John Frankenheimer

He grew up in New York City and became interested in movies at an early age; he recalled going to the cinema every weekend. In 1947, he graduated from La Salle Military Academy in Oakdale, Long Island, New York. In 1951, he graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he had studied English. He also developed an interest in acting as a career while in college but began thinking seriously about directing when he was in the Air Force.

Frankenheimer began his directing career in live television at CBS. Throughout the 1950s he directed over 140 episodes of shows like Playhouse 90, Climax!, and Danger, including The Comedian, written by Rod Serling and starring Mickey Rooney as a ragingly vicious television Comedian.

Frankenheimer's first theatrical film was The Young Stranger (1957), starring James MacArthur as the rebellious teenage son of a powerful Hollywood movie Producer. He directed the production, based on a Climax! episode, "Deal a Blow", which he directed when he was 26. Frankenheimer returned to television during the late 1950s, moving to film permanently in 1961 with The Young Savages, in which he worked for the first time with Burt Lancaster in a story of a young boy murdered by a New York gang. His departure from television is considered to signal the end of the Golden Age of Television.

Movie critic Leonard Maltin writes that "in his time [1960s]... Frankenheimer worked with the top Writers, producers and actors in a series of films that dealt with issues that were just on top of the moment—things that were facing us all."

Frankenheimer became a close friend of Senator Robert F. Kennedy during the making of The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. In 1968, Kennedy asked Frankenheimer to make some commercials for use in the presidential campaign, at which he hoped to become the Democratic candidate. On the night he was assassinated in June 1968, it was Frankenheimer who had driven Kennedy from the Los Angeles Airport to the Ambassador Hotel for his acceptance speech.

The Train (1964) had already begun shooting in France when star Lancaster had Arthur Penn the original Director fired and called in Frankenheimer to save the film. As he recounts in the Champlin book, Frankenheimer used the production's desperation to his advantage in negotiations. He demanded and got the following: his name was made part of the title, John Frankenheimer's The Train.

Frankenheimer followed Seconds with his most Spectacular production, 1966's Grand Prix. Shot on location at the Grand Prix races throughout Europe, using 65mm Cinerama cameras, the film starred James Garner and Eva Marie Saint. The making was a race itself, as John Sturges and Steve McQueen planned to make a similar movie titled Day of the Champion.

Frankenheimer's next film, 1967's all-star anti-war comedy The Extraordinary Seaman, starred David Niven, Faye Dunaway, Alan Alda and Mickey Rooney. The film was a failure at the box office and critically. Frankenheimer calls it in the Champlin book "the only movie I've made which I would say was a total disaster."

Then came 1968's The Fixer, about a Jew in Tsarist Russia and based on the novel by Bernard Malamud. The film was shot in Communist Hungary. It starred Alan Bates and was not a major success, but Bates was nominated for an Oscar.

Frankenheimer followed this with I Walk the Line in 1970. The film, starring Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld, about a Tennessee sheriff who falls in love with a moonshiner's daughter, was set to songs by Johnny Cash. Frankenheimer's next project took him to Afghanistan. The Horseman focused on the relationship between a father and son, played by Jack Palance and Omar Sharif. Sharif's character, an expert horseman, played the Afghan national sport of buzkashi.

Impossible Object, also known as Story of a Love Story, suffered distribution difficulties and was not widely released. Next came a four-hour film of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, in 1973, starring Lee Marvin, and the decidedly offbeat 99 and 44/100% Dead, a crime black comedy starring Richard Harris.

With his fluent French and knowledge of the culture, Frankenheimer was asked to direct French Connection II, set entirely in Marseille. With Hackman reprising his role as New York cop Popeye Doyle, the film was a success and got Frankenheimer his next job. Black Sunday, based on author Thomas Harris's only non-Hannibal Lecter novel, involves an Israeli Mossad agent (Robert Shaw), chasing a pro-Palestinian terrorist (Marthe Keller) and a disgruntled Vietnam vet (Bruce Dern), who plan to blow up the Goodyear blimp over the Super Bowl. It was shot on location at the actual Super Bowl X in January 1976 in Miami, with the use of a real Goodyear Blimp. The film tested very highly, and Paramount and Frankenheimer had high expectations for it but it was not a hit.

Frankenheimer is quoted in Champlin's biography as saying that his alcohol Problem caused him to do work that was below his own standards on Prophecy (1979), an ecological Monster movie about a mutant grizzly bear terrorizing a forest in Maine.

Most of his 1980s films were less than successful, both critically and financially, but Frankenheimer was able to make a comeback in the 1990s by returning to his roots in television. He directed two films for HBO in 1994: Against the Wall and The Burning Season that won him several awards and renewed acclaim. The Director also helmed two films for Turner Network Television in 1996 and 1997, Andersonville and George Wallace, that were highly praised.

In 1981, Frankenheimer travelled to Japan to shoot the cult martial-arts action film The Challenge, with Scott Glenn and legendary Japanese star, Toshiro Mifune. He tells Champlin that his drinking became so severe while shooting in Japan that he actually drank on set, which he had never done before, and as a result he entered rehab on returning to America. The film was released in 1982, along with his HBO television adaptation of the acclaimed play The Rainmaker.

In 1985, Frankenheimer directed an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum bestseller The Holcroft Covenant, starring Michael Caine. That was followed the next year with another adaptation, 52 Pick-Up, from the novel by Elmore Leonard. Dead Bang (1989) followed Don Johnson as he infiltrated a group of white supremacists. In 1990, he returned to the Cold War political thriller genre with The Fourth War with Roy Scheider (with whom Frankenheimer had worked previously on 52 Pick-Up) as a loose cannon Army colonel drawn into a dangerous personal war with a Russian officer. It was not a commercial success.

The film was unseen, either theatrically or on broadcast, for many years. Urban legend has it that the film was pulled from circulation due to the similarity of its plot to the death of President Kennedy the following year, but Frankenheimer states in the Champlin book that it was pulled because of a legal battle between the Producer, Sinatra, and the studio over Sinatra's share of the profits. In any event, it was re-released to great acclaim in 1988.

Frankenheimer won four consecutive Emmy Awards in the 1990s for the television movies Against the Wall, The Burning Season, Andersonville, and George Wallace, which also received a Golden Globe award. He was considered one of the last remaining Directors who insisted on having complete control over all elements of production, making his style unique in Hollywood.

Frankenheimer's 1996 film The Island of Doctor Moreau, which he took over half a week into production from Richard Stanley, was the cause of countless stories of production woes and personality clashes and received scathing reviews. It was said that the veteran Director could not stand Val Kilmer, the young co-star of the film. When Kilmer's last scene was completed it was reported that Frankenheimer said, "Now get that bastard off my set." In an interview, Frankenheimer refused to discuss the film, saying only that he had a miserable time making it. Frankenheimer also professed that "Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer".

However, his next film, 1998's Ronin, starring Robert De Niro, was a return to form, featuring Frankenheimer's now trademark elaborate car chases woven into a labyrinthine espionage plot. Co-starring an international cast including Jean Reno and Jonathan Pryce, it was a critical and box-office success. As the 1990s drew to a close, he even had a rare acting role, appearing in a cameo as a U.S. General in The General's Daughter (1999). He earlier had an uncredited cameo as a TV Director in his 1977 film Black Sunday.

Frankenheimer's last theatrical film, 2000's Reindeer Games, starring Ben Affleck, underperformed. But then came his final film, Path to War for HBO in 2002, which brought him back to his strengths – political machinations, 1960s America and character-based drama, and was nominated for numerous awards. A look back at the Vietnam War, it starred Michael Gambon as President Lyndon Johnson along with Alec Baldwin and Donald Sutherland. One of Frankenheimer's last projects was the 2001 BMW action short-film Ambush for the promotional series The Hire, starring Clive Owen.

Frankenheimer is also a member of the Television Hall of Fame, and was inducted in 2002.