Ted Kotcheff, a well-known Canadian-born director, passed away along with a longer career as an executive manufacturer on” Law &, Order: Special Victims Unit,” who directed the movies” First Blood”,” Weekend at Bernie’s,”” Wake in Fright,”” The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,”” Fun With Dick and Jane,” and” North Dallas Forty.” He was 94.
Kate Kotcheff’s child, Kate, wrote in an email that Kotcheff passed away peacefully on Thursday evening in a hospital in Mexico while being sedated.
Kotcheff stated in a 1975 meeting with the Los Angeles Times,” I have always been drawn to the feeling of being outside of the major of the society.” In all of my photos, I see people outdoors or with no idea what’s causing them.
Kotcheff, a Russian immigrant, was born in Toronto on April 7, 1931, and by the early 1950s, had begun to work in broadcast. He afterwards re-entered the United Kingdom and began directing both for phase and television. In 1971, he directed” Wake in Fright” in Australia, which a Times review called “raw, disconcerting, and mesmerizing.”
Richard Dreyfuss ‘ version of Mordecai Richler’s” The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” which won the Berlin Film Festival’s major award and earned author Lionel Chetwynd an Academy Award nomination for an adapted story, was returned to Canada in the early 1970s.
With the 1982 film” First Blood,” which first introduced the traumatized Vietnam veteran John Rambo played by Sylvester Stallone, Kotcheff found great success in Hollywood.
Sheila Benson, a Times critic, said in a review of” First Blood that” this violent and disturbing movie is exceptionally well made.” ” First Blood” would win on that split ticket, Benson added,” If it is possible to dislike a movie and admire it in almost equal measure.” Kotcheff has smeared so many lingering instances of exultant nihilism into our brains that words to the contrary are incredibly sop. The action is frightening, indeed, and it’s action, not words, that makes” First Blood” run.
If” First Blood” explored post-Vietnam America’s despair and anxiety, then” Weekend at Bernie’s” in 1989 became an unlikely cultural touchstone for its carefree, freewheeling playfulness, demonstrating Kotcheff’s versatility.
The movie follows two grittier young men ( played by Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy ) who plot a string of elaborate schemes over the course of a hectic weekend to prove that their shaky boss ( Terry Kiser ) is still alive. A weekend among the wealthy, the jaded, and the corrupt is just the right thing for an acid social satirist like Kotcheff, according to Times critic Kevin Thomas, who also made a small cameo as a father to one of the young men.
Kotcheff eventually made a comeback to television, where he worked for more than 10 years and on nearly 300″ Law &, Order: Special Victims Unit” episodes.
The Directors Guild of Canada gave Kotcheff a lifetime achievement award in 2011. In 2017, he wrote a memoir,” Director’s Cut: My Life in Film.”
Kate and Thomas Kotcheff are also left by his wife, Laifun Chung, and two children. He is predeceased by his first wife, actress Sylvia Kay, who he had three kids with.
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