Joe Dante
Joseph James Dante Jr. is an American film director. His films—notably Gremlins alongside its sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch —often mix the 1950s-style B movie genre with 1960s radicalism and cartoon comedy.
Dante's output includes the films Piranha, The Howling, Explorers, Innerspace, The 'Burbs, Matinee, Small Soldiers, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action. His work for television and cable include the social satire The Second Civil War, episodes of the anthology series Masters of Horror and Amazing Stories, as well as Police Squad! and Hawaii Five-0.
Early life
Dante was born in Morristown, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Livingston. His father was an Italian-American professional golfer who encouraged him to play sports; however, Dante was more interested in drawing cartoons and frequenting Saturday matinees at the cinema. Dante was 12 when Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine dedicated to horror films, came onto news shelves. He soon wrote to the magazine with reviews of certain horror films, which he did for a number of years.Dante had originally planned on becoming a cartoonist, but was told that it wasn't a real art form and that he should try something else. While attending the Philadelphia College of Art, Dante realized he was more inclined toward filmmaking:
In his free time as a student, Dante began assembling The Movie Orgy, an epic collection of B movie clips, 16mm films, cartoons, commercials, and trailers that was seamlessly edited together into one 7-hour compilation.
Career
1970s
After a stint as a film reviewer, Dante began his filmmaking apprenticeship in 1974 when producer Roger Corman offered him a job in the trailer-cutting department at New World Pictures, where he edited the trailers for such films as Cover Girl Models and Amarcord. Other established directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich had already emerged from Corman's de-facto film school.In 1975, Dante moved up to directing when he collaborated with fellow Corman school alumni Allan Arkush to make the satirical exploitation film Hollywood Boulevard. The film was conceived when Corman made a bet that he could produce a movie within ten days on a budget of only $54,000. Although producer John Davison reported the budget was approximately $50,000, it was the cheapest made by New World Pictures. The filmmakers achieved this by coming up with a story about a B movie studio which could incorporate footage from other movies that Corman owned.
Two years later, Dante directed Piranha, written by John Sayles. The film was shot in Texas "in a rush" on a budget of $600,000, and was considered quite ambitious for the time and cost. Dante, who was convinced the film would be a disaster, spent a month in the editing room. People came to visit him, but as Dante recalled he was in "such a fog" that he didn't even recognize who they were at first. The film won the attention of Steven Spielberg who, unbeknownst to Dante, prevented Universal from blocking the film's release, convincing them that Piranha was a parody and that it wasn't in competition with Jaws 2.
In 1979, Dante directed some scenes of Rock 'n' Roll High School when Allan Arkush fell ill due to exhaustion, but remains uncredited. Dante also helped plot the premise of the film with Arkush.
1980s
Dante again collaborated with John Sayles when he enlisted him to rewrite the previously adapted draft of Gary Brandner's werewolf tale The Howling. Sayles rewrote the script with the same self-aware, satirical tone that he gave Piranha, and his finished script bears only a slight resemblance to Brandner's novel. Dante said that at the time he made The Howling, werewolves were considered by many to be "corny and old hat". His approach was to disguise it as long as possible and make it look like a slasher film — which was a lot more popular at the time — "and then bring in the supernatural elements slowly so that the audience could get acclimated and not immediately reject it as something old-fashioned." The film's special effects, which at the time were considered state-of-the-art, were completed by Rob Bottin after Rick Baker left to work on An American Werewolf in London.Dante had been previously offered the chance to direct Airplane! by Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker. Although he turned it down, Dante agreed to direct two episodes of their police procedural spoof Police Squad!, which was his first experience shooting something on a studio lot.
Due to their work on The Howling, Dante and producer Michael Finnell received the opportunity to make the film Gremlins by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg also brought Dante on as one of the directors on John Landis' Twilight Zone: The Movie. Dante's segment, a remake of the original Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", features cartoon-style special effects, revolving around a woman played by Kathleen Quinlan who is 'adopted' by an omnipotent boy. Dante also took over editing duties on George Miller's segment of the film, after he left the project feeling repulsed by the news of the fatal helicopter accident. Chris Columbus' original draft of Gremlins went through several rewrites before a shooting script was finalized. According to Dante, it was a gruelling shoot and once the design of the gremlins were finalized, the studio's reaction was divisive. The film follows a teenager, played by Zach Galligan, who inadvertently breaks three important rules concerning his new pet and unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town. It proved to be one of Dante's biggest hits to date, being the third highest-grossing film of 1984. "I'd never seen a reaction like that," Dante said of the film's first preview. "They thought it was the greatest thing ever and Warner Brothers was I think shocked, frankly, by how popular the picture became."
After the success of Gremlins, Dante took on the offer to direct Explorers, about a group of friends who build a working spacecraft and encounter extraterrestrial life. Dante liked the script, but felt the film needed a better third act. After being denied extra time by Paramount executives, Dante and the film's writer, Eric Luke, then improvised the story whilst filming commenced. In the spring of 1985, Paramount changed the film's initial release date from late August to early July, telling Dante and the editors to stop editing and deliver a shorter rough cut. As a result, about an hour and a half worth of footage was left on the editing room floor. Explorers marked the film debuts of both Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix, and has only grown in its reputation over time, developing a cult following. Dante reflected on the film by saying that he is appreciative of the warm reception it has earned over the years, but continued by saying "the problem is for me is that the movie you'll see is not the movie I wanted to make. It's the movie I got to make up to a certain point and then had to stop. It's hard for me to look at it, cause it's not the film I quite had in mind." The missing and cut scenes are presumably lost, as Dante tried searching for them in recent years.
In the mid-1980s, Dante was offered the script of Innerspace written by Chip Proser, who called it "a rip off of Fantastic Voyage". Dante initially turned the film down until the script was later rewritten as a comedy by Jeffrey Boam. Dante said he had a "wonderful experience" making Innerspace, mainly because of the cast which included actors Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, and Meg Ryan among others. However, after one particular day of filming, Dante recalled that studio executives from Warner Brothers had invited him out to lunch and told him that what he was doing was not funny and described Short as being "not very attractive", wanting to recast the role. While this conversation left him with a lot of anxiety, Dante decided to "plow on" and just make the movie he always intended to make. Despite successful test screenings, the film ended up flopping at the box office in the summer of 1987. Dante said this was because the studio did not know how to promote it and that the original poster failed to include the movie's actors on it.
In 1988, Dante agreed to direct the black comedy The 'Burbs, intrigued by its premise and the blending of real-life situations with elements of the supernatural. Dante and producers Larry Brezner and Michael Finnell agreed that Tom Hanks would be the most suitable actor to portray the married Ray Peterson, a suburban homeowner who tries to introduce excitement into his life by investigating the activities of his mysterious neighbors. Dante referred to Hanks as "the reigning everyman, a guy that everybody can identify with", comparing him to James Stewart. Production on The 'Burbs was filmed in chronological order over the course of ten weeks, mainly on the Colonial Street backlot at Universal Studios. "There was a lot of temptation to broaden it and go outside the neighborhood, but it seemed to violate the spirit of the piece," Dante said, "It's almost the kind of thing that could be a stage play except that you could never do on-stage what we've done in this movie."
1990s
Dante was asked many times to helm a sequel to Gremlins, due to its financial success. Dante declined, because he saw that story as having a proper ending, and thus a sequel would only be meant to be profitable. The studio decided to proceed without him, approaching various directors and writers. Storylines considered included sending the gremlins to Las Vegas or even into outer space. After those ideas fell through, the studio returned to Dante, who agreed to make the sequel after receiving the rare promise of having complete creative control over the movie as well as a budget tripling that of the original film. Since Chris Columbus was not available to write the sequel's script at the time, Dante brought on screenwriter Charles S. Haas to help plot the film. Dante later claimed it was the film into which he had put the most of his personal influence. He referred to it as "one of the more unconventional studio pictures ever," imagining it as a satire of Gremlins and sequels in general, resulting in a film with several meta-references and self-referential humor. Both Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates returned to star in the film. It also features several guest stars, including Christopher Lee as a mad scientist. The film was released to theaters in the Summer of 1990 but did not perform as well at the box office as the original.Charles S. Haas wrote two more films for Dante; one an unproduced script about Chuck Jones' early years at Termite Terrace and the other, Matinee about the Cuban Missile Crisis. In it, John Goodman stars as William Castle-type filmmaker Lawrence Woolsey, who specializes in horror and sci-fi B movies. Originally written by Jerico Stone, Dante said his draft was "quite different than the film that eventually emerged." The film opened in early 1993 and received positive reviews, but failed to turn a profit.
From 1993 to 1994, Dante was attached as the director of The Phantom, developing a draft of the script together with Jeffrey Boam, which was originally tongue-in-cheek in tone. According to Dante, right when the film was to begin shooting, Paramount pulled the plug on the film over its budget. Later, it was put back into production, with the script rewritten under a new director who made it serious, despite the script's humorous tone. Dante ended up with an executive producer credit.
In 1994, Dante directed the television film Runaway Daughters, that aired as part of the anthology series Rebel Highway which paid homage to 1950s "drive-in classic" B movies by revamping them "with a '90s edge". Dante also directed the 1997 made-for-television film The Second Civil War, a social satire about anti-immigration. The film was allegedly troubled with a "tremendous amount of interference during post-production" by a studio executive at HBO. In 1998, he directed the made-for-television film The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy, the intended pilot for an undeveloped sci-fi TV series, The Osiris Chronicles.
When Dante began pre-production work for Small Soldiers, a film about toy action figures who come to life, he was told to make an "edgy picture for teenagers." Later, after Burger King became a sponsor to promote the film, he was told to soften it as a "kiddie movie" and as a result, several of the action and explosion scenes were edited out. Dante also claimed there were 12 uncredited writers who did work on the film over the course of five years. When released in 1998, it received mixed reviews and was a moderate box office success.