John G Avildsen

Born in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, on December 21, 1935, John Guilbert Avildsen (few moviegoers know the meaning of the G.) tried to start his own advertising agency. But he had no luck in this area, so he tried his hand at cinema. He first worked in the production department, before working as a production assistant with the legendary Otto Preminger , who taught him the rudiments of the trade, on The Desired Night .

Finally convinced that his future lay in the film industry, he graduated with a degree in filmmaking from New York University. After his debut as a director, the forgotten drama Turn on to Love , the discreet comedy Rampage at school , and the interesting thriller Joe , he consecrated himself definitively with Save the Tiger (1973), an intense criticism of the system’s dark points, which he talked about the disenchantment of the 70s, and the crisis of family values. For his work as an executive who realized that the only way to save his clothing company was to burn down a plant on the premises to collect the insurance, veteran Jack Lemmon won a well-deserved Oscar for best actor.

After the light comedy Naughty Cheek , with Burt Reynolds , producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff called him enthusiastically about the script that had been sent to them by a stranger named Sylvester Stallone , which had been based on his own life to outline the story of an Italian-American humble determined to succeed as a fighter who has the opportunity to face the heavyweight champion of the world when the one who was to be his next opponent breaks his hand. After accepting the project, the originally planned title, Paradise Alley , was changed to Rocky , and Stallone himself was recruited as the lead. John G AvildsenHe excelled as a director because he managed to hide that he had a very low budget, with methods such as shooting the final fight backwards, because it cost less to remove the makeup that marked the effects of the fight than to add it. In this sequence it can be seen that he had more extras as an audience in the last minutes than in the first. For the now classic sequence in which the protagonist trains by climbing the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he first used Garrett Brown’s Steadycam system, whereby the camera is attached to an isoelastic suspension system.

Upon its release, the film became a huge hit with audiences, and the theme song from Bill Conti ‘s soundtrack , “Gonna Fly Now” topped the charts for several weeks. “Avildsen fits the character very well in his urban environment, where ordinary people fight for his illusions,” said Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times, who gave the film full marks. “No one has done more for Philadelphia’s image than Rocky since Benjamin Franklin,” said Dick Doran, the city’s director of commerce. “I would have liked to direct that film”, confessed the legendary filmmaker Frank Capra , an illustrious representative of the Italian-American community.

The Academy granted him ten nominations for the Oscars, triumphing in three, editing, film and director, for Avildsen himself. It would seem that his career was at its peak, and that he could have had better fortune from then on, but his success went to his head. For this reason he was fired from his next job, Saturday Night Fever , due to his continued demands on the producers, and his dictatorial treatment of the lead, John Travolta , and he refused to take on Rocky II . He was relegated to somewhat second-tier projects.

He recovered in 1984, with the tremendous success of another character who triumphed against adversity, in a different discipline, martial arts, in Karate Kid (The moment of truth) . He exalted Ralph Macchio , who played the protagonist, a young man who, after moving with his mother to a new city, suffers bullying, and Pat Morita , the teacher who will teach him to defend himself and succeed in life. The director himself took over two sequels, Karate Kid II, The Story Continues , and Karate Kid III , The Final Challenge .

Curiously, in 1990, he agreed to return to the universe of the Italian colt, with Rocky V , because according to his statements “it was a great script.” However, he failed to give force to the story, to the point that it obtained the worst box office results of the entire franchise. He next portrayed apartheid in South Africa, through the story of an orphan, in The Force of One . After the film about the world of rodeos 8 seconds, he said goodbye to the cinema with the action by-product Inferno , starring Jean-Claude Van Damme , who was beginning to be in low hours.

Divorced from Marie Olga Maturevich, with whom he had two children, until 2003 he joined actress Tracy Brooks Swope , mother of another offspring, to whom he gave his most important role, the mother who dies prematurely in The Force of One .