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Telegraph
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Stallone's Maga moment: The bloody battle to make Rambo II
Rambo was meant to die. Sylvester Stallone's traumatised Vietnam vet – harassed by small-town cops for being a bit scruffy and triggered into fighting a one-man war – was supposed to shoot himself. That was the scripted end to First Blood, Rambo's 1982 movie debut, which reworked the similarly fateful conclusion to David Morrell's original novel, published ten years earlier. But there was uproar from a test audience when Rambo died. It was, according to Stallone and director Ted Kotcheff, a near riot. 'The audience was going to tear them apart! They'd invested their emotions in the character for 100 minutes,' says author Nat Segaloff, who details the entire Rambo phenomenon in a new book, The Rambo Report (covering five Stallone films, three Morrell novels, and a whole lot of bulging cultural muscle). Stallone and Kotcheff had been savvy enough to film an alternate ending in which Rambo lives, albeit in handcuffs. The audience reaction ensured that John J Rambo would survive to fight another day. Yet when the character returned three years later for Rambo: First Blood Part II – which premiered 40 years ago – he was a different man: a throbbing, glistening, ultra-violent hunk of Eighties-style machismo; the personification of Ronald Reagan's America and the country's changing relationship with Vietnam. 'The first film, closer to the tone of my novel, presents him as an anti-hero,' says Rambo creator David Morrell, who – coming to the US from Canada – was inspired to write First Blood by Vietnam news reports and protests he saw while lecturing at Penn State. 'The second film – partly because of the change in political atmosphere in the United States – made him into a superhero.' The sequel sees Rambo recruited from prison and sent back to the jungle to rescue missing POWs. He essentially gets a second crack at 'Nam. 'Sir, do we get to win this time?' Rambo asks. 'This time it's up to you,' replies Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), encapsulating the idea that it was gutless politicians, not the troops, who lost Vietnam, as well as the can-do Reagan attitude that made America great again (the first time around). 'There were cheers from the audience at that line,' says Morrell. Rambo: First Blood Part II outgunned the original film at the box office, though it was criticised for its generic foreign villainy and blatant jingoism. It was branded 'a right-wing fantasy', endorsing the myth that there were POWs still held in Vietnam after the war – a myth that morphed into an ultra-conservative conspiracy theory. 'The jingoistic thing is definitely there,' says Morrell. 'There's no way around it… There's an anti-bureaucratic theme which you can balance with the jingoism. No question it's a controversial movie. If it wasn't so darn well-made we might have stronger objections.' Indeed, Rambo II (as it's best known) is an astonishing piece of guts-and-glory cinema. It lit the fuse on an explosion of Eighties action and made Rambo the muscleman of the cultural and political moment. Even Reagan was a fan. Back during the production of the first film, Stallone and Kotcheff had pure-hearted reasons for keeping Rambo alive. 'They didn't want veterans watching the film to believe that suicide or death was the only way out,' says Segaloff. But, as noted in The Rambo Report, Stallone knew there were potential sequels. He was, of course, already three Rockys in by this point. Rocky III was in the can and would open just after First Blood wrapped. There had been doubt about Stallone's box office power outside of the Rocky series, but First Blood hit big and Rambo II was put into action. The sequel would have a bigger budget – a reported $25.5 million – with Acapulco on the Mexican Pacific coast doubling for Vietnam and George Cosmatos taking over as director. James Cameron was hired to write the initial screenplay, which Cameron did while waiting for production to begin on The Terminator. Incredibly, Cameron wrote scripts for both Rambo II and Aliens – plus Terminator rewrites – all at once, across three months, switching between different desks for each project. Cameron – interested in layered, fleshed-out characters and 'Nam trauma – put Rambo in a mental institution and added a comedy CIA man, Brewer, tipped to be played by John Travolta. For Stallone, though, there was too much talk and not enough action. He jettisoned much of Cameron's set-up and dropped Brewer (though he and Travolta were pals after Sly had inexplicably directed the Saturday Night Fever sequel, Staying Alive). David Morrell used some of Cameron's version as the basis for his novelisation of Rambo II, which – unusually for a novelisation – combined Cameron's script, the shooting script, and Morrell's own material. Cameron later said that Sly's Rambo II was 'almost like they were parachuting into 'Nam to pick up a six-pack of beer'. Stallone took credit for the POW rescue mission story, inspired by a letter he received from a distraught wife. Her husband had been missing in Southeast Asia for 16 years. Stallone, like other stars, was sold on the myth that missing-in-action soldiers were still being held in 'Nam. 'I'm convinced that the MIAs are alive. Living in Laos,' he told Time in 1985. 'There's been a great avoidance of the issue. The country has been shoving it under the mat and forgetting it.' The POW/MIA issue dates to the mid-Sixties, when POW wives formed action groups – later the National League of POW/MIA Families – to raise awareness and gather information. Richard Nixon's administration declared that up to 1,400 soldiers were POW/MIAs, suggesting they were being held captive rather than dead. As noted by historian Rick Perlstein, it was a useful bit of spin for Nixon, an effort to further sway opinion against the communists. More questions were raised about supposedly missing POWs as the US withdrew from the war. But there was no evidence of any POW/MIAs. The myth's lasting legacy was spawning the idea that the government wasn't telling families the whole truth. (The National League of Families currently states that 1,572 men are still unaccounted for.) 'The unintended consequence was that the National League of Families and other groups go, 'A-ha, the government's holding out on us!'' says Bill Allison, a history professor at Georgia Southern University, specialising in the Vietnam War. 'By that point, in 1973-74, we'd had the revelations of My Lai, which the army tried to cover up, and Watergate. Political sides will latch onto some kind of narrative they can exploit, and there's nothing worse you can say in the United States than, 'We've left American service members behind.' It was an easy jingoistic thing to latch onto.' Ross Perot, the businessman and proto-Trumpian presidential candidate, got actively involved and fuelled cover-up theories. There were hearings, investigations, and delegations. Celebrities wore bracelets in support of the POW/MIAs. All the while, tricksters in Southeast Asia cottoned on, selling false information and phoney dog tags to desperate American families. 'Then these movies start coming out,' says Allison. 'And if Americans learn their history from anywhere, it's the big screen.' Indeed, Rambo wasn't the first Hollywood star to hunt missing POWs. Gene Hackman did it in Uncommon Valor (1983) and Chuck Norris did it in Missing in Action (1984). Offscreen, Clint Eastwood and William Shatner helped fund a POW-finding mission by Vietnam vet and crank Lt Col Bo Gritz, who failed to find any evidence. (Gritz is often called the inspiration for Rambo, but Morrell confirms that he definitely wasn't.) Rambo might not have been the first to search for missing Americans, but he was the most successful. In the sequel, he drops into 'Nam, immediately wins a fight with a snake, and swiftly finds a campful of American POWs. In true Eighties-style, the Soviets are the puppet masters, with Steven Berkoff's sadistic Lt Col Podovsky pulling the strings and doling out the torture. But – even with the Soviets on hand – the real villain of Rambo II is CIA man Murdock (Charles Napier), 'a stinking bureaucrat that's trying to cover his ass', according to one character. To Murdock, the mission is a box ticking exercise. He's not interested in actually recovering POWs and, when Rambo defies orders, Murdock orders a helicopter to abandon him and a POW – proof the troops could have won in Vietnam if it wasn't for the pen-pushers. Rambo symbolically shoots up Murdock's office and computers at the end. 'Mission accomplished,' he growls. David Morrell knew that Rambo II would be a success when he received an unexpected FedEx delivery one morning. It was a videotape of the film's pulse-ratcheting helicopter action. 'I was a professor at the time,' he recalls. 'It was eight in the morning, and I was getting ready to teach. But I was stunned watching this. Andy Vajna [the executive producer] kept saying, 'This is going to be a big movie' but I didn't believe him until I saw this. My wife was in the kitchen feeding our kids before school. I went in and said, 'Andy's right, this is going to be a big movie.'' Morrell wasn't bothered by how his character had changed from the novel to the first film and changed again more drastically for the sequel. In First Blood – which channeled the anger and disillusionment over Vietnam – Rambo was a victim, unable to switch off the war or shake the image of his friend's guts exploding over him. In Rambo II – now a flaxen-haired patriot waging Reagan's tough-on-communism foreign policy – he's up for the ruck. 'A pure fighting machine with only a desire to win a war that someone else lost,' describes Colonel Trautman. 'If winning means he has to die, he'll die. No fear, no regrets.' Interestingly, Stallone's other franchise character, Rocky Balboa, followed a similar trajectory. Rocky and Rambo were outwardly defined by brawn and violence but were vulnerable and lost beneath the beefy exteriors. But, as the sequels rolled on, they became indomitable heroes – templates for the mega-muscled icons of Eighties action, all pumped up by the decade's sense of excess and conservatism. For Rambo, the sequel also marked an intensely violent rebirth. In First Blood he doesn't kill anybody. 'Anyone who dies, dies of their own folly,' notes Nat Segaloff. But in Rambo II, he kills 70 villains, going on the warpath with an arsenal of guns, knives, a rocket launcher, his own bare hands, and an explosive bow-and-arrow that makes one villain literally burst into a shower of flesh. The moment that Rambo emerges from a rock-face, camouflaged by mud, and knives a Soviet soldier, is a particular primal pleasure (two years before Schwarzenegger caked himself in muck to fight Predator). 'It's Stallone porn,' jokes Allison about all the biceps and beat-ups. Stallone prepared by working out four hours a day and trained in archery and SWAT combat techniques with the Los Angeles police. Co-star Julia Nickson, playing doomed field operative Co Bao, recalled that Sly was like 'the unofficial Mayor of Acapulco', driving around in his 'Sly-mobile', charming the locals, and knocking back slammers at the local disco. There was tragedy on the film, though. While filming an explosion, special effects man Cliff Wenger Jr slipped on wet rocks at the top of a waterfall and fell to his death. Elsewhere, the crew contended with corrupt officials who demanded bribes to allow US helicopters into the country, and a Mexican general who insisted on drinks with Sly in return for using his hangar. As noted in The Rambo Report, Stallone declined the invitation – at which point it was suggested that the general would shut off their electricity. Rambo: First Blood Part II blasted its way into cinemas on May 22, 1985. It's a tremendous action film not just for the testosterone-jacking violence and killer lines ('To survive war, you gotta become war'), but also the work of legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff and rousing, call-to-action score of Jerry Goldsmith. It made $300 million and detonated a cultural aftershock that Time magazine dubbed 'Rambomania' – a spin-off cartoon, action figures, toy guns, and Rambo III (i.e. Rambo goes to Afghanistan) in 1988. Rambo had embodied a change. Previous films about Vietnam – The Deer Hunter (1978) and First Blood – were about the war's trauma and depression and the agony of re-assimilation. 'This was popular culture shaping American perceptions of the Vietnam experience,' says Allison. 'That idea of the damaged veteran became ingrained.' But released just a few years later, Rambo II is a story of rampant heroism. Given a second chance at the war, Rambo wins it. The film could also be called Vietnam II. And Rambo wasn't alone in giving 'Nam a positive spin. As daft as they seem now, The A-Team were Vietnam vets who drove around Los Angeles doing heroic odd jobs (while hiding from the government – those ruddy pen-pushers again). Over in Hawaii, Magnum PI's crew were functioning, well-adjusted vets who sometimes went back into action to sort out the POW/MIA issue. David Morrell points to a change in national mood with the end of the Iran hostage crisis in 1981, with the hostages released minutes after Ronald Reagan's inauguration. 'It did a lot for giving America a sense of accomplishment,' says Morrell. 'When Rambo II came out, it represented that new attitude – a cinematic version of those hostages returning.' Bill Allison also points to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Washington DC, dedicated to the fallen soldiers, which was established in November 1982, and Reagan's comments, saying, 'These were men who died for freedom... We are beginning to appreciate that they were fighting for a just cause.' 'It changed the view of the Vietnam veterans,' says Allison. 'We could see them not as wounded but as healing.' Rambo II continues in that spirit. Making his big climactic speech, Rambo wants just one thing for the vets to begin their healing process: 'For our country to love us as much as we love it.' It's little wonder that Reagan himself enjoyed Rambo's adventures. After the release of hijacked plane hostages in June 1985, Reagan said, 'Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.' Reagan also declared that Rambo was a Republican. (Stallone disagreed, insisting that Rambo is 'totally neutral'). A signed poster of Rambo II is held in the Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, along with prints that depict the president as 'Ronbo' – a meme for the times – with Reagan's head stuck on Sly's meaty, tooled-up physique. (Donald Trump sold similar merchandise during his Presidential campaigns.) Rambo's political heft went beyond the United States. David Morrell recalls that his Rambo books – including novelisations of Rambo II and III – were hugely popular in Poland. A reporter told Morrell that during the Eighties, when Poland was part of the Eastern Bloc, they smuggled Rambo videos into the country and wore bandanas to demonstrate against Soviet soldiers. When the Berlin Wall came down, someone had sprayed 'Rambo' on a piece of concrete. The success came with controversy, too. In Denmark in 1986, leftist demonstrators defaced Sly's private jet with graffiti, protesting Rambo as a symbol of American militarism. Closer to home – literally outside Stallone's home – concerned parents protested the release of a Rambo action doll. 'When Sly was making Rambo 4 [2008], he phoned me and said in retrospect he was uncomfortable with how warfare was glamourised in the second and third films,' says Morrell. The fourth (intensely violent) film was more in keeping with the subdued tone of Morrell's original novel. A fifth film, Last Blood, followed in 2019. In Rambo II, Rambo says he's going to live 'day-by-day'. But 'film-by-film' might be more fitting. Each instalment speaks to the politics of its moment. An origin story is currently planned, directed by Jalmari Helander, the man behind Sisu, perhaps the finest – and most visceral – one-man-army film of recent times. 'First Blood Part II is wish fulfilment for the people who think we should have won Vietnam,' says Segaloff. 'But in subsequent films he becomes the empowered avenging angel who rectifies wrongs that the government can't because of diplomatic or military reasons – but which he can do as the lone saviour.'
American Military News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- American Military News
Ted Kotcheff, ‘First Blood' and ‘Weekend at Bernie's' director, dies at 94
Prolific Canadian-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, who directed the films 'First Blood,' 'Weekend at Bernie's,' 'Wake in Fright,' 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,' 'Fun With Dick and Jane' and 'North Dallas Forty,' in addition to a long run as an executive producer on 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,' has died. He was 94. Kotcheff's daughter Kate Kotcheff said via email that he died peacefully while under sedation Thursday night in a hospital in Nuevo Nayarit, Mexico. In a 1975 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kotcheff said, 'The sense of being outside of the mainstream of the community has always attracted me. All my pictures deal with people outside or people who don't know what's driving them.' Born in Toronto on April 7, 1931, to Bulgarian immigrants, Kotcheff began working in television in the early 1950s. He later moved to the U.K., directing for both stage and television. In 1971, he directed 'Wake in Fright' in Australia, which a Times review upon its 2012 re-release called, 'raw, unsettling and mesmerizing.' Returning to Canada in the early 1970s, Kotcheff directed 1974's adaptation of Mordecai Richler's 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz' starring Richard Dreyfuss that would win the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and earn writer Lionel Chetwynd an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay. Kotcheff found huge success in Hollywood with 1982's 'First Blood,' which first introduced the traumatized Vietnam veteran John Rambo played by Sylvester Stallone. Reviewing 'First Blood,' Times critic Sheila Benson wrote, 'this violent and disturbing film is exceptionally well made.' Benson added, 'If it is possible to dislike and admire a film in almost equal measure, then 'First Blood' would win on that split ticket. … Kotcheff has seared so many lingering examples of exultant nihilism into our brains that words to the contrary are so much sop. It's action, not words, that makes 'First Blood' run, and the action is frightening, indeed.' If 'First Blood' tapped into the despair and anxiety of post-Vietnam America, 1989's 'Weekend at Bernie's' became an unlikely cultural touchstone for its carefree, freewheeling playfulness, displaying Kotcheff's versatility. The film follows two ambitious young men (played by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) who create a series of elaborate ruses over the course of a hectic weekend that their sketchy boss (Terry Kiser) actually isn't dead. In a review of 'Bernie's,' Times critic Kevin Thomas wrote that, 'a weekend among the rich, the jaded and the corrupt is just the right cup of tea for an acid social satirist such as Kotcheff,' also noting the filmmaker's small cameo in the film as father to one of the young men. Eventually Kotcheff returned to television, working for more than 10 years and on nearly 300 episodes of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.' In 2011, Kotcheff received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Canada. He published a memoir, 'Director's Cut: My Life in Film,' in 2017. Kotcheff is survived by his wife, Laifun Chung, and children Kate and Thomas Kotcheff. He is predeceased by his first wife, actress Sylvia Kay, with whom he had three children. ___ © 2025 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ted Kotcheff obituary
The Canadian film-maker Ted Kotcheff, who has died aged 94, was denied entry to the US for being a suspected communist, banned for life from the Royal Albert Hall for organising a 1968 anti-apartheid charity show that ended with the burning of the American flag, and directed a TV play, broadcast live, in which one of the actors died during the second act. If this suggests a calamitous career, the reality was very different. Kotcheff's beginnings as a hired hand in Canadian television left him well-placed to become one of the most versatile directors in commercial cinema. How could the same man who made the terrifying thriller Wake in Fright (1971), which Martin Scorsese called 'disturbing' and 'beautifully calibrated', be responsible also for the lively coming-of-age comedy The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) starring a young, zingy Richard Dreyfuss? How could one film-maker leap from the gritty First Blood (1982), with Sylvester Stallone as the Vietnam veteran and proto-survivalist John Rambo, to the macabre slapstick of Weekend at Bernie's (1989), in which two insurance company employees try to pass off their dead boss as living? Kotcheff did. And he did it exceedingly well, without ever repeating himself. He turned down the sequel to First Blood, reasoning that Rambo was 'a man who abhorred violence [and] wrestled with the moral dilemma of violence in Vietnam' whereas the follow-up turned him into 'a gratuitous killing machine'. He also declined to direct the Weekend at Bernie's sequel, saying he had 'run out of dead man jokes, or at least the desire to stage them'. It was more his style to make, say, a TV version of Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice with Ingrid Bergman, which he did in 1967, or Billy Two Hats (1974), starring Gregory Peck, which had the distinction of being the first western shot in Israel. He was born William Kotcheff in Toronto, to immigrant parents – Theodore, a Macedonian restaurateur, and Diana (nee Christoff), who was Bulgarian – and raised in the slum neighbourhood known as Cabbagetown. He accompanied his parents to rehearsals for their leftwing theatre group, which put on plays in a Bulgarian-Macedonian hall, and appeared on stage at the age of five as a village child in The Macedonian Blood Wedding. He was educated at Silverthorn public school and Runnymede collegiate institute and graduated in 1952 from the University of Toronto with a degree in English. It was during his early days at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that he changed his first name: the company already had 12 Bills working there, so he promoted one of his middle names (Theodore), though he reverted to William for the credits on his first film, the comedy-drama Tiara Tahiti (1962), starring James Mason. In 1953, he travelled with a fellow CBC stagehand to New York for a holiday, only to have his entry to the US barred because of his brief membership, six years earlier, of the Left Wing Book Club in Toronto. The ban shaped the next few decades of his career. 'It marooned me professionally in Canada, which had no film industry whatsoever at that time,' he said. Nevertheless, he quickly made his mark in television, directing a major anthology series at 24 and proceeding to live TV drama. Eager to expand his talents, he was stymied by the lack of a national cinema and the monopoly that British directors had on directing Canadian theatre. While compatriots such as Arthur Hiller and Norman Jewison had relocated to Hollywood, Kotcheff headed for the UK, where he found TV and theatre work. It was during the transmission of his live TV play Underground (1958), about survivors of a bomb attack on London, that the actor Gareth Jones, who played the villain, suffered a fatal heart attack. As Jones was stretchered away, Kotcheff hastily rejigged the third act to conceal the sudden absence of the drama's chief antagonist. 'One TV critic thought it was a brilliant narrative device of mine to eliminate the character,' he said. His second film, Life at the Top (1965), followed the main character from the kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, again played by Laurence Harvey and now married with two children but with a wandering eye and vague political ambitions. It brought Kotcheff to the attention of Michelangelo Antonioni, who sought his advice on cutting 20 minutes from his existential thriller Blow-Up (1966). 'He ended up using practically all of my suggestions,' Kotcheff said. His stock continued to rise with the award-winning TV film Edna, the Inebriate Woman, broadcast in 1971 as a BBC Play for Today to an audience of more than nine million. Written by Jeremy Sandford, also responsible for Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home (1966), it starred Patricia Hayes as the title character, who is unhoused and alcoholic. The choice of a predominantly comic actor to play dramatic material was inspired, though Kotcheff had to plead with ITV to release Hayes from her filming commitments on The Benny Hill Show. In the same year, Wake in Fright had its premiere at Cannes, where the young Scorsese expressed his admiration for the film vocally throughout the screening. Evan Jones, with whom Kotcheff had collaborated on the race drama Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), adapted Wake in Fright from Kenneth Cook's novel about a schoolteacher who loses all his money gambling in the outback and ends up stranded there. Kotcheff, who shot the film in punishing conditions ('110 degrees in the shade – and there was no shade'), described it as 'one man's descent into hell'. He evoked that infernal mood masterfully, not least in harrowing climactic footage of a real-life kangaroo hunt. But the devil was in the tiniest details, too. Kotcheff specified to the design and costume departments that there should be no cool colours on screen ('I want the intense heat of the outback to be omnipresent,' he told them). He also sprayed the interiors with dust that was tinted the colour of the outback desert, and released small quantities of flies on to the set during every take. His next film, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was adapted by his friend Mordecai Richler from Richler's own 1959 novel about an ambitious and restless young man bouncing from one money-making venture to the next in Montreal's Jewish area. In one, Duddy (Dreyfuss) hires an over-the-hill documentary maker (Denholm Elliott) to shoot a barmitzvah. In a genius move, Kotcheff includes the hilariously highfalutin result as a film-within-the-film. He described The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival, as 'his entrée into Hollywood', and found that previous objections to him entering the US had evaporated. He made his Hollywood debut with the comedy Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), starring Jane Fonda and George Segal as a middle-class couple who turn to crime when their fortunes take a downturn. Segal was also the star of Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), AKA Too Many Chefs, an eccentric and underrated black comedy to which Kotcheff brought his customary flair and eye for detail. Shooting in Michelin-starred restaurants, it was the only one of his films during which he gained rather than lost weight. North Dallas Forty (1979) was an unsentimental study of life inside the NFL, with Nick Nolte superb as a veteran wide receiver bruised and buffeted by the sport. The NFL refused to cooperate with the production, and it was rumoured that former players who did were later shunned by the organisation. First Blood and another Vietnam-oriented project, Uncommon Valour (1983), with Gene Hackman as a former Marine colonel who returns to Laos to find his missing son, were sandwiched between two films starring James Woods: In Split Image (1982), he was a brutal cult deprogrammer, while in Joshua: Then and Now (1984), again adapted by Richler from one of his novels, he was a writer whose once-perfect life is in tatters. Switching Channels (1987), a comedy set at a TV station, was scuppered by the last-minute replacement of Michael Caine with Burt Reynolds, who sparred constantly with his co-star, Kathleen Turner. Kotcheff never had another box-office success after Weekend at Bernie's, and drifted instead into directing TV movies, though he had a sizeable small-screen hit on his hands as the producer of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which he ran between 2000 and 2012. In his 2017 autobiography, he proudly described his filmography as a 'gumbo', and said: 'The only thing I have never done is what others expected me to do.' He is survived by his second wife, Laifun Chung, and their children, Alexandra and Thomas, and by three children, Aaron, Katrina and Joshua, from his marriage to the actor Sylvia Kay (one of the stars of Wake in Fright), which ended in divorce. William Theodore Constantine Kotcheff, film director, born 7 April 1931; died 10 April 2025
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ted Kotcheff, ‘First Blood' and ‘Weekend at Bernie's' Director, Dies at 94
Ted Kotcheff, the Canadian filmmaker who introduced moviegoers to Sylvester Stallone's traumatized Vietnam War veteran John Rambo with 'First Blood' and helmed comedies like 'Weekend at Bernie's,' 'Fun With Dick and Jane' and 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,' died Thursday. He was 94. His death was confirmed by his family to Canadian publication The Globe and Mail. More from Variety Sylvester Stallone Says He's Too Ugly to Play Ken, but Ryan Gosling Should Be the Next Rambo: 'If I Ever Pass the Baton, I'll Pass It on to Him' Cannes: Sylvester Stallone Says 'Rambo' Wasn't 'Meant to Be a Political Statement' Andy Vajna, 'Rambo' Producer, Dies at 74 After beginning his career in Canadian television and working in the U.K. industry, Kotcheff broke through with his 1974 feature 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,' an adaptation of Mordechai Richler's 1959 coming-of-age novel starring then-rising star Richard Dreyfuss. The film took home the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay (for Richler and Lionel Chetwynd), launching Kotcheff's career in the American film industry. In Hollywood, Kotcheff turned in box office hits like the marital satire 'Fun With Dick and Jane,' starring George Segal and Jane Fonda, and the football insider drama 'North Dallas Forty,' starring Nick Nolte. But his most enduring feature came in 1982, with the release of the Sylvester Stallone actioner 'First Blood.' More to come… Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025 The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ted Kotcheff, director of First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's and Wake in Fright, dies aged 94
Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: 'He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.' In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff's work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: 'He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.' The son of Bulgarian/Macedonian immigrants to Canada, Kotcheff was born in 1931 in Toronto, and raised in the city's Cabbagetown district. After earning a degree in Ebglish literature from Toronto University, Kotcheff joined a fledgling CBC in the early 1950s, part of a remarkable generation that included Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller, Sidney J Furie and Alvin Rakoff. Like them, he felt he had to move away to further his career, and Kotcheff came to London in 1957 and began making TV plays for strands including Hour of Mystery, Armchair Theatre and ITV Playhouse. These included an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones in 1958, written by Terry Southern and starring Kenneth Spencer and Harry H Corbett, No Trams to Lime Street in 1959, written by Alun Owen, and – infamously – Underground in 1958, in which actor Gareth Jones collapsed and died during a live transmission. Kotcheff moved into features in the early 60s, making his debut with the 1962 comedy Tiara Tahiti, starring James Mason and John Mills, following it up with Life at the Top, the sequel to hit kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, in 1965, and the race-issue drama Two Gentlemen Sharing in 1969. In the same period Kotcheff also directed the original production of Lionel Bart's celebrated musical Maggie May, which premiered in 1964. Kotcheff continued to work in TV, directing Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of Jean Cocteau's La Voix Humaine in 1967, and achieving perhaps his high point with a contribution to Play for Today in 1971, starring Patricia Hayes as a homeless alcoholic in Edna the Inebriate Woman. However his career took an unexpected detour in the same year with the cult Australian film Wake in Fright, for which he was offered the job to direct despite never having visited the country. Despite being poorly received in its home country due to its uncompromising depiction of a brutally cruel Australian outback, including notorious scenes of a kangaroo hunt, Wake in Fright was selected for the Cannes film festival and went on to become celebrated as a landmark film, both as part of the Australian new wave of the 1970s and as a pioneering entry in the 'Ozploitation' subgenre. In 1974 Kotcheff finally realised his ambition of making a successful Canadian feature film with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; starring Richard Dreyfuss, it was adapted from a novel by his friend (and former housemate in London) Mordecai Richler, with whom he had worked on a string of British productions – including an Armchair Theatre adaptation of Duddy Kravitz in 1961. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival and was a major commercial success in Canada. As a result, Hollywood took notice and Kotcheff was hired to make satirical comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as a successful married couple who turn to crime after Segal is fired. It was a hit on its release in 1977, and Kotcheff followed it up with another Segal comedy Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? and Nick Nolte American football film North Dallas Forty. Kotcheff then released arguably his most influential film: the Sylvester Stallone action film First Blood, which had numerous directors and lead actors attached to it before Kotcheff offered the role to Stallone and production got underway in 1981. A depiction of an emotionally embattled Vietnam veteran, First Blood was a sizeable hit and spawned two sequels, including Rambo: First Blood Part II which became a career-defining success for Stallone in 1985. Kotcheff had another big success at the end of the decade: the dead-body comedy Weekend at Bernie's, starring Andrew McCarthy. After the failure of the Tom Selleck comedy Folks! in 1992, Kotcheff returned to TV, and in 2000 joined the long running crime show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as executive producer and occasional director, where he remained for 12 seasons. Kotcheff was married twice, to Sylvia Kay between 1962 and 1972, and to Laifun Chung, who survives him.
