“Mondo” genre with his 1962 documentary Mondo Cane (A Dog’s Life), died on 17 August, aged ninety-one. The film was a huge commercial success and led to a number of similar “shockumentaries” in the mid-1960s. J. G. Ballard incorporated the director’s aesthetics into his fragmentary novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
Scottish-born BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning TV and film director Alastair Reid died the same day, aged seventy-two. His credits include The Night Digger (scripted by Roald Dahl), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1980, starring David Hemmings), Artemis 81, and two episodes of Tales of the Unexpected.
Iranian-born Reza [Sayed] Badiyi, who holds the Directors Guild of America record for directing more television episodes than anybody else, died in Los Angeles on 21 August, aged eighty-one. He shot the iconic “wave curl” title sequence for Hawaii Five-0 and the opening sequence for Get Smart. His numerous other credits include episodes of Mission: Impossible, The Magician, The Six Million Dollar Man, Man from Atlantis, Holmes and Yo-Yo, The Incredible Hulk, The Phoenix, Superboy, Dinosaurs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Nowhere Man, Viper, Baywatch Nights, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mortal Combat: Conquest, Sliders and Early Edition. Badiyi also directed the 1972 TV movie The Eyes of Charles Sands, and he was assistant director on Carnival of Souls (1962), in which he made an uncredited appearance as a bus ticket customer.
Veteran American TV director Charles S. Durbin (Charles Samuel Dubronevski) died on 5 September, aged ninety-two. He helmed episodes of such shows as Tales of Tomorrow (including an adaptation of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s “Little Black Bag”), Tarzan (1966), The New People, Ghost Story, Kung Fu, Man from Atlantis, Tabitha, Supertrain, Herbie the Love Bug and Starman, along with the TV movies Cinderella (1965), Death in Space and Topper (1979). In 1958 Durbin was blacklisted for four years by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
American underground film-maker, comics artist and teacher George (Andrew) Kuchar, died of prostate cancer on 6 September, aged sixty-nine. He began making 8mm films in the 1950s with his twin brother Mike, and his numerous experimental and avant-garde short films include such titles as The Slasher, I Was a Teenage Rumpot, The Fall of the House of Yasmin, Route 666, Hush Hush Sweet Harlot, Planet of the Vamps, Kiss of Frankenstein and The Fury of Frau Frankenstein. In 1975 he published a cartoon biography of H. P. Lovecraft in Arcade #3, which offended many fans of the writer.
Highly-respected Hollywood producer and studio executive John Calley died of cancer after a long illness on 13 September, aged eighty-one. His film credits include The Loved One, 13 (aka Eye of the Devil), Castle Keep and Catch-22. After leaving the movie industry in 1980 for more than a decade, he returned to produce The Da Vinci Code and its sequel, Angels & Demons. Calley received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 2009 from The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. His second wife was actress Meg Tilly.
Canadian film producer John Dunning died on 19 September, aged eighty-four. He co- founded Cinepix (later Lions Gate Films) in 1962, and his movie credits include The Sensual Sorceress, Death Weekend, David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Rabid, My Bloody Valentine (1981 and 2009 versions), Happy Birthday to Me, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Whispers and The Incredible Adventures of Marco Polo and His Journeys to the End of the Earth.
Fritz Manes, a boyhood school friend of Clint Eastwood who went on to produce a number of the actor’s movies, including Firefox, Tightrope and Pale Rider, died on 27 September, aged seventy-nine. He also produced Ratboy (1986), directed by Eastwood’s former girlfriend, Sandra Locke.
Fifty-six-year-old technology guru Steve Jobs (Steven Paul Jobs), who co-created Apple Computer Inc. in 1977 with Steve Wozniak, died of respiratory arrest stemming from a metastatic pancreatic tumour on 5 October. He had been diagnosed with a rare form pancreatic cancer in 2003. In 1986, Jobs purchased a computer graphics firm from George Lucas and renamed it Pixar Animation Studios. In 1991 the company signed a deal with Disney, and Jobs is credited as an executive producer on Toy Story (1995).
Welsh-born TV director and scriptwriter [Alan] Paul Dickson died on 6 October, aged ninety-one. An award-winning documentary film-maker, he also helmed episodes of Colonel March of Scotland Yard (starring Boris Karloff), The Avengers, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Department S. In 1956 Dickson directed the low budget SF film Satellite in the Sky.
Yugoslavia-born cinematographer Andrew Laszlo (Andras Laszlo) died in Montana on 7 October, aged eighty-five. After beginning his career in documentaries (including The Beatles at Shea Stadium), he worked on Miracle on 34th Street (1973), The Dain Curse, The Funhouse, Southern Comfort, Streets of Fire, Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Innerspace, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Ghost Dad.
Iranian-born Hollywood costume designer Ray Aghayan (Reymond G. Aghayan) died on 10 October, aged eighty-three. His credits include Our Man Flint, In Like Flint and Doctor Dolittle (1967), along with more than a dozen Academy Awards shows. He won an Emmy Award with his lifetime partner Bob Mackie for the costumes in an all-star TV version of Alice Through the Looking Glass (1966).
Prolific British TV director Peter Hammond (Peter Charles Hammond Hill) died on 12 October, aged eighty-seven. A former actor (the 1949 Helter Skelter, Hammer’s X The Unknown), he began directing in the early 1960s and his credits include episodes of Out of This World (hosted by Boris Karloff), The Avengers, Out of the Unknown, Wuthering Heights (1978), Tales of the Unexpected, Shades of Darkness, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. In 1987, Hammond also directed the Holmes TV movie The Sign of Four and the BBC mini-series Dark Angel (aka Uncle Silas), based on the Gothic novel by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.
British-born film producer Richard Gordon died in New York City on 1 November, aged eighty-five. Along with his older brother Alex, Gordon moved to the US in 1947, starting up his own distribution company, Gordon Films, on the East Coast. This resulted in him entering into co-production deals with various European companies, and he produced or executive produced such films as The Haunted Strangler (aka Grip of the Strangler, starring Boris Karloff), Fiend Without a Face, Corridors of Blood (with Karloff and Christopher Lee), First Man Into Space, The Playgirls and the Vampire, Devil Doll (1964), Curse of the Voodoo (aka Curse of Simba), The Projected Man, Naked Evil (aka Exorcism at Midnight), Island of Terror (starring Peter Cushing), Secrets of Sex (aka Bizarre), Tower of Evil (aka The Horror of Snape Island/Beyond the Fog), Horror Hospital (with Michael Gough), The Cat and the Canary (1978) and Inseminoid (aka Horror Planet). Gordon also “presented” such films as Metempsyco (aks Tomb of Torture) and Cave of the Living Dead to the American market. He became Bela Lugosi’s agent in the 1950s, and after a UK theatrical tour of Dracula flopped in 1951, he came up with the story idea for the comedy Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (aka My Son the Vampire) starring the ailing actor.
