Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme

Demme at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, March 2010
Born Robert Jonathan Demme
February 22, 1944 (1944-02-22) (age 66)
Baldwin, Nassau County, New York, U.S.
Occupation director, producer, actor, screenwriter
Years active 1971 - present
Spouse Joanne Howard
Evelyn Purcell

Robert Jonathan Demme (born February 22, 1944) is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for directing The Silence of the Lambs, which won him the Academy Award for Best Director.

Contents

Personal life

Demme was born in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York in 1944.[1] He is a graduate of the University of Florida. He also was the uncle of director Ted Demme, who died in 2002. He is currently a member of the steering committee of the Friends of the Apollo Theater in Oberlin, Ohio, along with Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman.[2] Demme has three children by two marriages: Ramona, Brooklyn, Josephine.

Career

Demme broke into feature film working for exploitation film producer Roger Corman from 1971 to 1976, co-writing and producing Angels Hard as They Come and The Hot Box. He then moved on to directing, with three films (Caged Heat, Crazy Mama, Fighting Mad) for Corman's studio New World Pictures. After Fighting Mad, Demme directed the comedy film Handle with Care for Paramount Pictures in 1977. The film was well-reviewed by critics,[3] but received little promotion,[4] and performed poorly at the box office.[5]

Demme's next film, 1980's Melvin and Howard, did not get a wide release, but received a groundswell of critical acclaim, and led to the signing of Demme to direct the Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell star vehicle Swing Shift. Intended as a prestige picture for Warner Bros.[6] as well as a major commercial vehicle for Demme, [7]it instead became a troubled production due to the conflicting visions of Demme and star Hawn. Demme ended up renouncing the finished product, and when the film was released in May 1984, it was generally panned by critics and neglected by moviegoers.[6] After Swing Shift, Demme stepped back from Hollywood to make the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense; the eclectic screwball action-romantic comedy Something Wild; a film-version of the stage production Swimming to Cambodia, by monologist Spaulding Gray; and the New York mafia-by-way-of Downtown comedy Married to the Mob. a[›]

In 1991, Demme won the Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs—one of only three films to win all the major categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress). Demme followed that up with Philadelphia, which garnered star Tom Hanks a Best Actor Oscar.

Since then, Demme's films have included an adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved, and remakes of two popular films: The Truth About Charlie, based on Charade that starred Mark Wahlberg in the Cary Grant role; and The Manchurian Candidate, with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep.

In 2007, Demme's film Man from Plains, a documentary about former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's book tour in promotion of his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, premiered at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals.

In 2008, the art-house hit Rachel Getting Married was released, which many critics compared to Demme's films of the late 1970s and 1980s.[8][9][10] It was included in many 2008 "best of" lists, and received numerous awards and nominations, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress by lead Anne Hathaway. In 2010, Demme made his first foray into theater, directing Family Week, a play by Beth Henley. The play was produced by MCC Theater and co-starred Rosemarie DeWitt and Sarah Jones.

Demme has directed music videos for artists such as Suburban Lawns, New Order (for their 1985 single "The Perfect Kiss"), KRS-One's H.E.A.L. project and Bruce Springsteen. He also produced a compilation of Haitian music called Konbit: Burning Rhythms of Haiti that was released in 1989.

Demme is on the Board of Directors at Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY. In addition to his role on the board, he curates and hosts a monthly series called "Rarely Seen Cinema".

Clinica Estetico

Demme formed his production company, Clinica Estetico, with producers Edward Saxon and Peter Saraf. They were based out of New York City for fifteen years.

Filmography

References

  1. ↑ "Jonathan Demme Biography (1944-)". Film Reference. http://www.filmreference.com/film/38/Jonathan-Demme.html. Retrieved 2009-03-19. 
  2. ↑ "Friends of the Apollo". Oberlin College. http://new.oberlin.edu/apollo/friends.dot. Retrieved 2009-07-06. 
  3. ↑ Sragow, Michael (1984), "Jonathan Demme On the Line", American Film (January/February), http://www.storefrontdemme.com/ontheline.html, retrieved 2009-03-18, "Although his best two movies to date, Citizens Band (AKA Handle With Care, 1977) and Melvin and Howard (1980), were hailed for bringing the heartiness and sensitivity of a homegrown Jean Renoir into latter-day American film comedy, they failed to score at the box office." 
  4. ↑ Kaplan, James (1988-03-27), "Jonathan Demme's Offbeat America", The New York Times: 6.48, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7D71739F934A15750C0A96E948260&pagewanted=all, retrieved 2009-03-18, "Paramount figured it might just have a sleeper hit in the small movie, but it took a wait-and-see attitude, spending little on advertising and promotion, and hoping the movie would hook onto the C.B. craze and catch." 
  5. ↑ Williams, Phillip (2002), "The Truth About Jonathan Demme", MovieMaker, 2002-10-11, http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/the_truth_about_jonathan_demme_3301, "We had a great time doing it and we were invited to the New York Film Festival, despite the fact that the film tanked horrendously—and famously—at the box office." 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Vineberg, Steve, "Swing Shift: A Tale of Hollywood", Sight & Sound (British Film Institute), http://www.storefrontdemme.com/sightandsound.html, retrieved 2009-03-19 
  7. ↑ Uhlich, Keith (August 2004), Jonathan Demme, Sense of Cinema, ISSN 1443-4059, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/demme.html, retrieved 2009-03-19 
  8. ↑ Burr, Ty (2008), "He's back", The Boston Globe, 2008-10-12, http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2008/10/12/hes_back/, retrieved 2009-03-19, "Warm rather than cold, forgiving rather than damning, Rachel is a throwback to the fluky, generous vibe that sustained the director's films in the late 1970s and 1980s - Handle With Care (1977), Melvin and Howard (1980), Stop Making Sense (1984), Something Wild (1986) and Married to the Mob (1988)." 
  9. ↑ Olsen, Mark (2008-09-28), "Jonathan Demme's 'Rachel Getting Married.'", Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/28/entertainment/ca-demme28, retrieved 2009-03-19, "With "Rachel Getting Married," Demme, 64, has returned to the playful, deeply humanist storytelling of such early work as 1980's Melvin and Howard and 1986's Something Wild, both of which are widely acknowledged as having influenced a younger generation of filmmakers." 
  10. ↑ Schickel, Richard (2008), "Rachel Getting Married, Demme Getting Messy", TIME, 2008-10-02, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1846818,00.html, retrieved 2009-03-19, "Back in the '70s and '80s he was the best — or at any rate the most promising — young American director. […] Demme's new film, Rachel Getting Married, is arguably an attempt on the part of the director to wend his way back to his roots." 

External links

Films directed by Jonathan Demme
1970s
Caged Heat (1974) • Crazy Mama (1975) • Fighting Mad (1976) • Handle with Care (1977) • Last Embrace (1979)
1980s
Melvin and Howard (1980) • Swing Shift (1984) • Stop Making Sense (1984) • Something Wild (1986) • Swimming to Cambodia (1987) • Married to the Mob (1988)
1990s
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) • Cousin Bobby (1992) • Philadelphia (1993) • Storefront Hitchcock (1998) • Beloved (1998)
2000s
The Truth About Charlie (2002) • The Agronomist (2004) • The Manchurian Candidate (2004) • Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006) • Man from Plains (2007) • Rachel Getting Married (2008) · Neil Young Trunk Show (2009)
Academy Award for Best Director

Warren Beatty (1981) · Richard Attenborough (1982) · James L. Brooks (1983) · Miloš Forman (1984) · Sydney Pollack (1985) · Oliver Stone (1986) · Bernardo Bertolucci (1987) · Barry Levinson (1988) · Oliver Stone (1989) · Kevin Costner (1990) · Jonathan Demme (1991) · Clint Eastwood (1992) · Steven Spielberg (1993) · Robert Zemeckis (1994) · Mel Gibson (1995) · Anthony Minghella (1996) · James Cameron (1997) · Steven Spielberg (1998) · Sam Mendes (1999) · Steven Soderbergh (2000)

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