Richard Donner

Richard Donner (born Richard Donald Schwartzberg on April 24, 1930) is an American film director and also producer through the production company, The Donners' Company, he and his wife, producer Lauren Shuler-Donner, own.

Biography

Donner was born in the Bronx, New York City to Hattie and Fred Schwartzberg; he has a sister, Joan. Donner started his career with hopes of acting but quickly moved into directing commercials and making business films. He moved into television in the late 1950s, directing some episodes of the Steve McQueen western serial Dead or Alive. He has worked on over twenty-five other television series including The Fugitive, Get Smart, The Wild Wild West, Gilligan's Island, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kojak, Tales from the Crypt and a famous episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", as well as the serial, "Danger Island" from the children's program The Banana Splits. His first film, the cheap military drama X-15 (1962) starring Charles Bronson, was not a great success, and he returned to television work.

His break-through film was in 1976 with The Omen, produced in the 'horror boom' following The Exorcist. He followed it with the hit Superman in 1978 and prepared much of the sequel before being fired. The decision to remove him from the film series, made by producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, has been widely viewed by many fans as a huge mistake on the Salkinds' part, as the subsequent Superman films helmed by their preferred director Richard Lester, were of poor quality and quickly resulted in a downward spiral in popularity for the series. Donner has mixed commercial flops (Inside Moves, Radio Flyer) and successes (The Goonies, Lethal Weapon) since then. His legendary Ladyhawke (1985) ranks somewhere in the middle but has enjoyed a large cult following. Donner has received little critical appreciation, although he has a strong following amongst genre fans. In the case of Superman it was Donner who insisted the subject of the comic book superhero should be treated "straight" rather than "camp", an approach that strongly influenced later genre directors such as Bryan Singer and Tim Burton. In the early 1980s, Donner proposed to Warner Brothers a non-camp film version of Batman, to star Mel Gibson.

Richard Donner's cousin is actor Steve Kahan, who played the policeman tracking Otis in Superman: The Movie, and played Captain Ed Murphy in all the "Lethal Weapon" movies. Donner has cast Kahan in some of his other films too.

Themes

Donner often makes use of dramatic juxtaposition with a main character who is a 'believer' confronted with a partner or other characters who are doubters. This goes back to his Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in which William Shatner's character is the believer attempting to convince the crew of the plane. In The Omen, David Warner's photojournalist is the believer while Gregory Peck is the doubter. In Superman, the outwardly cynical Lois Lane 'believes' in Superman while Clark Kent does not.

Filmography

Director

X-15 (1961)
Salt and Pepper (1968)
Twinky (1969)
The Omen (1976)
Superman (1978)
Superman II (1980) (uncredited, as Richard Lester took over Direction)
Inside Moves (1980)
The Toy (1982)
The Goonies (1985)
Ladyhawke (1985)
Lethal Weapon (1987, 2 (1989), 3 (1992), and 4 (1998))
Scrooged (1988)
Radio Flyer (1992)
Maverick (1994)
Assassins (1997)
Conspiracy Theory (1997)
Timeline (2003)
16 Blocks (2006)
The Richard Donner Cut (2006)

Quote

"Mr. Donner has made several of the most successful and least interesting films of his age." David Thomson

"If it hadn't been for Geoffrey Unsworth, we wouldn't have had a movie." - acknowledging the late British cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth for his contributions to the development of the flying shots and additional special effects of the first Superman film.

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