JOHN FRANKENHEIMER
Name: John Michael Frankenheimer
Born: 19 February 1930 New York City, New York
Died: 6 July 2002 Los Angeles, California
John Michael Frankenheimer (February 19, 1930 – July 6, 2002) was an American
film director.
Frankenheimer was born in New York, the son of a German-born Jewish father and
an Irish-American Roman Catholic mother. He was graduated from Williams College,
in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1951. He became a film maker while serving as
a U.S. Air Force lieutenant during the Korean War, directing service films for
the Air Force and became interested in directing after his military service.
Frankenheimer began his directing career in live television shortly after the
service. He recalled after being discharged, he had an interview with CBS and
had a conversation with the hiring manager. The manager had also been a member
of the armed forces and told Frankenheimer that while they had no openings at
the time, he would call when needed. According to the director in an interview
with The Directors Series, he had spent two weeks in his hotel room waiting for
a phone call as the hotel didn't provide a messaging service. At the end of this
period, Frankenheimer did receive a phone call and was put to work as a live
television director. Throughout the 1950s he directed over 140 episodes of shows
like Playhouse 90, Climax, and Danger, including The Comedian, written by Rod
Serling and starring Mickey Rooney as a ragingly vicious television comedian.
His first theatrical film was 1957's The Young Stranger, starring James
MacArthur as a rebellious teenager. Frankenheimer helmed the production, based
on a Climax episode called "Deal a Blow", at the age of 26.
He returned to television through the rest of the 1950s, only moving to film
permanently in 1961 with The Young Savages, which teamed him for the first time
with Burt Lancaster in a story of a young boy murdered by a New York gang.
His next film Birdman of Alcatraz, shot in 1961, came to him after production
had already begun under another director. Burt Lancaster, who was producing, as
well as starring, asked Frankenheimer to take over the film. As Frankenheimer
describes in Charles Champlin's interview book, he told Frankenheimer the script
was too long, but was told he had to shoot everything that was written.
Sure enough, the first cut of the film was four and a half hours long, the
length Frankenheimer had predicted. Moreover, as he had said at the beginning,
the film was constructed so that it couldn't be cut and still be coherent.
Frankenheimer said the film would have to be rewritten and partly reshot.
Lancaster was committed to star in Judgment at Nuremberg, so he made that film
while Frankenheimer prepared the reshoots. The finished film, released in 1962,
was a huge success and was nominated for four Oscars, including one for
Lancaster's performance.
Frankenheimer was next hired by producer John Houseman to direct All Fall Down,
a family drama starring Eva Marie Saint and Warren Beatty. Because of the
production difficulties with Birdman of Alcatraz, All Fall Down was actually
released before that film.
He followed this with his most iconic film, The Manchurian Candidate.
Frankenheimer and producer George Axelrod bought Richard Condon's 1959 novel
after it had already been turned down by many Hollywood studios. After getting
Frank Sinatra to commit to the film, they secured backing from United Artists
and shot the film in 1962.
The story of a Korean War vet, brainwashed by the Communist Chinese to
assassinate the candidate for President co-starred Laurence Harvey and Janet
Leigh. The film also starred Angela Lansbury as Harvey's evil mother.
Frankenheimer had to fight to cast the actress, who had worked with him on All
Fall Down, and was just two years older than Harvey. Sinatra's choice had been
Lucille Ball. The film was nominated for two Oscars, including one for Lansbury.
The film was unseen for many years. Urban legend has it that the film was pulled
from circulation due to the similarity of its plot to the death of President
Kennedy the following year, but Frankenheimer states in the Champlin book that
it was pulled because of a legal battle between producer Sinatra and the studio
over Sinatra's share of the profits. In any event, it was re-released to great
acclaim in 1988.
'On the Set of Seven Days in May: Directing Fredric March.
He followed this up with another hugely successful political thriller, Seven
Days in May (1964). He again bought the rights to a bestselling book, this time
by Charles Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel, and again produced the film with his
star, this time Kirk Douglas.
Douglas intended to play the role of the General who attempts to lead a coup
against the President, who is about to sign a disarmament treaty with the
Soviets. Douglas then decided he wanted to work with Burt Lancaster, with whom
he had just costarred in another film. To entice Lancaster, Douglas agreed to
let him play the General, while Douglas took the less showy lead role of the
General's aide, who turns against him and helps the President.
The film, written by Rod Serling, and costarring Frederic March as the President
and Ava Gardner was a great success and was nominated for two Oscars.
Frankenheimer's next film was again taken over from another director. The Train
had already begun shooting in France when star Burt Lancaster had the original
director fired and called in Frankenheimer to save the film. As he recounts in
the Champlin book, Frankenheimer used the production's desperation to his
advantage in negotiations. He demanded and got the following: his name was made
part of the title, "John Frankenheimer's The Train"; the French co-director,
demanded by French tax laws, was not allowed to ever set foot on set; he was
given total final cut; and a Ferrari.
Again saddled with an unfilmably long script, Frankenheimer threw it out and
took the locations and actors left from the previous film and began filming,
with writers working in Paris as the production shot in Normandy. Although the
poorly chosen locations caused endless weather delays, the finished film was an
enormous success and the script was nominated for an Oscar.
Seconds (1966), starring Rock Hudson as an elderly man given the body of a young
man through experimental surgery, was poorly received on its release, but has
come to be one of the director's most respected and popular films in the decades
since. The film is an expressionistic, part-horror, part-thriller, part-science
fiction film about the obsession with eternal youth and misplaced faith in the
ability of medical science to achieve it.
He followed this with his most spectacular production, 1966's Grand Prix. Shot
on location at the Grand Prix races throughout Europe, on 65mm Cinerama cameras,
the film starred James Garner and Eva Marie Saint. Introducing methods of
photographing high-speed auto racing that had never been seen before, mounting
cameras on the cars, at full speed and putting the stars in the actual cars,
instead of against rear-projections, the film was an international success and
won three Oscars, for editing, sound and sound effects.
His next film, 1967's all-star anti-war comedy The Extraordinary Seaman starred
David Niven, Faye Dunaway, Alan Alda and Mickey Rooney. The film was a failure
at the box office and critically, and Frankenheimer calls it in the Champlin
book, "the only movie I've made which I would say was a total disaster."
1968's The Fixer, about a Jew in Tsarist Russia, was shot in Communist Hungary.
The film, starring Alan Bates, was not a major success, but Bates was nominated
for an Oscar.
Frankenheimer was a close friend of Senator Robert Kennedy and in fact drove him
to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he was assassinated in June
1968.
Immediately after this, he filmed The Gypsy Moths, a romantic drama about a
troupe of barnstorming skydivers and the impact they have on a small midwestern
town. The celebration of Americana starred Frankenheimer regular Burt Lancaster.
reuniting him with From Here to Eternity co-star Deborah Kerr, and also featured
Gene Hackman. The film failed to find an audience, but Frankenheimer always
stated that it was one of his personal favorites.
He followed this film with I Walk the Line in 1970. The film, starring Gregory
Peck and Tuesday Weld, about a Tennessee sheriff who falls in love with a
moonshiner's daughter, was set to songs by Johnny Cash.
Frankenheimer's next project took him to Afghanistan. The Horsemen focused on
the relationship between a father and son, played by Jack Palance and Omar
Sharif. Sharif's character, an expert horseman, played the Afghan national sport
of buzkashi.
His next film Impossible Object, also known as Story of a Love Story, suffered
distribution difficulties, and was not widely released.
He followed this in 1973 with a four-hour film of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh,
starring Lee Marvin and the San Francisco-set 99 and 44/100 Per Cent Dead a
crime black comedy starring Richard Harris.
With his fluent French and knowledge of the culture, Frankenheimer was next
asked to direct French Connection II, set entirely in Marseille. Starring Gene
Hackman, the film was a major success and got Frankenheimer his next job, Black
Sunday in 1976.
Black Sunday, author Thomas Harris's only non-Hannibal Lecter novel, involves an
Israeli Mossad agent (Robert Shaw), chasing a Palestinian terrorist (Marthe
Keller) and a disgruntled Vietnam vet (Bruce Dern) who plan to blow up the
Goodyear blimp over the Super Bowl. It was shot on location at the actual Super
Bowl X in January 1976 in Miami, with the use of a real Goodyear blimp. The film
tested very highly, and Paramount and Frankenheimer had high expectations for it.
When it failed to become the hit that was expected, Frankenheimer has admitted
he developed a serious problem with alcohol.
He says in Charles Champlin's biography that his alcohol problem caused him to
do work that was below his own standards on his next film, 1979's Prophecy, an
ecological monster movie about a mutant grizzly bear terrorizing a forest in
Maine. The directors output lessened considerably after this film. In the next
fifteen years, he only directed seven films. He was even forced to direct a
lowbrow cop film called Dead Bang in 1989 starring Don Johnson. In 1990,
Frankenheimer returned to his forte of the cold war political thriller when he
made The Fourth War. This film starred Roy Scheider as a loose cannon Army
colonel drawn into a dangerous personal war with a Russian officer.
Frankenheimer was able to make a comeback in the 1990s by returning to
television. He directed two films for HBO in 1994: Against the Wall and The
Burning Season that won him several awards and renewed acclaim. The director
also helmed two films for Turner Network Television in 1996 and 1997,
Andersonville and George Wallace that were highly praised. He even acted for the
first time, playing a desperate U.S. General in The General's Daughter (1999) in
a crucial cameo appearance.
His 1996 film The Island of Dr. Moreau, which he took over a few weeks into
production from another director, was the cause of countless stories of
production woes and personality clashes, and received scathing reviews. It was
said that the veteran director could not stand Val Kilmer, the young star of the
film. When Kilmer's last scene was completed it was reported that Frankenheimer
said "Now get that bastard off my set". In an interview, Frankenheimer refused
to discuss the film saying only that he had a miserable time making it. However,
his next film, 1998's Ronin, starring Robert de Niro, was a return to form,
featuring Frankenheimer's now trademark elaborate car chases woven into a
labyrinthine espionage plot.
His last theatrical film, 2000's Reindeer Games, starring Ben Affleck,
underperformed, but his final film, Path to War for HBO in 2002, brought him
back to his strengths - political machinations, 60's America and character-based
drama, and was nominated for numerous awards.
He was scheduled to direct a prequel to The Exorcist but died suddenly in Los
Angeles, California, from a stroke due to complications following spinal surgery
at the age of 72, shortly before filming started.
Despite the many celebrated films he directed, many of which won Academy Awards
in various categories, Frankenheimer was never nominated for a Best Director
Oscar.
Name: John Michael Frankenheimer
Born: 19 February 1930 New York City, New York
Died: 6 July 2002 Los Angeles, California
John Michael Frankenheimer (February 19, 1930 – July 6, 2002) was an American
film director.
Frankenheimer was born in New York, the son of a German-born Jewish father and
an Irish-American Roman Catholic mother. He was graduated from Williams College,
in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1951. He became a film maker while serving as
a U.S. Air Force lieutenant during the Korean War, directing service films for
the Air Force and became interested in directing after his military service.
Frankenheimer began his directing career in live television shortly after the
service. He recalled after being discharged, he had an interview with CBS and
had a conversation with the hiring manager. The manager had also been a member
of the armed forces and told Frankenheimer that while they had no openings at
the time, he would call when needed. According to the director in an interview
with The Directors Series, he had spent two weeks in his hotel room waiting for
a phone call as the hotel didn't provide a messaging service. At the end of this
period, Frankenheimer did receive a phone call and was put to work as a live
television director. Throughout the 1950s he directed over 140 episodes of shows
like Playhouse 90, Climax, and Danger, including The Comedian, written by Rod
Serling and starring Mickey Rooney as a ragingly vicious television comedian.
His first theatrical film was 1957's The Young Stranger, starring James
MacArthur as a rebellious teenager. Frankenheimer helmed the production, based
on a Climax episode called "Deal a Blow", at the age of 26.
He returned to television through the rest of the 1950s, only moving to film
permanently in 1961 with The Young Savages, which teamed him for the first time
with Burt Lancaster in a story of a young boy murdered by a New York gang.
His next film Birdman of Alcatraz, shot in 1961, came to him after production
had already begun under another director. Burt Lancaster, who was producing, as
well as starring, asked Frankenheimer to take over the film. As Frankenheimer
describes in Charles Champlin's interview book, he told Frankenheimer the script
was too long, but was told he had to shoot everything that was written.
Sure enough, the first cut of the film was four and a half hours long, the
length Frankenheimer had predicted. Moreover, as he had said at the beginning,
the film was constructed so that it couldn't be cut and still be coherent.
Frankenheimer said the film would have to be rewritten and partly reshot.
Lancaster was committed to star in Judgment at Nuremberg, so he made that film
while Frankenheimer prepared the reshoots. The finished film, released in 1962,
was a huge success and was nominated for four Oscars, including one for
Lancaster's performance.
Frankenheimer was next hired by producer John Houseman to direct All Fall Down,
a family drama starring Eva Marie Saint and Warren Beatty. Because of the
production difficulties with Birdman of Alcatraz, All Fall Down was actually
released before that film.
He followed this with his most iconic film, The Manchurian Candidate.
Frankenheimer and producer George Axelrod bought Richard Condon's 1959 novel
after it had already been turned down by many Hollywood studios. After getting
Frank Sinatra to commit to the film, they secured backing from United Artists
and shot the film in 1962.
The story of a Korean War vet, brainwashed by the Communist Chinese to
assassinate the candidate for President co-starred Laurence Harvey and Janet
Leigh. The film also starred Angela Lansbury as Harvey's evil mother.
Frankenheimer had to fight to cast the actress, who had worked with him on All
Fall Down, and was just two years older than Harvey. Sinatra's choice had been
Lucille Ball. The film was nominated for two Oscars, including one for Lansbury.
The film was unseen for many years. Urban legend has it that the film was pulled
from circulation due to the similarity of its plot to the death of President
Kennedy the following year, but Frankenheimer states in the Champlin book that
it was pulled because of a legal battle between producer Sinatra and the studio
over Sinatra's share of the profits. In any event, it was re-released to great
acclaim in 1988.
'On the Set of Seven Days in May: Directing Fredric March.
He followed this up with another hugely successful political thriller, Seven
Days in May (1964). He again bought the rights to a bestselling book, this time
by Charles Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel, and again produced the film with his
star, this time Kirk Douglas.
Douglas intended to play the role of the General who attempts to lead a coup
against the President, who is about to sign a disarmament treaty with the
Soviets. Douglas then decided he wanted to work with Burt Lancaster, with whom
he had just costarred in another film. To entice Lancaster, Douglas agreed to
let him play the General, while Douglas took the less showy lead role of the
General's aide, who turns against him and helps the President.
The film, written by Rod Serling, and costarring Frederic March as the President
and Ava Gardner was a great success and was nominated for two Oscars.
Frankenheimer's next film was again taken over from another director. The Train
had already begun shooting in France when star Burt Lancaster had the original
director fired and called in Frankenheimer to save the film. As he recounts in
the Champlin book, Frankenheimer used the production's desperation to his
advantage in negotiations. He demanded and got the following: his name was made
part of the title, "John Frankenheimer's The Train"; the French co-director,
demanded by French tax laws, was not allowed to ever set foot on set; he was
given total final cut; and a Ferrari.
Again saddled with an unfilmably long script, Frankenheimer threw it out and
took the locations and actors left from the previous film and began filming,
with writers working in Paris as the production shot in Normandy. Although the
poorly chosen locations caused endless weather delays, the finished film was an
enormous success and the script was nominated for an Oscar.
Seconds (1966), starring Rock Hudson as an elderly man given the body of a young
man through experimental surgery, was poorly received on its release, but has
come to be one of the director's most respected and popular films in the decades
since. The film is an expressionistic, part-horror, part-thriller, part-science
fiction film about the obsession with eternal youth and misplaced faith in the
ability of medical science to achieve it.
He followed this with his most spectacular production, 1966's Grand Prix. Shot
on location at the Grand Prix races throughout Europe, on 65mm Cinerama cameras,
the film starred James Garner and Eva Marie Saint. Introducing methods of
photographing high-speed auto racing that had never been seen before, mounting
cameras on the cars, at full speed and putting the stars in the actual cars,
instead of against rear-projections, the film was an international success and
won three Oscars, for editing, sound and sound effects.
His next film, 1967's all-star anti-war comedy The Extraordinary Seaman starred
David Niven, Faye Dunaway, Alan Alda and Mickey Rooney. The film was a failure
at the box office and critically, and Frankenheimer calls it in the Champlin
book, "the only movie I've made which I would say was a total disaster."
1968's The Fixer, about a Jew in Tsarist Russia, was shot in Communist Hungary.
The film, starring Alan Bates, was not a major success, but Bates was nominated
for an Oscar.
Frankenheimer was a close friend of Senator Robert Kennedy and in fact drove him
to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he was assassinated in June
1968.
Immediately after this, he filmed The Gypsy Moths, a romantic drama about a
troupe of barnstorming skydivers and the impact they have on a small midwestern
town. The celebration of Americana starred Frankenheimer regular Burt Lancaster.
reuniting him with From Here to Eternity co-star Deborah Kerr, and also featured
Gene Hackman. The film failed to find an audience, but Frankenheimer always
stated that it was one of his personal favorites.
He followed this film with I Walk the Line in 1970. The film, starring Gregory
Peck and Tuesday Weld, about a Tennessee sheriff who falls in love with a
moonshiner's daughter, was set to songs by Johnny Cash.
Frankenheimer's next project took him to Afghanistan. The Horsemen focused on
the relationship between a father and son, played by Jack Palance and Omar
Sharif. Sharif's character, an expert horseman, played the Afghan national sport
of buzkashi.
His next film Impossible Object, also known as Story of a Love Story, suffered
distribution difficulties, and was not widely released.
He followed this in 1973 with a four-hour film of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh,
starring Lee Marvin and the San Francisco-set 99 and 44/100 Per Cent Dead a
crime black comedy starring Richard Harris.
With his fluent French and knowledge of the culture, Frankenheimer was next
asked to direct French Connection II, set entirely in Marseille. Starring Gene
Hackman, the film was a major success and got Frankenheimer his next job, Black
Sunday in 1976.
Black Sunday, author Thomas Harris's only non-Hannibal Lecter novel, involves an
Israeli Mossad agent (Robert Shaw), chasing a Palestinian terrorist (Marthe
Keller) and a disgruntled Vietnam vet (Bruce Dern) who plan to blow up the
Goodyear blimp over the Super Bowl. It was shot on location at the actual Super
Bowl X in January 1976 in Miami, with the use of a real Goodyear blimp. The film
tested very highly, and Paramount and Frankenheimer had high expectations for it.
When it failed to become the hit that was expected, Frankenheimer has admitted
he developed a serious problem with alcohol.
He says in Charles Champlin's biography that his alcohol problem caused him to
do work that was below his own standards on his next film, 1979's Prophecy, an
ecological monster movie about a mutant grizzly bear terrorizing a forest in
Maine. The directors output lessened considerably after this film. In the next
fifteen years, he only directed seven films. He was even forced to direct a
lowbrow cop film called Dead Bang in 1989 starring Don Johnson. In 1990,
Frankenheimer returned to his forte of the cold war political thriller when he
made The Fourth War. This film starred Roy Scheider as a loose cannon Army
colonel drawn into a dangerous personal war with a Russian officer.
Frankenheimer was able to make a comeback in the 1990s by returning to
television. He directed two films for HBO in 1994: Against the Wall and The
Burning Season that won him several awards and renewed acclaim. The director
also helmed two films for Turner Network Television in 1996 and 1997,
Andersonville and George Wallace that were highly praised. He even acted for the
first time, playing a desperate U.S. General in The General's Daughter (1999) in
a crucial cameo appearance.
His 1996 film The Island of Dr. Moreau, which he took over a few weeks into
production from another director, was the cause of countless stories of
production woes and personality clashes, and received scathing reviews. It was
said that the veteran director could not stand Val Kilmer, the young star of the
film. When Kilmer's last scene was completed it was reported that Frankenheimer
said "Now get that bastard off my set". In an interview, Frankenheimer refused
to discuss the film saying only that he had a miserable time making it. However,
his next film, 1998's Ronin, starring Robert de Niro, was a return to form,
featuring Frankenheimer's now trademark elaborate car chases woven into a
labyrinthine espionage plot.
His last theatrical film, 2000's Reindeer Games, starring Ben Affleck,
underperformed, but his final film, Path to War for HBO in 2002, brought him
back to his strengths - political machinations, 60's America and character-based
drama, and was nominated for numerous awards.
He was scheduled to direct a prequel to The Exorcist but died suddenly in Los
Angeles, California, from a stroke due to complications following spinal surgery
at the age of 72, shortly before filming started.
Despite the many celebrated films he directed, many of which won Academy Awards
in various categories, Frankenheimer was never nominated for a Best Director
Oscar.