If he had made no other films, Jonathan Demme would be forever remembered for his horror masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs (1991), one of only three movies to win Oscars in all four major categories: Best Picture, Director (Demme), Leading Actor (Anthony Hopkins) and Leading Actress (Jodie Foster). It also won the Screenwriting Oscar (Ted Tally).
Jonathan Demme, however, was a director who could master many genres. He started out with genre exploitation movies, and I first admired his work in the little indie Melvin and Howard (1980), with its delightful performances by Jason Robards and Paul Le Mat. Then he made one of the two or three best ever rock concert films, Stop Making Sense (1984) with The Talking Heads. And then he directed the topical drama Philadelphia (1993) and the wonderfully engaging addiction dramedy Rachel Getting Married (2008).
His body of work screams versatility, and his masterpiece…Well, his masterpiece just screams.
John Avildsen won the Best Director Oscar for Rocky (which also won Oscars for Best Picture and Film Editing). We still employ many cultural references to Rocky today, and remember it for launching the career of Sylvester Stallone and a spate of mostly mediocre sequels. But don’t discount Rocky. Remember that someone had to choose how to shoot Rocky Balboa pounding beef carcasses, running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and courting Adrian by introducing his turtles Cuff and Link. Movies don’t achieve iconic status by accident. Avildsen made a brilliant film that was both poignant and thrilling.
In his film Night of the Living Dead, George Romero re-invented the fictional zombie as a shambling, semi-decomposed brain-eater, and that is the zombie that we all envision today. Night of the Living Dead also changed movie standards (for better or for worse) to accept gratuitous gore for the sake of entertainment. And, because its rejection by major movie studios forced Romero to go indie, Night of the Living Dead became one of the first hugely successful independent films.
Bruce Brown directed The Endless Summer in 1966, thus inventing the surf documentary.
Jerry Lewis: Not My Cup of Tea. Maybe now we’ll finally get to see his notorious and long-suppressed The Day the Clown Died, the 1973 movie Lewis wrote, directed and starred in – about a clown imprisoned with children in a Nazi death camp.