Stuart gordon

Born on August 11, 1947 in Chicago (Illinois), Stuart Gordon wanted to study film at the University of Wisconsin, but since they did not accept him, he enrolled in Acting, specializing in Theater. After completing his studies, he launched several experimental and provocative assemblies. In The Game Show the actors kidnapped and humiliated the spectators, who had to rebel for the show to end.

But he became a national celebrity with his next stage performance, a version of “Peter Pan” that he turned into a protest against the Vietnam War. “Peter Pan became the leader of the hippies and the yippies, Captain Hook became Mayor Daley, and the pirates became the Chicago police. We left all the JM Barrie dialogue intact ,” she recalled. As a consequence he was arrested on the charge of obscenity – there were also some pornographic details – and the matter had a huge impact in the media at the time, until the prosecution withdrew the charges in November 1968.

He then founded, in the company of his wife, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, the Organic Theater Company, with which he would adapt several works by David Mamet. He made his film debut very late, when he was already 40 years old, because his friend Brian Yuzna convinced him to shoot Empire Re-Animator for the B-series production company , an adaptation of the story “Herbert West reanimator”, by HP Lovecraft , for which both professed great admiration. Despite its lack of budget, since it had the nerve to use a soundtrack clearly plagiarized from that of Psycho , the film had a great commercial impact, and turned Jeffrey Combs into a figure of low-budget horror films., its protagonist, who gave life to a doctor who experimented with a formula to raise the dead. Later he would have two sequels, in which Yuzna was involved, but where Stuart Gordon did not repeat as director.

For the same house, he re-adapted the author of Providence in Re-Sonator . In the 1990s,  Stuart Gordon directed Robot Jox , and the telefilm  The Pit and the Pendulum , based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe , and ventured into science fiction with Fortress of Hell, with Christopher Lambert , and Space Truckers: Space Transportation , with Dennis Hopper . He also co-created the story Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with Joe Johnston . 

In his last years of activity he directed the theatrical monologue “Nevermore… An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe “, performed by Combs. He is survived by his wife, and his three daughters, Suzanna, Jillian and Margaret.