Noel Black

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Noel Black (born June 30, 1937 in San Francisco , United States , † July 5, 2014 in Santa Barbara , California , United States) was an American film director .

Live and act

Black studied film at UCLA , graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1959 and a Magister Artium in 1964 . During this time, Black worked in 1961 on two films - Behind Enemy Lines and Early Generation - as a production assistant. One of Black's fellow students was Francis Ford Coppola . In the year of his graduation (1964), Black made his first short film, which was followed by another short film called Skaterdater the following year . The arduous romance between a Californian skateboarder and a girl on a bicycle was told in an exuberant tone . The film, which got along without dialogue, in 1966 for an Oscar nomination and won at the Film Festival in Cannes , the Palme d'Or for Best Short Film.

Then in 1967 the major studio 20th Century Fox approached Black and offered him a direction for a full-length feature film. His first film, produced together with Marshall Backlar , was the thriller The Angel with the Killer Hand, with Anthony Perkins as the convicted arsonist on the go and Tuesday Weld as the seemingly harmless blond psychopath. The film flopped. After it was downright beaten by the film critics at the premiere in 1968, a counter-movement gradually developed, and the thriller finally developed into a "cult hit" in fan circles, as the New York Times wrote in an obituary for Black in 2014. “Actually,” Black explained to himself in a lecture given by students at Boston University, “we saw a story with a lot of comedic elements, embedded in a serious framework - a kind of black comedy with existentialist humor, based on the prototype by Dr. Strange . "

Black's two follow-up productions for the cinema, Cover Me Babe and Jennifer on My Mind , were also major commercial failures. As a result, Noel Black had to be satisfied with television mass-produced goods. He wrote scripts and directed individual episodes of series such as Deployment in Manhattan , A Sheriff in New York , Quincy , Hawaii Five-Zero and the Twilight Zone . Two further attempts to return to the big screen at the end of the 1970s, Tödliche Spiegel and Dollarrausch , also remained without a response. After all, the teenage strip Private School - Die Superanmacher found some approval among the very young moviegoers in 1983, even if the criticism once again hardly left a good hair on the film. Until 1992, Noel Black continued to direct well-groomed but not particularly ambitious television food - individual films and series episodes - until he finally largely ended his career. Noel Black was unable to push through more ambitious projects with his donors.

Noel Black was married twice and had a son and a daughter.

Filmography (selection)

As a director of individual films, unless otherwise stated

  • 1964: The River Boy (short film, also screenplay and production)
  • 1965: Skaterdater (short film, also screenplay and production)
  • 1967: The Angel with the Killer Hand (Pretty Poison) (also production)
  • 1969: Cover Me Babe
  • 1971: Jennifer on My Mind
  • 1974: Amy Prentiss (TV series)
  • 1977: I'm a Fool
  • 1977: Deadly Mirrors (The World Beyond)
  • 1978: Dollarrausch (A Man, a Woman and a Bank)
  • 1980: The Golden Honeymoon
  • 1981: The Other Victim
  • 1982: The Wrong Trail (Prime Suspect)
  • 1982: happy endings
  • 1982: Private School - Die Superanmacher (Private School)
  • 1983: The Football Princess (Quarterback Princess)
  • 1984: Traffic problems ( Mischief , script and production manager only)
  • 1984: I was his wife - and was his victim (Deadly Intentions)
  • 1985: Promises to Keep
  • 1986: A Time to Triumph
  • 1987: A Conspiracy of Love
  • 1988: The Town Bully
  • 1989: Dolphin Cove (TV series)
  • 1992: Swans Crossing
  • 1996: Shakespeare's Children (documentary, co-script only)

literature

  • International Motion Picture Almanac 1991, Quigley Publishing Company, New York 1991, p. 33

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ New York Times, August 1, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Black, Noel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film and television director
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco , United States
DATE OF DEATH 5th July 2014
Place of death Santa Barbara , California , United States