John Carpenter

From Free net encyclopedia

This article is about the director. For other people named John Carpenter, see John Carpenter (disambiguation).

John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film music composer. He is considered by many to be the greatest director of modern horror, although he has in fact made films in a number of other genres.

His films are characterized by minimalist lighting and photography, static cameras, and distinctive synthesized scores (usually self-composed). He describes himself as having been influenced by Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and The Twilight Zone.

1 Biography
2 Trivia
3 Filmography
4 External links

[edit]

Biography

Although born in Carthage, New York, Carpenter was raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He attended Western Kentucky University (where his father was director of the music department) and later the University of Southern California, where the student film he edited and co-wrote with producer John Longenecker (The Resurrection of Broncho Billy) won an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1970.

His first major film in a directing role, Dark Star (1974), was a sci-fi comedy that he co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon (who later went on to write Alien, borrowing freely from much of Dark Star). His next film, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), a movie influenced by the films of Howard Hawks, was a very popular low-budget thriller regarded as one of the best exploitation films of the 1970s. Halloween (1978) was a smash hit on release and is considered to be the father of the slasher film genre, while the ghost story The Fog (1980) and sci-fi adventure Escape From New York (1981) quickly picked up a large cult audience as well as mainstream critical acclaim.

His next film, The Thing (1982), was unfortunately released at the same time as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and did not perform well commercially, marking the end of his purple patch at the box-office. The film was considered far too dark and the effects by Rob Bottin were considered too grotesque for a mainstream audience. However the film itself has retrospectively gained much critical appreciation, and is now often considered his best.

Following the box office failure of his big budget action-comedy Big Trouble in Little China (1986) he struggled to get films financed. He returned to making lower budget films such as Prince of Darkness (1987), a film influenced by the BBC series Quatermass, and They Live (1988). Although some of the films from this time did pick up a cult audience, Carpenter never again realised his mass-market potential. His recent career is characterized by a number of notable misfires: Escape From L.A. (1996) and Ghosts of Mars (2001) being two such examples which were both critically mauled and failures at the box-office.

Carpenter's reputation remains strong, his earlier films are considered classics and (as they have continued to perform well on home video) several have been subjects of big budget remakes: 2005 saw remakes of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, the latter being produced by Carpenter himself.

Carpenter recently returned to the director's chair for an episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror series, one of the thirteen filmmakers involved in the first season. His episode, Cigarette Burns, aired to generally positive reviews, and he has since decided to contribute another original episode for season two.

With the exception of The Thing, he has scored all of his films (although some are collaborations), most famously the themes from Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. His music is generally synthesised, with accompaniment from piano and atmospherics. All of his movies (with the exception of Dark Star) have been filmed in anamorphic widescreen.

Many horror/sci-fi/indie filmmakers have expressed admiration for Carpenter's work, including Robert Rodriguez, Guillermo Del Toro and Paul Thomas Anderson.

[edit]

Trivia

Carpenter has referred to the films The Thing, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness as forming part of an unofficial trilogy dealing with different "end of the world" scenarios. There is no connection otherwise between the films.
Some of the films that John Carpenter was attached to at one point but eventually left were Top Gun, Fatal Attraction, The Golden Child, No Way Out, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Deal of the Century, Armed & Dangerous, Firestarter and The Philadelphia Experiment.
Throughout his career John Carpenter has employed several pseudonyms (some linked to his "hero" Howard Hawks) such as: Frank Armitage, James T. Chance, John T. Chance, Rip Haight, and Martin Quatermass.
In addition to the numerous duties he assigns himself, Carpenter also flies a helicopter. He has a pilot's licence, and performed as a pilot for Memoirs of an Invisible Man.
During the early to mid-1970's, John Carpenter and Darwin Joston, who played Napoleon Wilson in Assault on Precinct 13, were next-door neighbors in Los Angeles. Carpenter wrote Assault on Precinct 13 during this period and has said that he based certain aspects of Wilson's character on Joston.
Many of the characters in John Carpenter's films are named after his friends, colleagues, and ex-girlfriends. The Fog, for example, contains at least five such characters (Nick Castle, Elizabeth Solley, Sandy Fadel, Dan O'Bannon, Tommy Wallace).