Jack Hill grew up around movies - his father was a designer for the Disney studios and Warner Brothers. He went to the University of California to study film, where he was a classmate of Francis Ford Coppola - they worked together on student productions and later both apprenticed with Roger Corman, working on The Terror (1963). While Coppola went ...
Coffy, Foxy Brown, Spider Baby, The Big Doll House, Switchblade Sisters, The Big Bird Cage, The Swinging Cheerleaders, Blood Bath, Sorceress, The Terror, Isle of the Snake People, The Wasp Woman, Fear Chamber, House of Evil, The Incredible Invasion, Mondo Keyhole, Pit Stop, Higher and Higher, City o...
Star Sign
Aquarius
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Quote
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I always wanted people to feel positive at the end of my films. I was always careful to try and juxtapose humor with the violence and tragedy. I think I accomplished that, and perhaps that is why a generation or two later my films are still popular and in-demand while many of the mainstream movies I was up against at the time, and truth be known, I was quite envious of, are now forgotten.
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I had the freedom to improvise. I feel quite fortunate that I worked in the low-budget sector because it meant I did not have to deal with committees who wanted to impose their ideas and prejudices on my material. I had a free hand--much more so than I would have had if I was working for the studios. As long as you put the elements in there that producers like Corman [Roger Corman] knew they could sell, such as sex and violence, you could raise the picture a little higher than expected and give the audience something intelligent to chew on.
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[on making 1970s "blaxplotation" films] You were working on pictures that the industry had nothing but contempt for. There was a lot of racism in the industry, a lot of it was under the surface, but it was here. And the executives at the studios really had contempt for the audience they were making movies for. It was an uphill struggle to try to do anything really good.
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Fact
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In 1998 he was set to direct a film project, "Julie McGriff's Difficult World of Sex". Sheryl Lee was set to star in the film, which was to be an offbeat comedy.
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Interviewed in "Wild Beyond Belief: Interviews with Exploitation Filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s" by Brian Albright (McFarland & Co.).
$11 Million
