Lucio Fulci.
I wholeheartedly endorse this opinion.Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, 2001 – and his lesser efforts, place him at the very top.
Nobody has mentioned squealer Elia Kazan yet. He should definitely get a mention.
The Texas town was named after King Vidor’s ancestors.
Several corrections here. First, King Vidor had nothing to do with Gone With the Wind. GWTW’s uncredited directors were George Cukor, Sam Wood, and William Cameron Menzies.
Second, the Gable/Cukor story referred to is salacious hogwash. Gable signed on to GWTW with Cukor already in place as director. No actor in the 1930s, not even Gable, had the power to have a director replaced in mid-production. Especially an actor who was no even at his home studio, but on loanout.
There is ample evidence from producer David Selznick’s internal memos about his friction with Cukor over script problems, and his unhappiness with the scenes Cukor filmed (only about half of Cukor’s work was retained in the final film; many of his scenes were reshot).
Specifically, Vidor, Texas was named after King Vidor’s father, lumberman Charles Shelton Vidor, who acquired the Beaumont Sawmill Company and later established the Miller-Vidor Lumber Company, around which the town of Vidor grew.
Alan J. Pakula directed these:
Pelican Brief, The (1993) (also producer)
Consenting Adults (1992) (also producer)
See You in the Morning (1989) (also producer)
Orphans (1987) (also producer)
Dream Lover (1986) (also producer)
Sophie’s Choice (1982) (also producer)
Starting Over (1979) (also producer)
Parallax View, The (1974) (also producer)
Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1972) (also producer)
Klute (1971) (also producer)
Sterile Cuckoo, The (1969) (also producer)
… aka Pookie (1969) (UK)
Stalking Moon, The (1969) (also producer)
Up the Down Staircase (1967) (also producer)
Inside Daisy Clover (1965) (also producer)
Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) (also producer)
Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) (also producer)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) (also producer)
Fear Strikes Out (1957) (also producer)
This is a hugely impressive list. People want to forget him because of the way he died, IMHO. He was driving a couple of miles from his home in Melville, NY (Long Island) to get syrup for his family. A length of pipe had fallen off a vehicle in front of him and the car directly in front of him hit the end of the pipe, causing it to flip up in the air high enough to come down through Pakaula’s windshield and kill him. Billy Wilder in “Sunset Boulevard” directed the closing scene where Gloria Swanson, after having shot her young jounalist friend (William Holden) surrenders to police by staging an exit scene down the spiral staircase in her Beverly Hills mansion, but that scene, great as it is, may be upstaged by the drive for syrup.
I generally agree with the aforementioned choices. I’d rank Kurosawa 1st , Renoir 2nd, Wells 3rd, Fellini and Bergman in a tie for 4th, Hitchcock 6th, Scorsese and Kubrick tied for 7th.
Some contenders not yet mentioned: Cassavetes (the best, if you ask Ray Carney), Capra (another favorite of Carney), Altman (I’d rank him at least 8th), and Ozu (the greatest filmmaker who works largely outside of the American-European aesthetic tradition?).
Kurosawa is my idea of an all around film artist, and his films had a huge influence on blockbusters like Star Wars (see The Hidden Fortress) and The Magnificent Seven (see Seven Samurai).
Thanks for the corrections and amplifications on King Vidor. As with so many of the sensational stories Kenneth Anger told in “Hollywood Babylon”, a lot of the antique gossip doesn’t hold up once you start digging into it.
Frank Capra’s reputation during his career was largely that of a purveyor of unabashed sentimentality–his films were called “Capra-corn”–and I think that the modern equivalent is Ron Howard. It doesn’t occur to anybody to consider that someone who presents a plausible miracle on film is a great director… “It’s a Wonderful Life”, which must surely be one of the most-broadcast movies of the Christmas season by now, didn’t do so hot when it first came out (perhaps I’d better hedge now and say that that assessment depends very much on just how you define success). Similarly, although people remember “The Princess Bride” and “Apollo 13”, the astoundingly positive “Cocoon” appears to have been a bit optimistic to be enshrined in the pantheon of truly great movies.
As an aside, a friend once told me how she’d have fixed the almost universally-scorned ending of “The Abyss” (which I didn’t think stunk nearly as badly as everyone said–it was hard to believe, sure, but no more so than anything else that had happened in the movie. It was when we saw the sets, substantial constructs in fiberglass and pastel paint intended to match the whimsy of the delicate animation, that the entire fantasy came crashing to the ocean floor. So this friend goes, “They could’ve fixed the whole thing if they’d just shot it at night.”
Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray.
The two most complete film directors. Technique, story-telling, lighting, composition, editing, music… two stalwarts. Every film they have made is also incredibly humane.
Closely followed would be Stanley Kubrick just for his sheer uniqueness.
I’d also vote for Win Wenders and Mike Leigh.
(We got to be careful about this because there are so many great directors in Asia, emerging especially in the Arab world, and in South America who just don’t get international visibility)
Overall: Alfred Hitchcock
Silent: Buster Keaton
Golden Age: Alfred Hitchcock
Modern: Martin Scorsese
Suspense: Alfred Hitchcock
Horror: Dario Argento
Western: John Ford
Comedy: Buster Keaton
Writer/Director/Actor: Buster Keaton
Science Fiction: Stephen Spielberg
Animation (short): Tex Avery
Animation (feature): Hayao Miyazaki
Action: John Woo
Adventure: Stephen Spielberg
Drama: Orson Welles
Crime: Martin Scorsese
Musical: Stanley Donen
Gonna have to give a shout out for the Coen Brothers!!!
Blood Simple
Raising Arizona
Miller’s Crossing One of the most underrated flicks ever
Barton Fink
The Hudsucker Proxy
Fargo
the Big Lebowski
O Brother, where art thou?
The Man who wasn’t there
Great films all. Quirky and original.
Nobody’s Mentioned Sergio Leone yet? While not the greatest director ever, he broke a bit of new ground in westerns, giving them a more epic feel. The Spagetti Western Trilogy(Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) as well as *Once upon a time in America *.
Peter Jackson
Buster Keaton
The first, because his films are among the very few things I’ve seen that have ever brought me out of my complacency.
So the trilogy is based on someone else’s book. He still filmed them bloody well IMO.
And he has stuck to his f-ing DREAMS which is more than I can say for myself.
The man has been making films by the leanest scrapingist means ever since he first could, and in this country, that’s a damn hard achievement. And I like what he has done.
Yay my damned patriotism, Yay Him.
Buster Keaton I have long admired - his works being among the few that I have actively sought to view.
Another man who followed his life’s dream. He was creative, innovative. Screw the film effects, he could do that on his own.
So I haven’t seen Kurosawa - not yet, although I have heard his films through the walls of my flat in the wee small hours when most people try to sleep.
And I thought that (what the hell was it?) Oh I can’t even remember its name. It had a desert in it somewhere. (not Lawrence of Arabia) - Well, I must have found it dull.
I am happy to say that on this evening I was well inspired to a state of emotional frustration by a repeat screening of Peter Jackson’s latest offering, as to be halfway to drunkeness in frustration at my own failures, which no movie has ever done to me before. Any emotion is better than complacency.
Fantasy rocks. So does Buster Keaton.
Yay f-ing me.
Oop! Nearly forgot.
Jim Henson
and
Terry Gilliam
Personal heroes, both.
Yay them.