a world of corruption and decay. Enjo is often considered one of Ichikawa’s best films by both critics and by the director himself. Ichikawa and Wada also adapted two pre-WWII movies, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1935) and Yutaka Abe’s The Woman Who Touched Legs, and one comic book, Puu-San. At a time when dewy-eyed melodramas dominated screens in Japan, Ichikawa cranked out a number of hard-edged, bitingly satirical comedies in the early 1950s. In A Billionaire (1954), for example, he builds an unlikely comic situation around a suicidal tax collector and a family of eighteen poisoned by radioactive tuna. Although Ichikawa shared the existential humanism of such postwar contemporaries as Keisuke Kinoshita and Akira Kurosawa, he rarely slouched into the sentimentalism that sometimes marred the work of his counterparts. Perhaps his most humanistic and moving work was his best-known work in the West, Burmese Harp, which won the San Giorgio Prize at the Venice Film Festival and tells the story of a Japanese soldier in Burma who forsakes repatriation and disguises himself as monk to bury the war dead. Later in Ichikawa’s career, black humor and irony gave way to the macabre in Fire on the Plains (1959), about a band of desperate Japanese soldiers driven to cannibalism. In 1965, Ichikawa released Tokyo Olympiad; although widely hailed as a masterpiece of the sport documentary genre, the studio, expecting a straight report of the game’s wins and losses, butchered Ichikawa’s original edit, prompting him to leave the studio and start a production company with his old friend Kurosawa. One of his last films was an adaptation of the age-old saga 47 Ronin. Ichikawa died of pneumonia at age 92 in February 2008.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:95358~T1)

Born in the 9th arrondissement of Paris to a Jewish family of Algerian origin, Lelouch won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966 for Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman), as well as two oscars including best foreign language film. The 1981 musical epic Les Uns et les Autres is widely considered as his masterpiece, and his credits now add up to 50 or so films. His father gave him a camera to give him a fresh start after his failure in the baccalaureat. He started his career with reportage – one of the first to film daily life in the U.S.S.R., the camera hidden under his coat as he made his personal journey. He also filmed sporting events like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Tour de France. His first full length film as director, Le Propre de l’homme, was decried by the critics – ‘Claude Lelouch, remember this name well, because you will not hear it again’ – Cahiers du Cinema said. La Femme Spectacle (1963), following prostitutes, women shopping, going for nose-jobs, was censored for its misogynist tendency. Un homme et une femme changed his fortunes and was met with favour even by the Cahiers group. Legend has it that Lelouch found himself one morning on the beach at Deauville when he caught sight of a young woman and her child on the sand. He thought about her story, tried to put together the story of how she had arrived at that moment. The scenario for the film was born. Lelouch set in place here some of the techniques of his filming he will use all his career. He used the locations for decor (here, the Grand Hotel at Deauville), recycled images from his old films (here, the 24 Hours of Le Mans), and used product placement as a means of financing his work (here, Jean-Louis Trintignant and his Ford Mustang.)

Lelouch is known for making movies based heavily on improvised dialogue.

He was arrested after his 1976 film, C’était un rendez-vous, reportedly at the time featuring a Ferrari 275 GTB being illegally driven at speeds approaching 140 km/h through the streets of Paris by a Formula 1 driver, was first shown publicly.

Recent claims made by the director himself, however, suggest he drove his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 in the film and dubbed the sound effects of a Ferrari 275GTB.

In recent years the public and the critics have seemed less interested in the director. The first part of his intended trilogy ’ Le Genre Humain’, ‘Les Parisiens’ was described in Paris Match as one of the most resounding flops of French cinema. Perhaps a director like Cedric Klapisch had replaced him in the hearts of the younger generation? Lelouch responded, ’It’s true no doubt, my public has grown old. It stays home and watches television.’

He has collaborated on no fewer than 28 occasions with the composer Francis Lai. They scored a great hit with the piece ‘chabadabada’ for the film Un homme et une femme sung by Nicole Croisille and Pierre Barouh, and more than 300 versions of the song exist.

He is the father of 7 children and is currently married to Alessandra Martines. —IMDb

Once the vanguard of 1960s-1970s Hollywood New Wave, director Arthur Penn saw his cinematic fortunes decline with the mid-‘70s rise of more straightforward blockbuster entertainment. Even as he struggled through the ’80s and ’90s, however, Penn’s legacy was assured by such films as Little Big Man (1970), Night Moves (1975), and the pivotal masterwork Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
Born in Philadelphia, Penn was trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as a watchmaker, but by high school, he knew he preferred theater. While stationed at Fort Jackson, SC, during World War II, Penn formed a small drama circle with his fellow infantrymen, and continued his education as an actor at school in North Carolina and Italy after the war. Though Penn acted in Joshua Logan’s theater company and studied with Michael Chekhov at the Actors Studio’s Los Angeles branch, he opted for a career behind the scenes when he got a job at NBC TV in 1951. By 1953, Penn was writing and directing live TV productions for the Philco Playhouse and Playhouse 90. Earning a shot at feature films, Penn combined the Method acting concentration on character psychology with the story of legendary Western outlaw Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958). Starring Paul Newman as Billy and shot in crisp black-and-white, The Left-Handed Gun emphasized ‘50s rebel neuroses over pastoral spectacle, becoming more of a character study of youthful revolt spiked with dramatic violence than a typical good vs. bad oater. Though European audiences loved it, Americans were unimpressed. Having directed the Broadway success Two for the Seesaw that same year, Penn stuck with theater and quickly established a sterling reputation with consecutive Broadway hits: The Miracle Worker, Toys in the Attic, and All the Way Home.
Penn returned to movies with the film adaptation of The Miracle Worker (1962). Resisting pressure to cast Elizabeth Taylor, Penn insisted that Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke reprise their stage roles as intrepid tutor Annie Sullivan and her blind and deaf charge Helen Keller. Saccharine-free and masterfully acted, The Miracle Worker became a hit, earning an Oscar nomination for Penn and Oscar wins for Bancroft and Duke. Penn’s Hollywood glow quickly diminished, however, when star Burt Lancaster abruptly fired Penn two days into shooting on The Train (1964). Angry and undaunted, Penn proceeded to make the underrated and little seen Mickey One (1965). Shot with French New Wave aplomb and starring Warren Beatty, Mickey One eschewed all narrative certainty in its highly personal exploration of a nameless man’s paranoid flight from the Mob, presaging the enormous influence New Wave technical freedom, genre revision, and ambiguity would have on Hollywood a few years later. Penn left filmmaking again in disgust after producer Sam Spiegel fired him from The Chase (1966) and recut the film.
After a year off, however, Penn was coaxed back into movies by Beatty to helm Bonnie and Clyde. Though they clashed during production, Beatty saw to it that he and Penn could cast the film with unknowns from New York theater and TV, shoot with no studio interference on location in Texas, and edit the film in New York. With his producer-star’s full support, Penn aimed to make the violence as brutal as possible, culminating with the incendiary quick-cut, slow-motion climax showing the eponymous glamour outlaws riddled by bullets. Though critics were repulsed by the bloodshed and the notion of criminals as beautiful doomed heroes, Beatty, armed with a rave by Pauline Kael and reports of audience enthusiasm, fought Warner Bros. for a re-release and Penn’s combination of French New Wave style with an American genre finally made an impact. Hailed as a visionary work and embraced by the youthful Vietnam-era audience, Bonnie and Clyde became a pop-culture phenomenon, inspiring a cycle of revisionist gangster movies that included Thieves Like Us (1974) and Badlands (1973), making stars out of Faye Dunaway and Gene Hackman, and altering the visual language of Hollywood violence. Penn lost the Best Director Oscar, though, to The Graduate‘s (1967) Mike Nichols.
Penn confirmed his place in the new Hollywood counterculture firmament with _Alice’s Restaurant_ (1969) and Little Big Man (1970). Adapted from Arlo Guthrie’s song and starring Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant was a dreamy, satirical, fun, yet downcast look at life in a hippie commune that garnered Penn his third Oscar nod for directing. More epic in form and content, Little Big Man mordantly re-framed the glorious myth of the Western frontier as a tragic comedy of genocide and white stupidity and amorality. Though star Dustin Hoffman’s misadventures as a snake oil salesman, gunfighter, and adopted Cheyenne provided comic relief, Penn’s tough depiction of the Washita Massacre and different take on Custer’s Last Stand powerfully revealed which side was “civilized.” Though Little Big Man was a major hit, Penn took a hiatus from films (save for the omnibus documentary Visions of Eight ¹⁹⁷³) until Night Moves (1975). As with The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974), Night Moves recast the potent film noir detective as a man overwhelmed by the corruption he uncovers. Despite the presence of Gene Hackman as the doomed PI, Night Moves’ rigorously downbeat tone was no longer in synch with audience tastes. Penn’s next effort, The Missouri Breaks (1976), was intended to be a blockbuster pairing of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando as a horse thief and the gunfighter hired to kill him. Though Brando and Nicholson made a fascinating pair, the film’s shifting tones and defiant eccentricity turned off audiences and critics. Penn didn’t direct another film until his critique of the 1960s, Four Friends (1981).
Never able to recapture his late-‘60s success, Penn directed only the workmanlike spy actioner Target (1985) and thriller Dead of Winter (1987) before the barely released Penn & Teller Get Killed (1990) essentially ended his feature-film career. Returning to the more welcoming environs of TV, Penn scored a critical success with The Portrait (1993), a finely crafted character study starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall. The made-for-cable feature Inside (1996) dealt with the kind of politically charged subject matter — in this case, South African apartheid — reminiscent of Penn’s best films. Though he was long past retirement age, Penn, via his director son Matthew Penn, signed on as an executive producer for Law & Order‘s 2000 season to help punch up the long-running series’ New York grit; a skill he exercised again helming an episode of Sidney Lumet’s cable series 100 Centre Street (2001). —AllMovie guide

Schlesinger was born in London into a middle class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician. After Uppingham School and graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked as an actor.

One of his earliest films, the British Transport Films’ documentary Terminus (1960), gained a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two fiction movies, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were set in the North of England. A Kind of Loving won the Golden Bear award at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962.

His third Darling (1965) described tartly the modern urban way of life in London and was one of the first films about ‘swinging London’. Schlesinger’s next movie was Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s popular novel. Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) was internationally acclaimed and it won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.

His later films include Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Yanks (1979), Pacific Heights (1990), A Question of Attribution (1991), The Innocent (1993) and The Next Best Thing (2000).

Schlesinger also directed Timon of Athens (1965) for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the musical I and Albert (1972) at London’s Piccadilly Theatre. From 1973 he was an associate director of the Royal National Theatre.

Openly gay, Schlesinger dealt with homosexuality in Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday and The Next Best Thing, and two main characters in Marathon Man were at least implicitly gay. Speaking about Midnight Cowboy’s unflattering portrayal of homosexuality, he stated that he was against political correctness and the self-censorship it encourages, which would prevent such a film from being made today.

Schlesinger also directed a notable party political broadcast for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom general election, 1992 which featured Prime Minister John Major returning to Brixton in south London where he had spent his teenage years, which highlighted his humble background, atypical for a Conservative politician. Schlesinger admitted to voting for all three main political parties in the UK at one time or another.

The book and TV series The Glittering Prizes, writer Frederic Raphael, who won the Best Screenwriting Oscar for his work on Schlesinger’s film Darling, feature a character believed to be based on Schlesinger. —Wikipedia