What a strange experience...my weekly Movie Update e-mail from the New York Times brings the news that Director George Hickenlooper died a few days ago. I went to high school with George and, while we weren't really friends, we knew and were cordial with each other, and I followed his film career with interest. He directed a mix of documentaries and features. His best-regarded film was the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness, about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. It is an outstanding movie (it was first shown on Showtime, and won an Emmy) , with much more drama than your typical documentary. A couple years later, he directed the short "Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade," from a script written by his friend, the then-unknown actor Billy Bob Thorton. Thorton of course starred in the feature adaptation of this short, which launched him into stardom, but apparently cut Hickenlooper out of any role in the full-length movie.
One interesting thing about Hickenlooper's work was the occassional focus on music. He directed Mayor of the Sunset Strip, a strange-than-fiction documentary about the life of uber-music fan Rodney Bingenheimer. If you love music and haven't seen it, put it on your Netflix queue - it's terrific. He also directed Factory Girl, a fictionalized portrait of Edie Sedgwick and her involvement in Andy Warhol's "Factory" scene. The movie was almost universally panned, and it wasn't stellar, but I still enjoyed the way it portrayed the rivalry between Warhol and Bob Dylan. Another interesting tidbit about George is that he made a documentary about his cousin John, who was then the Mayor of Denver and now the Governor of Colorado.
In sum, an interesting and eclectic figure, and one of the few directors to make a career switching between documentaries and feature films. RIP.
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