I Just Learned that Stuart Gordon Did Not Make Any Movies During the Last 13 Years of His Life and Am Angry at the Movie Business on His Behalf
I recently had the honor of appearing on Puppet Master/Castle Freaks, a podcast devoted to the Full Moon cinematic universe.
I was on to discuss one of my favorite movies, Stuart Gordon’s 1986 masterpiece From Beyond. When one of the hosts mentioned that Gordon had only recently died, during the COVID years but not of COVID my first instinct was to correct him.
For some reason, I thought that Gordon had died sometimes around 2010, not long after the release of his final feature film, 2007’s masterful Stuck.
I was wrong, however, and the host was right. Gordon died on March 24th, 2020 of Multiple Organ Failure.
On one hand I was glad that Gordon lived a full decade than I thought. On the other, I was angry on Gordon’s behalf that one of the great horror filmmakers went thirteen years without making a movie.
Now it’s possible that Gordon had retired and had no interest in making more films. If so, he definitely deserved it.
But it seems more likely that Gordon wanted to continue to work but had a hard time getting projects made.
I wrote a column for TCM Backlot called First and Last where I covered major director’s first and last movies. I discovered that the filmmaker’s debut was often their best film.
It’s the movie they had been working and building towards all their lives, a project they felt passionately about.
If great filmmaker’s first film is often a story that the passionate young filmmaker had to tell, then their final film is often a movie that they were able to get made.
There are exceptions to the rule, of course. Robert Altman’s final film, Prairie Home Companion was a lovely little capper to an extraordinary career. Sidney Lumet had his share of misfires but his career began and ended strongly with 12 Angry Men and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.
The careers of great filmmakers are more likely to follow in the footsteps of Billy Wilder, however, who wrote and directed some of the greatest movies of all time yet ended his career with 1982’s Buddy, Buddy, a wildly unsuccessful adaptation of a play by notorious French hack Francis Veber.
I doubt that Wilder felt passionately about the film, but it was commercial enough, on paper at least, that he could get it made with the all-time comedy team of Walter Matthau in the leads, so it became the last movie he made before his death in 2002, some twenty years after his unfortunate swan song.
Wilder ending his career with a Francis Veber adaptation is like Bob Dylan releasing a final album of John Mayer covers.
Gordon is one of those fortunate filmmakers who began and ended his movies on a high note. 1985’s The Re-Animator was the instant cult classic that made Gordon’s name as a filmmaker. Gordon’s final film, 2007’s Stuck is a bracing blast of black comedy and hard-edged social satire that’s also, like pretty much all of Gordon’s films, well-acted, well-written and oddly humane in its cruelty.
Unlike most filmmakers, Gordon never had a creative slump. I’ve seen pretty much everything that he’s done and the only film of his that I would not wholeheartedly recommend is 1987’s Dolls.
A lot of filmmakers have maybe one good film. Gordon only had one bad film.
Gordon needed very little to make a terrific cult movie. He famously made Castle Freak after seeing a poster of a freak in a castle in Full Moon mogul/producer Charles Band’s office and volunteered to make a movie based on, again, an image in a dude’s office, for a half million dollars.
Gordon can’t just make a terrific movie on an Asylum budget: he did make a terrific movie FOR the bottom-feeding parasites at The Asylum in 2006’s King of the Ants early in its existence, before it dedicated itself to spewing out only derivative garbage.
A beloved filmmaker struggling to get anything made late in their career is an too common story. We as a culture do not revere age, experience and wisdom when there are new, shiny things we can throw money at.
I should know. At the risk of being immodest, I’ve had a pretty impressive, lengthy career and I can’t get a job or make enough money through my writing to get by to save my life. It doesn’t matter what I try. Everything seems to fail. I’m very lucky that my wife is much more successful than I am when it comes to making a living.
We need to do better. We really do. While Kickstarter has opened up an exciting new avenue for funding movies it’s sad that great artists are forced to ask the public for money to continue working.
It’s not too late to give money to worthy veteran filmmakers so that they don’t need to go decades between films but at this particular moment the entertainment business and capitalism seems to be going in the opposite direction.
That sucks for the Stuart Gordons of the world but it also sucks for moviegoers deprived of the work of people with important voices that deserve to be heard above the din and white noise of our maddening modern world.
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