- Jack Hill, sometimes referred to as a legendary cult film director, grew up around films - his father was a set designer for Warner Bros. since 1925 and later for Walt Disney Studios, where he eventually designed Disneyland's Cinderella's Castle. Jack went to the University of California to study film, where he was a classmate of Francis Ford Coppola - they worked together on student productions and later both apprenticed with Roger Corman, working on The Terror (1963), among other films. While Coppola went on to Oscardom, Jack continued with low budget exploitation films, several of which were highly profitable, especially The Big Doll House (1971), which started the short-lived women-in-prison film genre. His so-called "blaxploitaton" films, Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), were both major hit films. Nowadays his films are hailed as cult classics, thanks primarily to Quentin Tarantino who saw Jack's work as it made its way to video, with almost all of his films now available for viewing on various streaming channels, as well as on DVD releases.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jack Hill
- SpouseElke(1973 - present)
- After working with Jack Nicholson in The Terror (1963), he considered him to be a terrible actor, but when he saw him in The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), he rethought his opinion - and figured that Nicholson had just been miscast in various Roger Corman films.
- His UCLA student film The Host (1960) was a huge influence on the last third of Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1979).
- Interviewed in the book "Wild Beyond Belief: Interviews with Exploitation Filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s" by Brian Albright (McFarland & Co.).
- In 1998, he was set to direct a film project named "Julie McGriff's Difficult World of Sex". Sheryl Lee was set to star in the film, which was to have been an offbeat comedy.
- Attended Hollywood High School.
- [on making 1970s "blaxplotation" films] You were working on pictures that the industry had nothing but contempt for. There was a lot of racism in the industry, a lot of it was under the surface, but it was here. And the executives at the studios really had contempt for the audience they were making movies for. It was an uphill struggle to try to do anything really good.
- I had the freedom to improvise. I feel quite fortunate that I worked in the low-budget sector because it meant I did not have to deal with committees who wanted to impose their ideas and prejudices on my material. I had a free hand--much more so than I would have had if I was working for the studios. As long as you put the elements in there that producers like Corman [Roger Corman] knew they could sell, such as sex and violence, you could raise the picture a little higher than expected and give the audience something intelligent to chew on.
- I always wanted people to feel positive at the end of my films. I was always careful to try and juxtapose humor with the violence and tragedy. I think I accomplished that, and perhaps that is why a generation or two later my films are still popular and in-demand while many of the mainstream movies I was up against at the time, and truth be known, I was quite envious of, are now forgotten.
- [why the Blaxploitation genre stopped by the end of the 1970s] No longer needed. There were plenty of black characters and lifestyles appearing in mainstream films by that time.
- [Blaxploitation] It's an unfortunate term most likely invented by somebody in that trade papers. It didn't exist when I was working. Everybody used the term "black pictures," which was demeaning, and unfortunately stuck onto me when I tried to get more mainline projects to direct.
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